...Because if you don't take at least a few advanced college level classes in literature, or history, or sociology, or philosophy, or art history (or...), you may end up going through life spouting really stupid things about literature that you would have been embarrassed to write in your most embarrassing Freshman Seminar "Shakespeare's depiction of Hamlet's indecision makes him a very human character and shows that he deeply understands the human condition" essay. In other words, you may end up like David Brooks himself.

Some choice bits from today's column about the value of a Humanities education.

Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion. In an information economy, many people have the ability to produce a technical innovation: a new MP3 player. Very few people have the ability to create a great brand: the iPod. Branding involves the location and arousal of affection, and you can’t do it unless you are conversant in the language of romance.

Seriously? Seriously? Ignoring the fact that Steve Jobs was a college drop-out, literature and art and history do not make you more equipped to understand actual people, or to influence them. Quite the opposite, in my case

Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. People think by comparison — Iraq is either like Vietnam or Bosnia; your boss is like Narcissus or Solon. People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies. If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.

On the one hand, I can't really argue with this point, because, well, exempla from history! In a larger way, it is certainly true that recognizing the allusions that make up a great deal of one's cultural discourse is a good thing to be able to do. And yet I don't think that more facile comparisons to the Peloponnesian War or the Fall of the American Roman Empire improve said discourse. Quite the contrary -- this kind of thing is exactly why I can't stand David Brooks in the first place! (See: "Once, I took a college course on the Englightenment; now I can talk about the fundamental divisions in views of human nature.")

Finally, and most importantly, studying the humanities helps you befriend The Big Shaggy.

Let me try to explain. Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior: economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling. They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy.

Oh yes, he went there. Brooks goes on to talk about the various sides of his chest monster -- from illicit affairs of passion to over-confident investors, to awesome athletes and manly soldiers manfully giving their all: "The observant person goes through life asking: Where did that come from? Why did he or she act that way? The answers are hard to come by because the behavior emanates from somewhere deep inside The Big Shaggy."

But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech. These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities.

It’s probably dangerous to enter exclusively into this realm and risk being caught in a cloister, removed from the market and its accountability. But doesn’t it make sense to spend some time in the company of these languages — learning to feel different emotions, rehearsing different passions, experiencing different sacred rituals and learning to see in different ways?

Again, leaving aside that dig at academia -- this formulation bothers me a lot. Part of it is rhetoric: B. clearly wants it both ways: that the Humanities teach you about the mysterious universal emotional core at the heart of the human experience and also teach you about "different emotions...passions...rituals." And talking about experiencing the works of "rare and strange" creators who can enlighten us about our hidden humanity? Utter utter crap. But most of all: the Humanties are not "rich veins of emotional knowledge" opposed to sterile and technical sciences! They are amenable to analysis, too! (Not to mention the fact that the "sciences" aren't completely divorced from "very human" aspirations and deep desires. Nor, in my experience, does mathematics (at least) not also cause one to marvel at the beauty and mystery in the universe, if that is your thing.) They mean different things to different people in different periods! Things we call "the humanities" are not some obscure "emotional language" -- on the contrary, they are in actual human languages and symbolic systems that cohere, are the product of thought and conscious intentions (although the specific intentions themselves are usually obscure), engage with ideas that can be debated in other forms and other forums, engage critical thinking as much as any other subject of study, and frequently were created with functions OTHER THAN our own, latter-day, feel-good "emotional satisfaction." In other words: there are real things there, not the revelations of an obscure and hidden "shaggy beast" of deepest-seated primal urges that have remained unchanged over the centuries (as if!). Those real things are what are worth studying -- first, because they are real, second, because whether you are expanding your understanding of your own society's cultural history and past and traditions in some way, or whether you are studying those someone else's, taking a broader view of the world than the point in which your life happen to exist is a good thing.

And thirdly, one ought to study these things to a reasonably advanced level because the way in which one analyzes "the humanities" is a particular way of approaching ideas and representations of ideas, of thinking about their antecedents, contexts, the conclusions they imply, and the significance that they do or have had. This kind of critical thinking is a valuable skill to have -- whether you are going to apply it to novels, or advertisements, or interpersonal relations, or political speeches -- just as the ability to break down a problem and examine it with the scientific method is a valuable skill to have.

(also, texts are exciting!)