Derosha Moodley, the talented Literature Lecturer at our Eduvos Durban Campus shares her passion for the Humanities in this faculty feature.
Medical doctors work with blood.
Accountants with numbers.
Attorneys with law.
Humanities professionals? With emotion.
How exactly do we work with emotion? That’s what this post will explain with a bit of endorsement for getting a Humanities education (wink, wink).
To begin with, we use emotion to create messages, like a brand campaign to appeal to the emotions of a target audience. Then, we observe emotion in order to provide tools to help someone work through their mental health concerns and of course, we use emotion to create a piece of art that will inspire people for years to come.
Those are some of the ways we work with emotion - the very part of humanity that makes us either conscious humans or reckless humans:
A society that values the humanities is one that would question whether the Musks of the world who were lucky enough to make good investments from inherited money should be granted the authority to own the marketplace of ideas (or colonise another planet). It would also be a society that understands better than the new owner of Twitter that our future as a species relies not just on developments in technology, but also on how we decide to use them (Kilpatrick, 2022).
From the above assertion, we need the humanities professional to guide the business tycoons of the world on how to use their power for the ‘greater good’ of society. A fictional mind of the 90’s Dr Ian Malcolm of Jurassic Park (yes, the infamous chaotician in the dino-saving trio) once said “…Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”. Now, Malcolm’s critique of what he deemed to be bioterrorism in the film is not what we are dealing with in the real world (at least we hope so), but his words resonate with big corporate’s quest for mass innovation at the cost of the un-negotiated consent we give to these tech giants when we tick those pop-up T’s & C’s before downloading an App.
The social repercussions are too many to mention, but one example is Elon Musk’s recent reign of terror on Twitter:
The much-mocked launch of paid blue checks is just one example of the eyebrow-raising decisions Musk has made since his $44 billion purchase of the social network one month ago…In his first month, Musk also reinstated the Twitter account of former President Donald Trump, who was permanently suspended in January 2021 for inciting violence in light of the January 6 Capitol attack (Kim, 2022).
Okay, what’s bad about paying for the blue tick? Let everybody have one but, what about identity theft! Someone bought a blue tick and pretended to be Tesla. Musk got a taste of his own medicine. Okay, so he let Trump have his confiscated Twitter account back, what’s wrong with that? Trump’s Twitter influence incited a type of violence (Dang, 2022) that resulted in an episode of raging vandalism that made the history books. That’s the power of negligent messages. Big organisations cannot be left without emotional counsel when making messages that may have adverse effects on their human audiences.
The jungle fighter boss of the 1980s is quickly being replaced in corporate spaces all over the world in favour of the interpersonal virtuoso - says Daniel Goleman, a leading scholar in the field of emotional intelligence. People want to hire leaders who can read emotion and manage emotion. An organisation does not exist in isolation of its community so before an organisation or its brand falls prey to cancel culture by the very community it serves, an education on emotional literacy is important to anyone passionate about leadership.
The most popular question I get is why study the Humanities in a STEM world?
My personal response is that a machine can’t help you build a person’s confidence or help you build a relationship, but a humanities education can. A machine can’t help you manage a family’s emotional needs, but a humanities education can give you the tools to understand your family “effective communication, critical thinking, creative thinking, emotional intelligence, working well in teams, cultural understanding and problem-solving” (CSU, 2022) these are skills that can help you understand the people you work with and live with.
So, add an A to your STEM education. Make it STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics.
Susan Wojciki – CEO of YouTube - Studied History and Literature at Harvard and later on studied Computer Science
Oprah Winfrey – Media mogul – Studied communications at Tennessee State University
Stewart Butterfield – CEO of Slack technologies – Studied philosophy at St Michael’s University
Andrea Jung - CEO of Grameen America, former CEO of Avon products – Studied English at Princeton University (Bliss, 2022)
(And the list goes on…)
In closing, I leave you with a couple of questions, which side of the advert do you want to be on? The side that passively receives one of the greatest marketing messages in history which continues to persuade public opinion that diamonds symbolise the next stage of a relationship? (Friedman, 2015) Or the conscious consumer who knows what really lies behind this marketing narrative?
So, study your engineering and commerce but study humanities too, not only to advise big business on when to rein it in or to understand the inner workings of society, but more importantly, to learn how to build your own identity.
