Reflection Upon Humanities

Studying humanities is important for a healthy society and democracy and shouldn’t be looked at as an impractical and frivolous pursuit. The world today quickly judges and gets angry without really educating themselves about a certain topic. Most of this is usually due to social media being such an essential in today’s society. People just scroll through their social media most of the time, learn about something, and decide how to act upon it. They usually don’t further educate themselves about the topic of the post and they continue to spread their anger and misinformation. This would be called confirmation bias or cherry-picking which is picking and choosing what information fits with your thinking. In Mandy Pipher’s 2018 article, Devaluing a humanities education ultimately devalues humanity itself, she argues that “They learn about the complicated interactions between words, personal experience, and truth.” Meaning that when students that study English the right way and passionately learn to be more smarter, knowledgeable, and wise than an average person who doesn’t study English. In her 2018 article, Devaluing a humanities education ultimately devalues humanity itself, Mandy also answers why western democracy and this world is so messed up these days; “A distrust of rational discourse about differing points of view; confusing a strong emotional response with inalienable truth; an inability to parse good information and legitimate sources from the bad and disingenuous; a lack of empathy for the humanity of people different from oneself.” She explains that in today’s society people don’t listen to other people’s opinions and aren’t open to see how they see things. She explains that people mix strong emotions with the truth resulting in chaos (meaning people don’t want to accept facts as it doesn’t sit well with them so they find out a way to release their anger). Mandy clarifies that people these days aren’t able to find the difference between what information is good and reliable and what information is bad an unreliable. She also clarifies that people don’t tend to have a sense of empathy for people different from themselves, and that people nowadays seem to be more selfish, ignorant, and arrogant. Her article explains that English and humanities is indeed important to be studied upon for us to become better and more understanding people which would affect western democracy in a very good way. Humanities should be studied as it is vital for a healthy society and democracy.