The Case for Teaching Humans How to Be Human: In Defense of ‘Useless’ Degrees (That Might Save Us All).

1. When the Humanities Get Cut, So Do We

It’s easy — almost seductive — to lose hope. Not just hope in the political system (that’s old news), but hope in people. Hope in the very things that make us human. You can feel the fatigue in the air. The disillusionment. And it's not just happening on the front pages either. It’s creeping into our classrooms, our universities, and our cultural spaces. The places that are supposed to help us make sense of the world — literature, philosophy, the social sciences — are being hollowed out. Defunded and disregarded when we need them the most. 

The humanities aren’t new to the world of cutbacks. Five years ago, the Australian government doubled the cost of humanities degrees in a push to funnel students into “job-relevant” fields, whilst STEM degrees remained untouched. The subtext was clear: humanities degrees are no longer valuable, get your ass in a chair and learn Python. 

But now, it’s gone from cutbacks to straight-up erasure. Universities across the globe are shutting down entire departments overnight — Anthropology, History, Philosophy, the arts. Most of the time, no explanation given, just quietly labelled 'non-essential.' The very disciplines that help us understand ourselves and each other — slashed.

Because apparently, in a world on fire, what we really need is more coders.

2. Crisis ≠ The End

We’re living through a time of crisis — no doubt about it. And not the kind you can rebrand into a LinkedIn post with a neat little hashtag and a 3-step framework for “resilience.” This is deeper. Fueled by a cocktail of political division, social disconnection, and a collective nervous system that’s fried.

As an anthropologist, crisis isn’t a foreign concept to me. It’s what I live and work inside of. I’ve sat with Indigenous communities in South India, learning how their funerary rites not only provided a way to process grief but also allowed them to reclaim and reimagine their identity in the face of a cultural history shaped by slavery.

I’ve worked with young men wrestling with their masculinity, trying to find their footing in a world that keeps moving the goalposts.

I’ve shared space with teenagers in rural Australia facing an increase in suicides during the COVID lockdown.

The contexts are different, but the undercurrent is the same. In fact, we tend to think of crises as the end. But what if they were also beginnings?

A friend of mine recently shared this wisdom with me. In Chinese, the word for “crisis” is written as 危机 (wēijī). It’s made up of two characters: 危 (wēi), meaning danger, and 机 (jī), meaning opportunity. Every crisis contains a split — a tension between collapse and transformation.

And what I’ve learnt from all those encounters in the field — from those long, open conversations in times of rupture — is this: crisis isn’t a glitch in the system. It is the system. It’s woven into the human condition. But so is something else: the ability to create pockets of possibility. To cultivate opportunity (jī) in danger (wēi). 

Here’s the one thing everyone I met who lived through a crisis had in common: They kept showing up. Even when they were knee-deep in uncertainty. Even when the ground beneath them was shifting by the hour. They showed up for themselves, for their families, for their communities. They showed up to do the messy human work — making meaning out of chaos, whatever that chaos looked like for them back then. That, to me, is where the magic is — not in overcoming crisis per se, but in how we live through it and transform because of it. How we dig into the danger (wēi) to find opportunity (jī). 

3. Tech Fixes Can’t Save Us From Ourselves

The trouble is, we live in a world that doesn’t have much patience for that kind of slow, embodied wisdom. We want things fast, predictable, and easily packaged. We’re addicted to speed, addicted to control, addicted to neat little boxes that make us feel safe. And apparently, governments now want our kids lining up for degrees that churn out technocrats fluent in dashboards, risk matrices, and five-point plans — instead of ones that teach them to think critically, sit with uncertainty, or god forbid, empathise with someone who doesn’t think like them.

Because let’s be honest: why would we want a future workforce capable of having difficult conversations, questioning power structures, or calling bullshit on harmful systems when we can just teach them to produce a steady stream of jargon-laced nonsense that looks good in a quarterly report? Why invest in humans learning how to understand themselves and each other when we can just train them to speak corporate gibberish that keeps the machine running?

Anthropologist Dr. Friedman calls it the fetishisation of STEM, AI, data science — the cult of the so-called “solutionist.” This obsession with fast, supposedly rational answers isn’t just naive (by virtue of being worth shit if not paired with a human-centred approach), it’s dangerous. It sidelines the disciplines that help us grapple with uncertainty — anthropology, philosophy, the arts — the ones that force us to confront messy, inconvenient questions. Professor Johnston  warns that the dominant approach has become to throw “clever engineering” at complex social and political problems instead of addressing root causes through dialogue and education. 

He gives the following example:

“To address terrorism, we have locks on cockpit doors, metal detectors, surveillance monitoring, bomb-sniffing devices and body scanners at airports. We seem to prefer such responses to anything so socio-political as negotiation or education.”

