The Burden of the Humanities

I really enjoyed reading Wilfred M. McClay’s article The Burden of the Humanities. There were a few ideas in particular I really found interesting. I really enjoyed McClay’s comparison of humanities and sciences. Science is concrete. There are right answers in science. However, humanities are broad and indeterminate. “The humanities are imprecise by their very nature. But that does not mean they are a form of intellectual finger-painting” (pg. 36). Although imprecise, humanities deal with the world around us, how we see it. Sciences explain the world in a robotic manner, without reference to human meaning. I also really enjoyed the joking story McClay used to explain the American attitude towards the past. The man in the story did not want to pay for the story, but only pay for the bronze statue. Even after all the rats followed him and he saw the power of the statue, he still did not want to know the story behind it. He just asked to be sold, “a bronze statue of a lawyer?” (pg. 39). As a reader of this story, I too did not really care about the story behind the statue. I was too entertained by the punch line. My telling this story, McClay effectively motivates the reader to learn about our culture’s past. In order to appreciate our country, one must learn and have a general knowledge of our past. You can’t appreciate what one has today, “unless you pay the price of learning the stories” (pg. 39). The third idea that I really enjoyed was McClay’s analysis of humanities in the past in order to predict the definition of humanities in the future. In the past, humanities have been understood as humans opposed to animals, the divine, or the rational mechanical. Humanities have been defined as opposition to what humans are not. McClay then argues that, “what we call ‘the humanities’ will survive and thrive, however we choose to define them” (pg. 41). Whatever the humanities is used to oppose next, it will thrive since it has thrived to oppose many different ideas in the past. McClay then goes on to explain that he thinks that humanities will be defined to oppose the recent problems and prospects of biotechnology and medicine. Cloning, artificial wombs, species melding, etc. will force us to call into question our limitations and what it means to be human. I think McClay is right on his prediction of the future. It will be interesting to see how people use humanities to support or oppose new advances in biotechnology and medicine in the future.