To the Editor:
Re “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society,” by David Brooks (column, Jan. 28):
As a published author married to a writer/filmmaker, I deeply appreciated Mr. Brooks’s column.
It pains me to witness the modern-day devaluation of the arts and humanities. When I was a child, my art history major mother dragged me to many of the world’s great museums: the National Gallery of Art, the Met, the Louvre. I may have protested after the first hour, but certain works left indelible impressions: the terrifying passion of Klimt’s “Kiss,” the seductive movement of the Calder mobile.
Likewise, literature plunged me into different perspectives. The hard but loving existence of the Ingalls family in “Little House on the Prairie,” the dark history of internment of Japanese Americans in “Farewell to Manzanar,” the peculiar foibles of Shakespearean characters — entering these worlds deepened my understanding of life and fostered compassion, exactly as Mr. Brooks states.
At a time when my alma mater, Stanford University, reports that all five of the top declared undergraduate majors were in STEM fields, with computer science by far the most popular, our society desperately needs voices such as Mr. Brooks’s sounding the alarms in defense of our very souls.
MeiMei Fox
Honolulu
To the Editor:
I cannot get past David Brooks’s arguing that the humanities help us practice sympathy while saying, “College students are fleeing the humanities for the computer sciences, having apparently decided that a professional leg up is more important than the state of their souls.” As if being able to pay your bills, afford time off or have a family are not important for your soul.
I’m tired of boomers speaking as if later generations’ choices reflect our values rather than our constraints. Museums and opera? Or student loans? Those cultural opportunities are often expensive.
If he wanted to do more than publish a brag list of experiences that made him a cosmopolitan deep thinker, he should have skipped extolling experiences in Venice or Chartres or St. Petersburg or Madrid and considered why people’s habits have changed or how society could make these experiences more accessible.
I agree that culture is beneficial and its decline in society is a loss. But his thesis that culture makes us empathetic and wise, while lacking empathy or self-awareness of his privilege in framing the issue, makes a mockery of what could have been a valid point. He seems cultured … and disconnected.
Jennifer Cruickshank
West Point, N.Y.
To the Editor:
What a pleasure to read David Brooks’s full-throated endorsement of the humanities as a site of resistance against the dehumanization that’s hollowing out our lives. His appreciation of their value in cultivating humanist qualities is especially welcome at a time when most conversation about education is focused narrowly on the quantitative and measurable.
As a longtime professor of literature and author of “Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm,” I can tell you that when students grapple with complex literary texts, they’re developing mental muscles that serve them in their lives. They acquire the versatility, flexibility and adaptability that equip them professionally in a rapidly changing world — but more, they learn arts of survival.
The challenges we face, navigating the human minefield, are of a verbal, social, interactive nature: learning to interpret our fellow human beings, to pick up on meanings behind words, to read between the lines, to push back against the many agendas pushed on us, so we’re not “led by the nose as asses are” (as Iago says of Othello), like those poor fools whose bodies litter the stage at the end of a tragedy.
The humanities are not frills — they’re survival skills. They have a longer shelf life than a specialized training that may be automated, outsourced or obsolete within a few years.
Gayle Greene
Mendocino, Calif.
The writer is professor emerita at Scripps College.
To the Editor:
David Brooks’s fascinating piece on the role of literature and the arts in making us perceptive humans, able to understand others, was on the mark. However, he did not discuss how the study of history adds an important dimension.
Besides guiding us to understand how we arrived at where we are, history reveals the “period eye” of the past. We have to learn to comprehend how and what others have seen in other times and places in order to fully appreciate their art and literature. In doing so, we might realize how supple, complex and varied is the human mind, and how much there is to see and learn.
Steve Davidson
Georgetown, Texas
The writer is professor emeritus of history at Southwestern University.
To the Editor:
Bravo, David Brooks, for explaining why the arts are the soul of humanity and, therefore, should be an important part of one’s formal/informal education. Many years ago, colleges acknowledged that need by creating “core requirements” for graduation. Now, advocates of “personal freedoms” have eliminated them as irrelevant.
I used to advise my high school math students to take the minimum number of required courses for their major, immerse themselves in diverse studies, including the arts, and save career education for their graduate degrees.
The arts are so essential that I intermingled them with math (yes, that’s possible!). Thirty students and I would take about 10 trips a year to marinate in culture (classical music concerts, ballet, opera, theater, art museums, ethnic cuisines, etc.). By reinstating the arts as part of a normal education, our society might reverse its obvious downward spiral.
Martin Rudolph
Oceanside, N.Y.
To the Editor:
Thanks to David Brooks for his inspired paean to the humanities and the importance of exposure to art and culture. He reminds us that these are crucial elements in saving our society from much of the darkness that currently envelops it.
Hopefully, Mr. Brooks will remember his own words the next time he is tempted to inveigh against the “cultural elites” to whom he regularly attributes the fracturing of the American body politic.
On the one hand he wants us to study Rembrandt and Boswell; on the other he complains about people who have had that kind of education, suggesting that their snobbery is at the root of much that ails us. Which is it, Mr. Brooks?
James Gertmenian
Cumberland Foreside, Maine