The Humanities and National Identity

 What is the Point of the Study of the Humanities?

The New York Times recently published an opinion piece entitled “I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don ‘t Know What Their Value Is.” Many Americans share that ignorance, and we wonder why anyone should study subjects like literature or history. I think that the humanities have a key role in the education of the people of a nation.

The humanities are the means by which we create a national identity through a shared culture and history. A nation must be more than a collection of individuals who happen to reside within the borders of a territory. The people of a nation must have a shared identity that answers the question, "Who are we?" In a large territory, such an identity cannot emerge automatically. In every country, it is and has been a deliberate creation.

A National Identity Must Have Depth  

A shared, national identity should not be a shallow or a momentary thing. We Americans cannot be merely the people who eat hamburgers or the people who love the music of Taylor Swift. A national identity should have historical depth and cultural richness. When I was in school in France, I had to memorize poems written in the sixteenth century. I now understand that the point of that exercise was to impress on us that being French meant having a share in a literary tradition that went back for centuries. Memorizing those poems was part of learning what it meant to be French.

We can use works of American culture in the same way. We are the people who produced the literary works of Richard Wright and Emily Dickenson, the plays of Arthur Miller and August Wilson, the paintings of Jackson Pollock and Georgia O'Keefe, the music of Aaron Copeland and Scott Joplin. We are the people who have created a unified and distinctive culture from the contributions of an unimaginable variety of immigrant influences.

A National Identity Can Have Variants

A national identity does not have to erase regional or ethnic identities. We can have both. The American South has a distinctive culture, but southerners also share our American culture. American Blacks have a distinctive culture, too, but they remain Americans as they learn when they visit Africa. Spain has four official languages, but despite their protestations to the contrary, the people of Barcelona remain Spaniards.

A National Identity Can Change

A national identity is not static. It can change over time as people come to understand their society and their history from new perspectives. That is why the literary canon matters so much. When I was in college, the canon didn't include many female or nonwhite writers, and that had to change. We now study works by Black writers, by Hispanic writers and by women. We learn that their contributions have not diluted our culture. They have enriched it. We are a people with a rich culture that has many strands.

History and National Identity

The study of history also plays a role in our sense of who we are. When I was in school, I learned that we were the people whose ancestors arrived at Plymouth Rock, wrote the Declaration of Independence, fought the Civil War and crossed the prairies in covered wagons. We have since realized that the view that I learned is incomplete, and we have started to come to terms with the fact that we are also the people who exterminated the Native Americans, enslaved millions of Africans and imprisoned innocent Japanese in camps in WWII.

That dark view of who we are has been very hard for some people to accept, but it must in the end be incorporated into our sense of who we are. The solution cannot be that we stop studying history. It must be that we learn to tell our story in a new way. Perhaps, we will learn to accept that our history - like the history of every nation - is morally ambiguous. It contains both elements of heroism and elements of villainy.  

Perhaps the elements of villainy are the most important because we can learn from them. In a wonderful book about engineering failures called To Engineer is Human, the author explains that the study of failures is important because we can learn from them. Successes teach us nothing new. Perhaps the study of the villainous parts of our history will help us to build a more just society in the future. We can come to see ourselves as the people who created "Jim Crow" and also as the people who overcame it.

We Cannot Be a Nation Without the Humanities

The study of the humanities is the way that a national culture and a national identity are built. Without a shared culture and identity, patriotism becomes racism or shallow jingoism. We cannot be a nation if we learn only the things that benefit us directly as individuals. The study of accounting, computer science or chemistry does not help to create a shared identity. If we are to be a nation at all, we must learn to see ourselves as the inheritors of a shared culture and history. We can learn that only through the study of the humanities.