On 29 February professor Agnes Callard published (though dated 2 Dec. 2023) “I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is,” ending with the worrying — and seemingly dismissive claim that — "No one can genuinely ask a question to which she thinks she already has the answer,” which intends to tell us that not knowing the value of the Humanities is OK and perhaps more intellectually appropriate than knowing.

Her thesis is, "I am prepared to come out and admit that I do not know what the value of the humanities is. I do not know whether the study of the humanities promotes democracy or improves your moral character or enriches your leisure time or improves your critical thinking skills or increases your empathy."

As it happens, I think it is not OK not to know the value of what you're teaching, and that it is intellectually disingenuous to pretend otherwise. In fact, I think it is essential to communicate that value to others. So here is my answer after a brief mention of who I am and how I know:

I have a doctorate in International Relations and I’m now a rather respected novelist. I was a senior researcher and project manager at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research for about a decade. I remain connected to numbers think tanks including one at the Pell Center at Salve Regina, another at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, and a third — as a design fellow — at the Somali Public Agenda’s Policy Lab in Mogadishu.

I know exactly what the value of the humanities is, because I have worked with (i.e. tried to get real problems solved with) people who did or did not have a background in the humanities and I saw the consequences of that. In other words, my answer is not philosophical or deductive: it is empirical (though I long for a wider data set).

By "problems" I mean, for example, the reintegration of excombatants after wars and conflicts; the integration of refugees into economic life; the reduction of gender-based (i.e. sex-based) violence in war; arms control and disarmament with disparate societies, from Yemeni tribes to Russia, and the list goes on.

My expertise over some twenty professional years in IR was designing and planning projects, programs, and policies that can have positive social impacts in the communities where they were implemented. My focus was on method; Not what to do, but how to successfully design what to do across cultural systems.

My projects were usually on peace and security but I have worked in development and humanitarian affairs too.

As the years rolled on, I stopped taking interns with backgrounds in political science, conflict resolution, peace studies, development studies, and even security studies favoring instead students with degrees in English, literature, religion, and philosophy.

I did not do this because — as professor Callard speculated — "the study of the humanities promotes democracy or improves your moral character or enriches your leisure time or improves your critical thinking skills or increases your empathy."

No. I didn't care about any of that and I didn't expect to see that when they walked in the door.

Rather, every single intern I took on with a background in the humanities showed up with a core understanding of something the others were almost beyond the capacity to learn: an understanding that the world is comprised of a plurality of social and moral and ideational systems; that those systems are stable but not immutable; and that any meaningful engagement with another society requires attention to the premises, practices, and meanings that organize and animate — but also sustain — that community through time and, crucial. In understanding this, they also knew that the next step was comparison, because our own lives are also part of a distinct culture.

They may not have been taught to phrase it that way, but they “get it.”

They "get" that things are different in different places and that things change in the same place through time. They understand that action is reposed on, and animated by, thought. The humanities did not merely teach them ideas: it taught them how much ideas matter.

In HG Well’s time machine, the passenger did not move, but rather could venture backwards and forwards in the very same spot. When the pilot left the machine two hundred years earlier in the same room, she was effectively in a different world with different rules, and different primary structuring ideas.

In the same vein, what is true in a place through time is also true across places contemporaneously. Peru is not China, nor is China Canada. What turns a “space into a place” is the people, and what makes the people different is essential to understanding where you are and how that world works.

To what does this matter?

Or better yet, to what does this not matter?

Interested in AI? You’d better start understanding the plurality of socio-cultural systems because what is “intelligent” here is not the same as what is “intelligent there. You think the universalist engineers are going to "get it" having no background in the humanities? Forget it.

Interested in sales? Service design? Team dynamics? Innovation? Cooperation?

Progress?

If so, our students will need to learn what Clifford Geertz called, “an understanding of understandings not our own.” That means we need to know where our perspectives and ideas come from (Homer, Greece, religion, theology, law, interaction with other societies) and also know how our own ways of thinking relate to systems of thought elsewhere. That is far more than "critical thinking." It is an education.

America, and indeed Western civilization, is not going to be economically competitive or wisely run if we mask the challenges of the world in what Harald Lasswell called make-believe universalism.

Instead, we must attend to the differences.

The humanities is not only necessary but it is the gateway with the widest aperture for teaching students a habit of mind and an orientation to thinking that will eventually be necessary to save us all from extinction.

Now: Who wants to fund THAT?