“Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose)…
“Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. People think by comparison — Iraq is either like Vietnam or Bosnia; your boss is like Narcissus or Solon. People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies.”
David Brooks often surprises me. He’s kind of some old-world intellectual humanist moderate conservative libertarian.
This week he presents his defense of the humanities in ways that, being a literature and history major, I can mostly appreciate.
There is an interesting part in there too about how humanities majors, having keen insight into human emotions can be perfectly adept at branding and advertising
But we all know what Bill Hicks had to say about those kinds of people. (NSFW!)
