Valuable humanities

Last week, two close friends of the male persuasion told me that my newly formed medical humanities club on the Health Science Campus seemed "unnecessary" and "inconsequential." I had recently formed the Medical Humanities Association, a club dedicated to promoting the arts and a smattering of culture into the science-laden curriculum of medical school, and so, a negative opinion from friends was quite disheartening.

My immediate reaction was to get seething revenge upon my so-called friends who hated all things cultural. I had the obvious benefit of having a column in The Independent Collegian, and a 500-word polemic on medical students who were closet philistines seemed to be where my hell-hath-no-fury-like vengeance was headed.

However after my delicate sensibilities had cooled, I asked a larger philosophical question that has plagued the American education system for centuries - what was the value of the humanities upon everyday, practical life? Was there even a need for the occasional dose of fine arts in the medical curriculum especially? Some avant-garde medical schools such as Drexel University in Philadelphia and State University of New York-Syracuse offered courses in the medical humanities to its students. But the troubling question remained - did this make one become a more humane doctor? If the humanities indeed made one more humane, were English majors more morally inclined?

In a recent article in the "New York Times," Stanley Fish asked this very same question - was there a practical necessity of the humanities, not just in medical school curriculums, but to the university education system, in general? Fish inquires whether there is any pragmatic value of deconstructing and analyzing a poem (interestingly, I found this to be an appropriate example because that is how I envisioned the Medical Humanities Association - vigorously vivisecting poems just like we had carefully dissected our cadavers in anatomy). Fish argues that the value in said dissection is not that he is able to empathize with the values of the artist, but "the satisfaction is partly self-satisfaction - it is like solving a puzzle - but the greater satisfaction is the opportunity to marvel at what a few people are able to do with the language we all use."

Ironically, then, his conclusion is not that poetry and art make doctors more humane, but that there is an intrinsically selfish element involved. As an English major at the University of North Carolina, I can attest to the fact that the enjoyment of analyzing Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Ubervilles" does not come from me empathizing with the tragic plight of a poor country girl, but from achieving that flashing moment of understanding of what the author is saying behind the elaborate, brilliant subtext. And so, the moment where one uncovers the meaning behind the confusing allusions to the Phoenician sailor in T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" is a cognitive victory that provides me immense pleasure.

Fish continues his inquiry on the value of humanities and comes up with a theory that many have used to support the literary scholar industry - that it encourages critical thinking. A vague, term, perhaps, but a persuasive one enough to still fund English departments across the country. However, he has an interesting caveat - the fact that critical thinking skills can be learned from "sports radio, where host and callers-in debate the ingredients that go to make up a successful team." And in fact, Fish has a valid point - we can learn abstract thinking from other arenas of our lives that do not require a classroom-led discussion of what Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" truly means. For instance, Anderson Cooper and his panel of hosts perform abstract analysis every night on CNN when he covers the primaries for the presidential election. CNN and other media sources (such as the IC's own Forum section) do not merely report, but provides an analysis that dives to the heart of life's eternal question about human experience - "What does X event mean?"

And so, I end up siding with Fish's argument - that there really is no pragmatic, quantifiable value in analyzing literature. But if dissecting Martin Luther King's "Letter from the Birminghouse Jail" does not inspire me to change and better the current establishment, then is the study of humanities futile? If we cannot see any foreseeable, positive effects of social change upon society from such an endeavor, then one has to question its existence.

Nevertheless, though, I still wholeheartedly support the study of the humanities and the so-called "Shakespeare industry" that releases books on different theories about the Bard (was he a closet Catholic? Did he die of syphilis?); because there is something essentially noble about the English professor's dedication. The English professor, in his tweed coat and office filled with leatherbound books, makes his students appreciate how poetry written in a totally different time period and place can have the complexity and genius that even surpasses our generation's folk heroes of Nirvana and Bob Dylan. And so, while the study of humanities may not literally save people's lives in the obvious, literal sense the way doctors do, art rescues us in a metaphorical way - from living the unexamined life.