The Wisdom of the Humanities

The Wisdom of the Humanities

By Chase Padusniak

“So what are you studying?” If I had a quarter for every time I’ve heard that since I’ve been at school, my laundry costs would be covered. The doctors liked to ask me that during my recent stay at a hospital. So do premeds, for some reason. And I’m always a little awkward about my answer. Sometimes I just want to blurt out “Astronaut studies!” or “Big Time Pimpin’,” but I never want to admit the truth: English and medieval studies.

Blurting that out is a conversational antibiotic—the flora just wither away. Unless my interlocutors get really enterprising and ask me about the “poetry girls” I meet in class or what I think about Game of Thrones, what follows goes something like this:

And I’m left feeling empty and lifeless. People no longer respect the humanities. They have even stopped pretending to. If you don’t mangle DNA for a living or strive to usher in the robopocalypse, in most eyes you are barely fit to sell mechanical pencils. People would rather you trained to rob the hardworking American people of their money by studying some speculative or bureaucratic discipline than delve deeply into the human condition by reading old words inked on paper from dead trees.

I believe in liberal education. Otherwise I wouldn’t spend a fortune I don’t have every semester on a Jesuit college in urban Massachusetts. But even as Holy Cross viciously robs me of my future and the possibility of employment, I am hopeful.

I believe that to struggle with and attempt to understand the wisdom of our forebears is an experience that informs the essential thing, the soul. Socrates (for all his denying it) was wiser than Richard Dawkins will ever be. I suspect the same is true of Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas stacked up next to Bill Gates or Isaac Asimov. This isn’t to say that scientists, engineers, and businessmen cannot be wise. But part of wisdom is recognizing that the rest of us are not wasting our lives. When we look at man himself, what we need, precisely, is wisdom—instead of a rationalistic, technological “expertise.” There’s nothing wrong with attempting to innovate, with working to better our world or generate wealth—except when pursuing such goals makes you so narrow that you despise every other pursuit. When we wish to understand not just how to do something but also what we should do and why, what we need is wisdom. What we too often settle for instead is some blinkered technician’s gnosis.

Not to mention, have you seen Socrates’s beard? You don’t get one of those babies studying astrophysics.

Chase Padusniak, a junior at the College of the Holy Cross, has received a Mellon grant and a Hertog Political Studies Fellowship, and he has studied German at the Goethe-Institut Schwäbisch Hall in Germany.