What are the humanities? Most definitions will tell you they are a set of disciplines: history, philosophy, literature, religion. But these labels miss the deeper truth. The humanities are the study of what it means to be human—and their ultimate purpose is to alleviate human misery.

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That may sound lofty, or even sentimental. But it’s also profoundly practical.

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To live is to suffer. It’s a truth we all carry in our bones. We love, we lose, we grow, we grieve. No one escapes this life untouched by pain. That shared vulnerability should make us kinder to one another—but we are complicated creatures. Compassion isn’t automatic. That’s where the humanities come in. They offer us context for our suffering, language for our longings, and tools for empathy. They are how we understand one another—and ourselves.

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In a time of division and disconnection, the humanities are not a luxury. They are a lifeline.

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Yet we’ve increasingly treated them as irrelevant. Higher education is pressured to prioritize job training over broader intellectual development. Research must prove short-term value. Public funding favors outcomes over open-ended inquiry. We’ve become obsessed with efficiency and utility. But the human experience is neither efficient nor easily categorized—and if we forget that, we lose something vital.

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In his recent book Our Contentious Universities, Neil L. Rudenstine states that most science funding in the United States now goes toward developing products. In other words, we primarily invest in science not to understand the world, but to sell it something. This mindset is not limited to science—it’s part of a larger cultural shift in which all education must solve a defined problem or produce a measurable result.

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But, Rudenstine explains some of the most transformative discoveries—scientific or otherwise—come from curiosity without an agenda. DNA sequencing, for instance, was born out of basic research. No one knew where it would lead. That’s the nature of discovery. And it's equally true in the humanities. We don't read novels or study history because we know exactly what we’ll get from it. We do it because it has the power to expand our humanity. 

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What kind of world could we build if we let curiosity—not efficiency—lead?

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The humanities teach us that to be human is to suffer—but also help us to create, connect, and find meaning. They hold up a mirror and a map.

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We need them now more than ever.

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Brenna Gerhardt is the executive director of Humanities North Dakota.