In the opening sequence of Act One of Spike Lee’s
four-part Hurricane Katrina documentary, When
the Levees Broke, a piece of footage collected during the storm shows a
road sign for New Orleans’ Humanity Street.
Included as a means of emphasizing the scale of the flooding, the waters
of the Gulf of Mexico reach nearly to the sign’s green marker, at once evoking
the breaking of the levees themselves and, because of the aptly named
thoroughfare, the dire circumstances of the stranded residents of the deluged
city.
This particularly striking image in a film full of them
might provide another useful meaning, albeit unintended by the filmmakers; the
humanities (by which I mean the liberal arts, like English, History, Sociology,
Art, etc.) themselves are nearly ready to drown. Conduct a survey of college freshmen (I dare someone),
asking them their intended majors, and inevitably, the answers will read:
Business, Business Administration, Marketing, Advertising, Business again,
Economics, Business a third time. The
folks looking to study the less quantifiable are fewer and farther between as
the marketplace, in its infinite wisdom, increasingly decides that it has no
use for Literary Modernism, or an understanding of the Progressive Era, or
(gasp!) Descartes, and equally little use for those people who spent time
thinking about any of that “Commy stuff.”
To be fair, post-college opportunities don’t look rosy
for graduates in any discipline, but certainly the students who majored in
those business-oriented areas listed above have a better chance than those of
us who spent our time trying to figure out what it all means instead of how
much it all adds up to. For example, this 2009 study by the American Labor
Department reported that “The majors with the worst placement records were area
studies (44.7 percent in degree-requiring jobs) and humanities (45.4 percent).”1
My sympathies go out to those poor bastards in area studies; there is some
small comfort in knowing that it could always be worse, I suppose.
This isn’t to say that young people shouldn’t major in
these subjects; it sure looks like the smart move in hindsight, anyway. Maybe they understand something about the new
world that us humanities rubes just don’t, and maybe they’re right to start
speaking the native language. Take a look around and try to understand just how
much time the citizens of the world spend negotiating the minefield established
by the ubiquity of business. It has become as commonplace and almost as
necessary as breathing. From the
advertisements playing on the radio in the car on the way to work, to the
Starbucks drive-thru halfway to the office, to the job itself, and everything
in between, business is Everywhere. And
that’s just before 9 AM. Business is the
way we move through life, like we are all tiny blood cells, just traveling the
veins of the body and hoping we are lucky enough not to get thrown overboard by
a massive rectal hemorrhage.
And because we’re so busy keeping the body alive, there’s
no time to remember that we’re alive, too.
So, if there’s no time to live, then there must be no point in studying
disciplines that can’t be deciphered by an adding machine, no matter how much
it costs. It must be a waste of time to
bother understanding humanity’s flaws through the shared experience of Macbeth
because humans are just productivity numbers, anyway. Let’s not distract ourselves by thinking
about historical parallels between the 1920s, which precipitated the Great
Depression, and the run-up to our own contemporary financial meltdown of 2008,
because we’re not going to change anything, anyhow. Leave off looking at the Mona Lisa, because
we’re never going to figure out if she’s smiling or not, nor what she’s smiling
about if she in fact is, and get back to work, anywho.
‘But this must be what the market wants,’ my friends and
I routinely say, in mock genuflection at America’s true sacred altar, no matter
how much lip service that God fella gets. If the market says that it doesn’t have a
place for people who know anything about Rousseau, then we must obey. Philosophy has to put up a sign that says,
‘Going out of Business.’ And herein lies
the ironic trap of the market philosophy that’s brought us to this unenviable
place; the concept of the market is amorphous enough that its proponents have
been able to insist that everything falls into it, and is therefore subject to
the same rules. So, in the great market
competition between money and life, money builds a big-box store in town, and
life becomes another empty storefront on a depressed, small town Main Street.
I should do my humanities brethren a solid and close with
an appropriately opaque literary metaphor (maybe it’ll be one of the last ever
written and they’ll print it on a commemorative plate and sell it on QVC). But so few people will understand or identify
with it that I won’t even bother. The
water seems to get higher all the time.
Source:
1http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/the-college-majors-that-do-best-in-the-job-market/
