Studying the humanities is hard, and that's a good thing

In a world that seeks convenience, the humanities are hard, writes Thomas Chatterton Williams in The Atlantic. That's OK. "Difficulty is good."

As attention spans dwindle, even among students at elite schools, humanities departments are struggling to attract students, he writes. Many colleges are trying to persuade students the humanities are "relevant" and "practical."

That's not going to work, writes Williams, who teaches about books and ideas at Bard. "For humanities departments to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it."

He'll teach two spring seminars this year, one on Albert Camus and his influences, the other on the idea of the American dream through Black writers such as Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin. His "bright, self-selecting" students say they're "eager they are to immerse themselves in the texts," he writes. But their zeal doesn't last when they realize that close reading is difficult. "By the end of the semester, only a fraction seem to have gotten through the texts and writing assignments without outsourcing at least some of their work to AI."

"In just three years, ChatGPT and its competitors have rendered take-home essays — what I consider the central exercise of humanistic learning — nearly useless to assign and almost impossible to assess," he writes. He now suspects some students are using chatbots to generate talking points for class discussions. Their comments are blander. Few have original or eccentric insights.

Probing a text can be enjoyable but also tiring, even borderline painful. That’s good. Exhausting our mental faculties, such as through deep reading or effortful writing, is what makes them more potent. . . . 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," writes Williams. "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."

Facing a spiritual crisis, Sebastian Castillo formed an online club to read long, difficult books, he writes in the New York Times Magazine. Forty people recruited on social media signed up to read Spinoza's Ethics, and 15 made it through his 10-week "syllabus." When they reached the final chapter, "our collective mood" was "ebullient. Union with other people, oneness with the universe, an acceptance of the paths our lives had taken — these were things that we possessed all along."

They kept on going, meeting every Sunday for an hour on Zoom to discuss a difficult book. "A camaraderie emerges, I’ve found, when a group dedicates itself to a task that requires great effort," Castillo writes. It doesn't have to be philosophy. It just has to require mental exercise.

He likes easy things too, like "spending an hour looking at Instagram reels in bed," Castillo writes. "But I’ve found, as I have grown older, the world has incrementally foisted upon me a preponderance of quick and simple easiness."

For a few hours a week, he and his compatriots tackle something that requires "sincere mental devotion." As Spinoza concludes in The Ethics, "All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”