[allenz]

To the extent that the humanities are not "rational", whatever that means, they are a valuable and useful complement, and the world need not be driven by rationalism alone.

The humanities teach how to look from multiple perspectives, our values, what we believe and why, our self and our relation to society. It teaches critical thinking and analysis of complex, nonquantifiable factors, such as: should we declare war on North Korea? What does it mean to be Chinese American? Should I trust this person, website, or TV station? The humanities are about life, and virtually all the themes are immediately applicable in daily life.

[benbreen]

As a history professor, it's good to see such a civil and thoughtful discussion of the value of the humanities on HN. Thanks :)

For what it's worth, I enjoyed Prof. Rota's piece and didn't particularly object to his "what"/"how" distinction. I agree with commenters above that it's a misrepresentation of historical research, which can be deeply empirical. Unfortunately a huge amount of history education, especially k-12, does boil down to a rote memorization of past events, so I can't really fault him for the generalization.

[mnglkhn2]

Postmodernism revealed what happens when you look (intently) at ALL possibilities before you properly define YOUR identity and set of values.

Surprisingly, even Macron articulated that maybe Western world needs "great story arcs", which is code word for SHARED IDEALS.

War is always an attribute of survival and the problem is that US population is pretty insulated from acute strife on the survival front. But the risks are there and can only be appreciated once you train in geopolitics.