Humanities

On a very basic level, humanities studies the human condition and how it evolves throughout time. By reading and discussing texts from all kinds of different perspectives, Humanities paints a picture to better our understanding of problems within society.

Starting from Professor Quillen’s Unit, we focused mainly on the background and causes for racial divide. We asked a lot of questions regarding humanity itself, including, “What does it mean to be human?, Who is human?, What differentiates between the higher and lower classes of society?” Before fixing the persistent forms of oppression that have always been present in society, one must first understand the roots that creates divide. An answer that repeatedly popped up was one’s ability to reason. Human beings differ from animals in that humans have the capacity to reason, meaning they have freewill. This was used as justification for slavery; Black people don’t have the capacity to reason, therefore, they are animals that must submit to the everyone else’s commands. If they did have reason, why do they choose to be slaves?

This idea of man-made hierarchy takes us into Professor Tamura’s Unit, which talked about the inherent evil that sparks historical genocides. How could “ordinary” people in a different time period have the ability to commit some of the most brutal acts of violence known to man? Another key focus was the power of media, especially when dealing with graphic images of terror. Events only became real once they received attention from the media, regardless of its brutalness. Otherwise, people suffer in silence. The Rwandan genocide was a prime example of this. Even though people in the Rwandan genocide died at a rate 3 times as fast as the Holocaust, it had gotten very little attention in the Western World merely because it was a hastle for the U.S. to get involved. We can draw a connection from this to Unit 1’s idea of humanity. Since we’re all human beings, Humanities tries to understand how people justify their brutal actions.

Professor Wills’ Unit 4 relates these ideas to the Civil Rights Movement as we use John Lewis’ book, March: Book Two as a guiding point to analyze racism in America. In one of her plenary lectures, Professor Wills split us into groups to interpret different Bible passages. After coming together and discussing our interpretations, Wills revealed to us that some of these verses were actually used to justify slavery. Racist, white, religious leaders twisted words from the Bible to rationalize racism. This just shows to what extent people will go to believe in the morality of their immoral actions.

In Professor Robb’s unit, we redefined some intrinsic conceptual schemes that make up our view on humanity. Professor Thompson from the Physics department came in to do a lecture about early astronomical discoveries. In her lecture, she talks about huge conceptual schemes that experienced a full paradigm shift. For example, Ancient Greeks once believed that Earth didn’t move. The study of humanities is made up of these conceptual schemes, and Professor Robb encouraged us to question the “truth.

Humanities uses a wide range of mediums to give us a holistic view on the study of humanities. In using comics, speeches, poems, books, paintings, photographs, etc., Humanities teaches us about problems in our society by presenting different perspectives.