What does it mean at the end of the day?

"I applaud your interest in the humanities," I wrote to the student who wanted my take on her interest to pursue a graduate degree in the humanities.

I wish that we had a lot more people interested in understanding the human condition.

I continued in the email:

All of us need to think a lot about: "What constitutes "the good life"? or How meaningful are cultural differences? What is a just society?"  COVID-19 is forcing even those who didn't care about those questions to now think about them as they/we are all stuck at home.

There are plenty of people around the world wondering, for instance, what they were trying to do all this time by working long hours at the expense of spending a few days--even hours--with family and friends.  The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, openly asked what was so important when we were so busy:

Cuomo also spoke poignantly about his mother and the times he promised to have coffee with her but backed out because things came up. “Wrong, wrong. That was more important than anything else,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t miss something until it’s been taken away. And it made me rethink what was important and what I had been missing, and I’d been missing a lot." We’re all busy, he noted. "What does it mean at the end of the day? What were you really busy with, and did it matter?”

Did all that really matter?

What matters then?  What is a "good life" to live?

Scientists and lawyers and programmers cannot answer that question. Nobody can. But, at least the humanities can help us think about them and get to our own answers.

But, of course, that is not where we will go to in a year or more, by when we will have figured out how to prevent getting infected by COVID-19.

Yuval Noah Harari wrote in a commentary a few days ago:

The present crisis might indeed make many individuals more aware of the impermanent nature of human life and human achievements. Nevertheless, our modern civilisation as a whole will most probably go in the opposite direction. Reminded of its fragility, it will react by building stronger defences. When the present crisis is over, I don’t expect we will see a significant increase in the budgets of philosophy departments. But I bet we will see a massive increase in the budgets of medical schools and healthcare systems.

I worry that funding for the humanities will be further diminished in the context of the acute economic crisis that will haunt higher education over the next few years. (Click here for a string of my tweets on this topic--the tweets have links to essays.)

But, very few will even care about the loss.  Because, very few are sincerely interested in understanding the human condition.

There is no way to put a positive spin on this reality.  Nor do I engage in putting a spin on anything.