For a moment, best-selling novelist Julia Alvarez sounded abashed. She was being interviewed by National Public Radio’s Scott Simon on April 4, 2020, about her new novel, Afterlife.
“I’ve got to say this, too, Scott, it feels kind of weird to be talking about my novel, and somehow promoting it, at a time like this,” she explained. “I feel like it just doesn’t quite feel right, because, you know, it’s not business as usual.”
“But you know,” Simon responded, “reading your novel this week gave me great pleasure. I think there’s no reason for you to feel that there’s something unusual in this. You’ve created a splendid work of art that can give comfort to people now, and I’m glad you can talk about it. I think people need to hear that, too.”
This brief exchange almost perfectly encapsulates the public insecurity many felt about discussing the value of the humanities in a moment of global medical calamity. To discuss fiction, poetry, painting and music under the shadow of mass death threatened to make discussants appear dilettantish at best, and insensitive snobs at worst.
But that perception did not match reality during the COVID-19 pandemic. We all read books, found new music to enjoy, watched TV and streaming movies, and communicated widely about how the humanities provided succor and catharsis during a time of enormous emotional stress. Our social media feeds and group texts throughout 2020 and 2021 were filled with recommendations to others about the movies, books and music we enjoyed.
But today, those conversations are largely forgotten. Public discourse around the COVID-19 pandemic now revolves around public health decision-making, scientific arguments about vaccines and the origins of the virus, and other debatable propositions. Remembrance of what actually happened—that is, our daily habits and activities under lockdown—is rarely chronicled in detail. Everyone wants to move on.
Yet such intentional amnesia obscures the ways the humanities got us through those difficult months.
The truth is the humanities—that is, the use of creativity and imagination, in questioning the human condition—remained absolutely central to our collective survival. The evidence, though difficult to measure in quantitative metrics, exists in the atmospheric ways that humanities media continually provided relief and distraction when scientific answers were still unknown and we all felt threatened by an unknown future.
With the fifth anniversary of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic upon us, we are undoubtedly going to hear much about Operation Warp Speed, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other scientific and medical legacies.
We’ll hear much less about the humanities and the role they played.
The problem is we’re loath to label Netflix, YouTube, podcasts and other technological marvels as humanities media. Instead, we talk about how new technologies distract, mislead and misinform us. We do not remember how we reached for them in the search for comfort in a time of true existential crisis, and the vital role they played in social cohesion.
There’s been a lot written about the crisis in the humanities. There’s been far less written about the humanities during a crisis. And that’s a mistake, because as we move further past 2020–2021, we will all likely forget when the power and vitality of the creative arts helped keep us grounded, sane, curious and, if necessary, distracted.
The very invisibility today of what occurred then needs to be illuminated. Even at the time—as evidenced by Julia Alvarez’s reservations about talking about her novel—it seemed almost embarrassing to celebrate witty scenes from Broadway plays, to choreograph interpretative dances or jot down lines of poetic observation. Yet moments of sublime, thoughtful, philosophical and engaging artistry arose everywhere.
How many people today recall the brilliant daily updates provided by Dr. Craig Smith, the chief of surgery at Columbia University Irving Medical Center? Smith continually quoted Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot and others for inspiration in his daily updates. The Wall Street Journal labeled Smith “the pandemic’s most powerful writer” while noting the “elegant, almost poetic” prose of his daily dispatches. Smith often relied on poetry to express the inexpressible, and many Americans eagerly read his work—not just to be informed, but to also be comforted emotionally. Smith understood the enormity of the existential confrontation that faced every American in 2020, and so employed his knowledge of the humanities to help others comprehend the incomprehensible. His artistry as a writer provided an enormous public service.
That’s precisely what Scott Simon was telling Julia Alvarez. She had nothing to apologize for, and, in fact, her artistic achievement in an unprecedented era of doubt, anxiety and uncertainty was a gift that would be gratefully received and appreciated.
A major problem with the humanities is that so much of its success will always remain invisible to the audiences that consume it. We are primed to take for granted the artistic process, now that AI can mimic it. History videos and podcasts remain available anytime, and ebooks can be downloaded so easily. We can see the Mona Lisa at any moment. Many of the world’s greatest artworks, and the most beautiful song performances, can be found instantly. It’s a miracle unimaginable to earlier generations, but it also paradoxically devalues the time, effort and creativity that inspired such beauty.
Debates about how to make the humanities more visible and relevant arise often. Some argue that the humanities should emphasize the analytics and metrics concerning job development and career preparation, or comparative salary growth over the course of a career. Others counsel the embrace of new avenues of promotion and marketing. But the first step needs to be simple recognition. We must make immediately clear—without obfuscatory language or elevated rhetoric—the impact of the humanities in the present and in the near past.
When the pandemic threatened the stability of the world, the answers people sought were primarily medical and scientific. But intertwined with anger and impatience in that moment was a yearning for meaning far more spiritual than empirical. As our regular routines of time and space became unsettled, and communication and interactivity more ambiguous, the need to explore the essence of what it means to be human naturally arose. People became creative, trying out new baking recipes, teaching themselves to play guitar or piano, or drawing sketches or drafting poetry. This was not simple escapism—it was engagement with our imaginations.
We also wondered about the future of humankind. We might not have called our ruminations, prayers, thoughtfulness, curiosity and questioning “philosophy,” but that’s what we were practicing. Those moments got many of us through when daily anxiety threatened existential desperation.
That the humanities sustained us through the pandemic is undeniable. The evidence is everywhere: We just need to see it, remember it and celebrate it. When a global primal moment of fear exploded—seemingly out of nowhere—to take control over our lives, it was fiction, movies, poetry, art, philosophy and music that moved us forward into the future. It was not solely the vaccines.
That’s history. And now it’s memory, too. The key question is whether humanities scholars understand these great achievements and will make them more widely known.