Stop Trying to Make the Humanities ‘Relevant’
- sciart0
- Dec 17, 2025
- 1 min read
Excerpt: "As a humanities professor myself, the biggest danger I see to the discipline is the growing perception, fueled by the ubiquity of large language models, that knowledge is cheap—a resource whose procurement ought to be easy and frictionless.
The humanities, which value rigorous inquiry for its own sake, will always be at odds with a world that thinks this way; that’s why relevance is a futile goal. For humanities departments to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it.
Indeed, the most useful lesson the humanities have to offer today is a profoundly countercultural one: Difficulty is good, an end in its own right.
...Only through difficulty do we improve our powers of thought and perception, which we carry with us in every endeavor. This is the true source of the humanities’ relevance.
...Camus’s great realization was that, in a meaningless world, we create our own meaning and quality through willed struggle—a lesson that AI threatens to obscure but the humanities are uniquely poised to teach.
Sisyphus is assigned to roll his rock for eternity, Camus writes. Yet he can still be happy so long as, each time he comes to the bottom of the hill, he’s the one who chooses to turn around and rise back up."