March 01, 2026

killing arts and humanities is killing us

hopelessness

In early 2025, the United States government moved to claw back $175 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which was already awarded, already promised, to state humanities councils, rural libraries, archives, museums, documentary filmmakers, teachers. For many of these organizations, that federal funding was 60% of everything they had. Gone. In a single move. Harvard, facing a deficit, cut PhD admissions in arts and humanities by 60% for two consecutive years. West Virginia University eliminated every single one of its foreign language programs. North Carolina passed a law making humanities professors legally ineligible for distinguished professorships. The state literally wrote into law that the study of human culture is a lesser pursuit.

This is happening at the exact moment that the people running Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are giving speeches saying that technical skills are becoming commodified, that what artificial intelligence cannot replace is critical thinking, curiosity, the capacity to understand an audience, the ability to ask a question that hasn't been asked before. They are trained capacities, and the place we have always trained them is in classrooms where students argue about Dostoevsky and Foucault and what justice actually means and whether a society can be free if its members don't know they're not.

I grew up being told, in a hundred indirect ways, that the arts were a beautiful hobby and science was a serious career. That literature was something you did for pleasure and economics/engineering was something you did for life. That studying why humans behave the way they do was less important than knowing how to build the things they use. I absorbed this message the way you absorb most of the most damaging ideas from a thousand small moments that accumulate into a worldview before you're old enough to interrogate it.

The story you are told about the world is always a story someone chose to tell. Power does not announce itself. It doesn't come out and say I have decided that certain kinds of knowledge are valuable and certain kinds are not, and I have made this decision because it serves me. It doesn't have to. It just funds some departments and defunds others, and thirty years later, the people making those cuts don't even know they're making a political choice. They think they're making a budget decision.

That is exactly what makes this so dangerous.

When you stop teaching people how power works, they can't see it working.
When you stop teaching people how identities are formed, they don't understand why they believe what they believe or where those beliefs came from.
When you stop teaching people history, history that includes the stories of people who lost, a population that has never studied how fascism rises doesn't recognize it when it wears a suit and holds a press conference.
A generation that has never read a novel from the point of view of someone unlike them is going to have a much harder time caring about people unlike them. There is decades of research showing that reading literary fiction increases empathy. That exposure to the humanities increases tolerance for ambiguity and for people who think differently. That critical thinking is the single best predictor of a person's ability to resist propaganda.

We are cutting these subjects from schools and universities at the precise moment we need them most.
I don't think that's a coincidence, and I don't think I'm being paranoid when I say that. Throughout history, every movement that wanted to concentrate power and suppress dissent moved quickly to control what gets taught and how. Not always with tanks. Sometimes just with funding cuts. Sometimes just by reclassifying certain questions as not worth asking.

Tagore wrote that education is not the amount of information put into a child's brain, but the kind of life it creates. He called it a suicide of the soul. I keep thinking about that phrase. When a society loses the ability to ask why

The students deciding their majors right now are doing it under enormous financial pressure, inside a culture that has been telling them for thirty years that the arts are a luxury they can't afford. I don't blame them for choosing differently.But I want to say something to them that I wish someone had said to me: the world you will spend your career in is going to be automated at a pace that makes almost every specific technical skill you learn today obsolete within a decade. The thing that won't be automated is your ability to understand other people, to ask a question no one has thought to ask, to recognize when a system is producing injustice even though all of its individual parts seem to be functioning normally. That is not a minor add-on to a professional life. And you learn it by reading, and arguing, and sitting with difficult questions long enough to feel their difficulty.

The most sophisticated political manipulation in human history is happening right now, at scale and the people designing it understand human psychology very well. They have studied what makes people afraid, what makes people loyal, what makes people stop asking questions. They have literature PhDs and behavioral economists and sociologists on their payroll, because they know that understanding how people think is the most powerful thing in the world. And we are responding to this by telling the next generation not to study how people think because there aren't enough jobs in it.

I think about the students who chose literature or philosophy or sociology or history, often against the advice of everyone who loved them, and I think about what they learned: how to read a text for what it is not saying. How to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously and sit with that discomfort instead of resolving it too quickly. How to trace an argument back to its assumptions. How to ask whose story is being told and whose is being left out. These are not academic exercises. These are survival skills for the 21st century, and we are treating them like decorative knowledge.

Martha Nussbaum wrote that democracies have souls, and those souls depend on education. what obligations you have to people you will never meet, what it means to live well in a shared world. A population without the inner resources to think critically, imagine different lives, and engage with complexity cannot actually govern itself, regardless of how many elections it holds.

We are in a specific moment of democratic crisis across the world. Hungary, Turkey, India, the United States, you can argue about the causes and the details, but what you see in every case is the weakening of the institutions and practices and shared commitments that make self-governance possible, and the corresponding rise of leaders who prefer a population that is frightened, certain, and incurious. And alongside every one of these political developments, you find pressure on universities, on arts funding, on the kinds of knowledge that produce citizens who ask uncomfortable questions.

The demise of a civilization does not usually look like a disaster. It usually looks like a series of reasonable decisions, each one justifiable on its own terms, that together add up to something irreversible. It looks like a university merging its philosophy department with something more profitable. It looks like a government deciding that libraries are a nice-to-have. It looks like parents steering their children away from the subjects that would teach them to question what they are being told, because they want their children to be safe and successful, and who can blame them for that?

Perspective is power. it is mechanically, structurally, historically true. The ability to see how something looks from a different angle - a different class, a different century, a different country, a different body is what separates people who can be manipulated from people who cannot. It is what separates a society that can see a mistake before it becomes catastrophic from one that can't. We teach it in arts and humanities. We are dismantling arts and humanities. And we are doing it with such confidence, such brisk managerial certainty, that almost nobody is stopping to ask the one question that any decent humanities education would have taught us to ask first.

Who benefits from a world where people stop asking questions?