Doctorversary

Fifteen years ago this week, I sat in a majestic seminar room in Princeton, NJ, with a phone to my left, the rest of my dissertation committee and other faculty members all around the rectangular table, as I defended my dissertation in Classics. In that dissertation, I argued that despite a hierarchical military culture that, on the surface, did not tolerate dissent, common soldiers subversively spoke out in various settings in our ancient sources from Homer to Ammianus Marcellinus. Sometimes they even got away with it. This suggests that military commanders’ control over their troops was always under some degree of threat—in some periods more than in others.

During the defense, the phone to my left was there for a very specific purpose: my committee chair, Josiah Ober, who had left Princeton for Stanford the year before, was joining the defense on speaker from a remote cabin in Montana. Any time the signal dropped, which happened every fifteen minutes or so, jokes interrupted the defense: “Did the bears finally get him?” “Nah, he’s taller than any bears” (true).

At the end, I passed. Phew. It turned out to be the last test of my life (so far, anyway), with the exception of the driving test a year later, when finally, at the age of twenty-eight, I got my driver’s license. This latter test I failed twice before finally passing, unlike any graduate exams in Ancient Greek and Latin.

The ability to pass rigorous exams in ancient languages languages, literatures, and ancient history while not learning to drive until after graduate school is good fodder for the standard fare harangues about the disconnected nature of academia from the “real world,” however one defines that.

To be fair, there is something to this criticism. And yet, I have been repeatedly struck over the past fifteen years, just how much I had learned as part of my education that was, in fact, deeply practical for life in the here-and-now. This is indeed what humanities folks mean, when we say that the humanities offer much more than mere subject expertise—they make us more human in ways ever more poignant and essential in the age of AI. Can a machine love others? It most assuredly cannot.

This week has seen two new reflections about undergraduate and graduate education from the writers at The Atlantic. First, David Frum posted on Twitter, that veritable marketplace of ideas for our age, an intriguing idea for fixing the current college debacle by offering an alternative: competitive exams that would bestow a degree without the expense or time in actual college. I am summarizing in extreme brevity, but you can read Frum’s thread in full. It assumes that other than knowledge and basic skills easily assessed on a test, college doesn’t have much to offer. Then Arthur Brooks wrote a piece at The Atlantic proper about the problematic state of our digital marketplace of ideas, to which John Fea responded with some reflections on what graduate students in History learn that counteracts the problems Brooks noted. As it happens, I wrote today’s reflection post last weekend, but it connects organically to these conversations this week. What is the value of an education in the humanities beyond the disciplinary training and information learning?

The humanities train us in various ways to embrace our humanity—our very personhood. No less important, they train us to accept the humanity and personhood of other people with whom we come into contact, even if they are difficult. In fact, we need this training especially when interacting with people we find difficult. Let’s face it, finding others difficult is a normal part of life—I assume it’s not just my kids who sometimes are tempted to turn on each other Romulus-and-Remus style.

We all sometimes get annoyed at others, whether loved ones or complete strangers. But we have to live with them, whether in the same home or the same society. In this age of division, nevertheless, too many of us do not possess the necessary skills to love difficult people well. Some days, we can’t even manage to love peaceful people well. As a democracy, we are all the poorer for this failure.

I am convinced that the humanities can teach us these essential skills, equipping us to be better spouses, parents, colleagues, and citizens. And, by the way, you don’t have to get a PhD to gain these skills—those benefits are available to Humanities majors and non-majors alike as part of the core curriculum at a number of colleges. After completing your education, you can always continue to read, learn, reflect. Resources like The Catherine Project (whose founder, Zena Hitz, has a new book out that Current contributing editor Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn reviewed yesterday!) will even allow you to take rigorous classes in the great books just for fun.

Here are just three examples of qualities and virtues that, I realize now, fifteen years on, my education in the Classics provided for me:

Listening

One of the most difficult skills for anyone to learn is listening. We have our own ideas, and we believe they are important. Sometimes that sense of importance overtakes our emotions, if we believe we are right. Listening gets even more challenging when someone’s perspective is vastly different from our own and relies on a wholly different set of presuppositions and worldviews.

