The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I was young and heading off to college, Humanities were still an honorable degree. History, Art, Philosophy, Music, Literature — you could get a diploma even if your chances of getting a job were slim to none. I guess I was more interested in getting an education than a career because I took a double major in the humanities at the Univ. of Wisconsin in Madison, a time when the Vietnam riots were in full swing, a different education altogether.

Jump 50 years into the future, a half century — the trend now is to downsize or eliminate the Humanities, the argument being that high tuition costs DEMAND degrees with maximum employment potential and a salary to pay off the huge student debt. Bizness degrees, I.T., engineering, high tech — that’s where universities and community colleges are funneling their students. Microsoft and Amazon, Google and Facebook, the billionaires of Silicon Valley, they’re all driving the pilot-less train into a brave new future of automation, artificial intelligence, drones and a wired world. The Digital Age is rapidly replacing the Industrial Era, leaving the Romantic Era beneath deep sediment. Who needs poetry when you can program the next generation of androids to write a ditty?

We call the Humanities humanities because we’re exploring just that, the qualities that make us human and not machine, an altogether necessary endeavor in this next evolution of mankind. It is more than alarming to watch the diminution of the Humanities at the same time humans are inexorably merging into their own technology. As an artist, I’ve never been one to argue that we’re the saviors of the culture, the Sensitive Ones, the Visionaries. I may have been wrong. More worrisome now — we may be canaries in the mine.

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