Hopefully, having explored our four themes and questioned your usual thinking, you are more aware of the diversity of culture and experience and what it means to be human.

The Big Questions

What is the purpose of life? Why do people suffer? How do we find joy? Is there life after death? The study of humanities is uniquely designed to address these confounding questions having no black-and-white answers. The humanities provide an assurance that we can embrace the process of searching, even if the conclusions are ever-changing.

“And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Some human experiences are universal—falling in love, finding success, enduring loss, withstanding pain. Nevertheless, an individual’s response to love, success, loss, and pain is unique because every person has a different interpretation of what these experiences mean. The comforting caress of the sun on someone’s cheek might be a source of irritation to another person. One person may shriek with joy over a winter of deep, heavy snowfalls. Someone else despairs during a long winter of gloom and depression.

We feel differently. We look different. We are different. At the same time, we automatically file away people by race, culture, religion, gender. We assess people’s worth according to how closely they resemble us. We treat people who are similar to us better than people who are different. This bias towards favoring people and values we agree with dictates social structures and relationship power-dynamics.

Digging under the surface of these habits can make us uncomfortable. We may choose to ignore unflattering aspects of our belief system. Flee from discomforting facts that challenge our world view. Disconnect from the world with the excuse that we are not sure we can help with this. Or, we may decide to invest in changing how we think.

“You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”
—William Wilberforce

Another big question. Since we are not all the same, can we claim a shared human experience? Perhaps the more important question to ask is how individuals can join together to battle the darker manifestations of humanity, such as greed, manipulation, violence, injustice, and intolerance?

On Being Human

It can be hard to be human. To wake up every day and brush your teeth and do the things you said you would do to find the work you enjoy and people you like; to deal with pandemics and earthquakes and disappointments; to cope with paper cuts and breakups and lost keys.

The insufferable waiting for social reform to manifest can be hard on humans. Emancipated slaves won the right to vote in America in 1870. One hundred thirty-eight years later, the United States elected President Barack Obama, its first Black president. Women won the right to vote in America in 1920. In 2019, American women made up 51% of the population but only 24% of the federal legislature. One hundred years after winning the battle for suffrage, a woman has yet to be elected president of the United States.

Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” reverberates with a message about how change gets started. In the last two stanzas, Angelou repeats the phrase, “I rise,” to underline her defiant resilience in the face of racism:

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.