Immersing myself for years in primary sources written in other languages, now dead, by people far removed from me by both space and time, required developing the ability to listen carefully and try to understand why these people sometimes said or did things that I consider surprising or, at times, downright awful. For example, the degree to which most people in the ancient world were comfortable with casual violence and abuse of the weak continues to horrify me.

But when we listen carefully, we remember that we are not listening to agree with someone. Agreement is never the obligation when listening. Rather, we listen to try and understand: why does someone think or feel this way? Am I understanding correctly what they are saying to begin with?

If you listen to others and they feel heard, you will be able to get along even if you still disagree at the end of the conversation. From infancy, all of us desire to be heard, known, understood, but it takes practice for us to hear, know, and understand others. Studying ancient history continues to offer invaluable practice for me in this regard, and my graduate training equipped me to do this.

Yes, I think that I can love living people much better because I have spent decades trying to understand very frustrating (in some cases) people who have been dead for over two millennia.

Democratic citizenship

Learning to listen to different perspectives, especially ones with which we disagree, and still loving image-bearers who have such different perspectives from our own, trains us for democratic citizenship.

It’s difficult to miss that there is a lot of screaming on all sides right now in our political discourse. Some of the screaming is even literal, conducted by adults who really should know better. As it happens, the importance of listening that I just noted above helps to create better democratic citizens—ones who are willing to hear out someone else, try and understand that person’s point of view, and explain one’s disagreements respectfully as part of dialogue.

It is no exaggeration to say that my husband may be particularly gifted in this area. If you have ever had a conversation (whether in real life or in writing) with Dan in which you disagreed over something, he usually begins by trying to summarize the other person’s point of view as sympathetically and kindly as possible. He will then ask: is this what you meant? Only then will he try to explain—again, with kindness—why he disagrees, and what premises and evidence he has in mind in offering his own interpretation of the events in question. Legend on our now former campus has it that he did make a former provost cry once by asking these questions, but those results are not typical.

My dissertation adviser’s focus in his prolific career-long explorations on the Athenian Democracy, starting with Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People, has been the question: how have these very different people, with very different views and opinions about what the state should do and how it should do it, been able to keep going on together?

This is a valuable question for democracy in America right now: how might we be able to keep going on together? Citizenship requires working together even if we don’t feel like it. The ship of state (to use the Athenian metaphor) will either sail smoothly or wreck. Regardless, it will do either one of these things with all of us on it yet.

Patience

As the cliché goes, patience is a virtue. It really is! One of the seven capital virtues—the ones mirroring the seven deadly sins in Medieval thought—it is one that philosopher Christian Miller has described it as a neglected virtue for our time. Few activities train one in patience—even as the subject is kicking and screaming all along—as a PhD program in the humanities. Students of the humanities at any level begin to learn this virtue as they realize that some things—reading well, thinking deeply, writing creatively, and discussing topics with others—take much time, and therefore, patience.

The modern life has consistently and insidiously trained us towards impatience. We live at a faster pace than ever, it seems, with expectations to do our work faster, get from one place to another faster, and just produce, produce, produce. This industrial attitude towards people is not natural. It is not good, as it reduces us to production machines, required to produce quotas of uniform products that are considered the best when they are identical—“flawless,” we dub them, stating in the process our view that anything different is, in fact, flawed. But we are not machines.

In the case of intellectual labor especially, patience pays off. Intellectual labor is not a uniform product. It requires something machines cannot offer: original creative thought. That original creative thought cannot be forced. It requires patience—the acceptance of the need to wait and think. No wonder poets since antiquity have spoken longingly and gratefully of the visitations by the muses. Inspiration that provides a breakthrough on a research project sometimes really does feel like the work of something outside oneself.

But beyond the world of ideas, of course, patience (patientia) is a virtue of great value for society, and its original Latin meaning referred to suffering. Why? If you’ve ever had to be patient with a child (or an adult) who is melting down, you can understand. Indeed, a related term from the same root, passio, originally referred to suffering of an extreme kind. It was the term for the genre of martyrdom narratives from the early church. Yes, waiting for anything to happen or having patience with others can feel like suffering–small-scale martyrdom, even– but it is a virtue because it benefits everyone at the end.

The humanities teach us that to be human is to dwell in community with others. Sure, a machine can flourish alone. But for our own flourishing as humans, we need to be in community with others, love others, suffer with others, and be patient with them.