Transcription
My image is a beautiful flower. The stem of the flower is, in fact, STEM: science, technology, engineering, and math. But the blossom of the flower is the humanities. Without the blossom, the stem is completely useless. It's just a stem.
How essential it is that these two areas work in coordination with each other. Sciences are the "how," and the humanities are the "why"—why are we here? Why do we believe in the things we believe in? I don't think you can have the "how" without the "why." Measurable is what we know, and the immeasurable is what the heart searches for. The humanities are the immeasurable: philosophy, religion, history, literature, music, culture.
The humanities are those subject areas that allow us to really probe what it means to be human. We all need to find who we are and how we fit into the world. The humanities teach us who we are. The humanities are the epitome of human expression. The humanities are what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said "the pursuit of happiness." This is not a pursuit of objects in a marketplace of things. This is the pursuit of ideas in a marketplace of our future.
Without humanities, life doesn't have life. That's at the heart of the matter. They're diminishing. The humanities are diminishing. The humanities are badly underfunded. Our leaders need to remain focused on all aspects of human knowledge and human endeavors. Education has been catastrophically weakened. Education is the most important thing that the human race can participate in.
High school seniors—college graduates—have such terrible misconceptions of what the world's about. A lot of American students graduating with a diploma in hand think we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War. How do you operate in a world as dynamic as today with that kind of misunderstanding? A lot of people think that the humanities are dispensable, but you take that away from children, and you're taking away one half of their essential development.
And it's very important for our children to have the same understanding so that they know: we're Americans. We believe in certain things in our country. That's how we stay together as people with common interests. That's how we survive. Surely this country would be massively diminished if we lived in a world in which nobody had any deep thoughts about what this freedom that we care so passionately about actually means.
I've covered a bunch of economic and political problems, and I watched policies fail. And they almost invariably fail because our policymakers get human nature wrong. It's important to know how human nature works. The humanities spend a great deal of time embracing our world, and when you embrace your world, you see the similarities between people. You also see the differences, and you learn how to respect those differences.
How do we actually come to understand each other if we don't share languages and the ability to speak across some boundaries of difference that language and nationality can sometimes present? The humanities are medicine in that we're taking the pulse of this patient called the United States of America, and we're learning the mistakes we've made and the successes that we've had, and we're applying it to the present and to the future.
Because there's no way to imagine a future without actually considering the past. I would never want to make the argument for the humanities based only on their practical applications. The spiritual uplifting of the arts—either visual or musical or any other kind of art—takes you out of the humdrum of your daily life and brings you into a whole world of possibilities.
If we look at what's beautiful and ask the question: if our lives are only about the mundane, was it also about the beauty? Art is a microcosm of life. If we leave behind the humanities and see it as unimportant, I think we'll lose our ability to dream. It's the freedom to think about things that are mysteries: about how and why we exist.
Like Christopher Columbus, nobody really cares what happened; it's not a big deal. Yet it's one of the most important things in history, and we don't think of it in terms of the large scope of the cosmos. I had the great good fortune of helping my friends go to the moon and come back alive. One of the great accomplishments in the history of humanity.
The younger generation, without the humanities, without history, without somebody explaining the drama, what it meant, the humanness of it, just thinks it's normal. They just think we've always been on the moon, and getting there is not a big deal. If we never talk about great events in the past, I think the younger generation will not only have missed something important, but they're going to address the future with half a deck.
[Neil Armstrong] "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." What did that mean? I don't know. It didn't seem like that big of a leap to me. We can't forget all of this. This is part of who we are. And that's what the humanities are about. Where are we without these things?
I would say no humanities, no meaning. No humanities, no soul. No humanities, no relationships. No humanities, we would be robots. No significance. No fulfillment in life. No history. No present. No future. No us. No concept about the rule of law. No humanities, no civilization. We won't be remembered.
There's no end to the spiritual and intellectual evolution that can take place by pursuing the humanities. If we use humanities to its fullest extent, in invention, in the sciences, that will propel us into this next century as a very vibrant nation that is creating wealth and promoting tolerance. So let's start there.