We live in a world hooked on tech-fixes like the one Johnston describes — band-aids over bullet wounds. It sends a clear message: don’t bother asking the hard questions. But by dodging the discomfort of sitting with complexity, we’re trading short-term comfort for long-term dysfunction.

The humanities refuse easy answers because, in a messy world made by messy humans, easy answers simply don’t exist. These disciplines take time. They take humility. They require us to sit with what we don’t know and resist the urge to bolt for the exits. And they’re being pushed to the margins precisely because they don’t serve the fantasy of control.

But here’s the thing I’ve come to believe — not just intellectually, but in my bones: our survival doesn’t come from control. It comes from connection. From dialogue. From refusing to turn away from the complexity of being human.

4. We Don’t Need Consensus. We Need Courage.

Anthropology, at its best, is a practice of radical empathy. It’s not about studying “the other” from a safe distance — it’s about stepping into someone else’s world and asking: What does this look like from where you’re standing? And then listening. Really listening. Even when what we hear challenges us, pisses us off, or makes us squirm.

Look me in the eye and tell me there is no need to teach the next generation how to look up from their phones and into each other's eyes. Convince me that there’s no need to cultivate the willingness, capacity and vocabulary to have difficult, uncomfortable, brave conversations. I’ll sit with you, and hear you out, even if what you believe doesn’t agree with me, because I believe doing so is radical in a world that doesn’t hold space for complexity, and we might learn something about each other and ourselves in the process, even if we don’t come to an agreement. 

This isn’t just about being nice or polite — it’s about staying human in a world that’s making it easier every day to retreat into echo chambers and throw digital grenades at each other.

That’s why the work of anthropologist Anand Pandian hit me so hard when I came across it recently.

Confronted by the rise of xenophobia and deepening political divides in the U.S., Pandian turned to anthropology to make sense of it all — because he knew that simple, one-sided answers to complex, centuries-old problems weren’t going to cut it. Plus, if he wanted hot takes and binary thinking, Reddit had him covered.

Instead, Pandian hit the road, travelling across America to speak with people whose views clashed with his own — not to debate or convert them, but to understand.

What he found was confronting.

“The problem lies less with the strangers among us than the strangeness within — the consequences of a feeling of radical estrangement from the world.”

It’s not just a political crisis. It’s an existential one. A disconnection not only from each other, but from ourselves — our feelings, our histories, our capacity for relationship.

And this is where the humanities matter.

They offer something algorithms can’t: the skills to sit with contradiction, to navigate discomfort, and to make meaning in complexity. The very skills we need to survive a world that keeps trying to flatten nuance into outrage.

In his effort to spark conversations with people whose views he disagreed with, Pandian wasn’t chasing consensus. He wasn’t trying to win an argument or convert anyone to his side. His mission was simpler — and harder. It was about presence. About showing up with curiosity, not an agenda. About trying to understand what drives neighbours to draw lines between each other in the first place.

We don’t need more algorithms. We need more conversations. We need art that unsettles us, literature that holds a mirror to our contradictions, philosophy that dares to ask the uncomfortable questions, and anthropology that challenges us to sit across from someone we disagree with — keep our shit together, and listen. Not to win. Not to fix. But to find out something we didn’t know about the other, and see behind their mask the fear, isolation, and need for belonging that drives most people to radical extremes. 

Because if we don’t engage with the mess — with all its discomfort, complexity, and contradiction — we leave the field wide open for the cynics, the autocrats, and the algorithms to define the terms for us.

5. Make Anthropology Dangerous Again

Dr. John Friedman, a Dutch-based anthropologist, was literally fired mid-lecture after his university dissolved its entire anthropology program overnight. No warning. No transition. Just gone.

But here’s the thing: he didn’t pack up and walk away.

Friedman kept teaching. Not in lecture halls, but in public libraries. In community spaces. Online. With the help of students, he built social media platforms from scratch, offering anthropology lessons for free — to anyone who wanted to learn.

Not because he’s clinging to false hope. But because he knows, deep in his bones, that these tools are necessary. That anthropology — and the humanities more broadly — aren’t some optional add-on to a "real" education. They are how we make sense of ourselves, each other, and the world we keep breaking and remaking.

Anthropology, just like the other humanities, might be in crises, but trust us, we’re not going anywhere. 

So here’s my invitation:

Sit in the uncomfortable conversation. Choose curiosity over certainty. Ask better questions. Listen like it matters — because it does.

The humanities aren’t dead. They’re just being forced underground. So let’s take them there — into living rooms, book clubs, public libraries, online forums, dinner tables, community halls. Let’s make anthropology dangerous again. Let’s teach each other how to be human — not perfect, not polished, but present.

Because in a world hellbent on turning us into cogs, showing up as fully human is a radical act.

You in?

Connect with one of our humans today, and find out just how not useless, anthropology can be.