On the “Revenge of the Humanities”

The more esoteric a crowd gets, the more often the defense of the humanities collapses into a kind of self-congratulation: a language of “critical thinking,” “interrogating power structures,” and “deconstructing systemic injustice”, offered as though these were private virtues that set one apart from the “unenlightened ones”. It is not enough to comment on the mere inadequacy of such a framing, much less its deceptiveness. It suggests that the humanities justify themselves only by deepening the inner life of those who study them (a claim that enthusiasts of any discipline could make), when their more urgent function lies elsewhere: in the maintenance of a shared world.

To understand this, it helps to notice what has happened to the idea of public service.

There was a time when the work of holding society together — of interpreting norms, transmitting memory, arbitrating meaning — was distributed across institutions like family, religion, and community. These were not always just or benign, but they performed a crucial function: they mediated between the individual and the impersonal structures of power. Over the past century, much of this mediating work has been outsourced — first to the state, then to the market. Welfare, education, even care itself became sectors, services, industries. The growing readiness among younger generations to entrust ever more of life to the state is puzzling (as though its historical record inspires such confidence), though that is a discussion for another time.

Now, in addition to the state and market, a third layer has emerged: the algorithm. 

What neither the state nor the market could fully standardize, the algorithm promises to optimize. It curates our attention, predicts our desires, resolves our choices before we get to contend with them as dilemmas. In doing so, it displaces an older kind of human labour — the labour of judgment.

This is precisely where the humanities matter — not as a counterweight in some abstract battle of disciplines, but as a form of public service in their own right. The humanities train and preserve capacities that cannot be outsourced without cost: interpretation, moral reasoning, historical memory, the ability to dwell in ambiguity without rushing to resolution. These are not ornamental skills. They are infrastructural to any society that wishes to remain more than a system of managed preferences.

Consider something as simple, and as endangered, as judgment. I do not mean decision-making in the procedural sense, but judgment as a cultivated sensibility — the ability to weigh competing goods, to recognize when a rule does not apply, to understand that a situation carries a meaning that cannot be reduced to data points. Algorithms can simulate decisions at scale, but they cannot inhabit the moral texture of a situation. They do not understand tragedy, irony, or the difference between what is efficient and what is fitting. If such capacities atrophy, the consequences are not merely intellectual but even civic.

A society that outsources judgment becomes increasingly dependent on systems it cannot interrogate. It loses the ability to explain itself to itself. Public discourse thins out, reduced either to technocratic management or to reactive outrage. In such a world, the humanities become one of the last remaining sites where the practice of meaning-making is sustained. This is what I mean when I say to think of the humanities as public service.

Just as the world seems to have surrendered itself to digitalism, it finds itself asking questions that no machine can answer without first becoming something like a human. And into this vacuum, almost sheepishly, return the humanities. Even Sam Harris has begun to concede as much. In a recent podcast, amid a discussion on artificial intelligence and its existential risks, he gestured toward what he called a possible “revenge of the humanities.” The phrase is telling.

Harris’s concern, in that conversation, is not trivial. He and his interlocutors outline a world in which artificial intelligence is not merely a tool but an autonomous agent capable of deceiving, strategizing, and pursuing goals misaligned with human flourishing. The technical problem of “alignment,” so named in the jargon of Silicon Valley, is in fact one of the oldest philosophical ones: What does it mean for a system to act in accordance with human values, when those values themselves remain contested, plural, and often inarticulate?

For the better part of the last century, the humanities have lived under a shadow of suspicion. They were accused of obscurity, of political excess, of having traded rigour for rhetoric. More damningly, they were deemed impractical in an age intoxicated by utility. The university, once a sanctuary for metaphysical inquiry, became increasingly a laboratory for economic productivity and finally, a system of credentialed but increasingly abstract expertise.

Consider the problem of artificial intelligence not merely as a technical challenge but as a narrative one. What kind of story are we writing about ourselves when we create machines in our own image? Are we, like Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods, or are we, like Faust, entering into a bargain whose terms we do not fully understand? These are questions that require interpretation, metaphor, and historical consciousness, the very tools of the humanities.

More fundamentally, the humanities remind us that intelligence is not synonymous with wisdom. A system may be capable of processing vast quantities of information and yet remain indifferent to meaning. To assume that intelligence alone can secure a desirable future is a fatal error, eternally recurring in new guises since the Enlightenment.

What the Enlightenment bequeathed was the ambition to render the world legible, and by extension, optimizable. And in many ways, it did. But it also produced the misguided belief that all human problems could be reduced to technical ones. The twentieth century, with its catastrophes, exposed the limits of this belief. The twenty-first, with its technologies, threatens to repeat it on a more sophisticated scale. 

What Harris and others are now confronting is the realization that we have built systems whose power exceeds our moral vocabulary. The humanities do not offer solutions in the way science or technology does. They do not produce answers so much as deepen questions. But this is precisely their strength. They resist the premature closure of inquiry. They act as a kind of cultural memory, reminding us that our present arrangements are neither inevitable nor final. They recover older vocabularies (of duty, virtue, dignity, the sacred) that are not static coordinates to be optimized, but evolving narratives to be interpreted. More importantly, they cultivate a certain kind of citizen: one who is not merely a consumer of services, but a participant in a shared moral, cultural and historical project.

In this sense, the humanities perform a function that neither the state nor the market, nor the algorithm, can easily replicate. The state can enforce norms, but it cannot generate meaning without risking coercion. The market can respond to preferences, but it cannot adjudicate between them when they conflict. The algorithm can optimize behavior, but it cannot justify the ends toward which that behavior is directed. Only a culture that actively interprets itself, through literature, philosophy, history, religion and the arts, can do that.

The irony of the present moment sneaks up on us only too often: the more sophisticated our systems become, the more they depend on assumptions they cannot themselves produce. Every algorithm encodes a set of values — about what counts, what matters, what should be maximized. But these values do not arise from computation. They are inherited, contested, revised. If the humanities recede, the values risk disappearing into oblivion.

If we continue to outsource judgment, we may gain efficiency, but we risk losing authorship over our collective life. The humanities intervene here not by rejecting these systems, but by insisting that they remain answerable to meanings they cannot generate on their own.

In this sense, the revenge of the humanities is in light of the recognition that the human condition cannot be outsourced (however appealing it may be to defer, if only briefly, the existential burden), not to algorithms, not to markets, not even to science itself. 

Harris, who represents the scientific rationalist tradition now confronting its limits, is right to sense that something is shifting. The humanities, long relegated to the margins, are being summoned back. The future, it turns out, will not be decided by intelligence alone, but by the meanings we choose to attach to it.

And meaning, stubbornly, remains a human art.

Image source: Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer.