They’re planning armageddon.
The floating text for this cartoon reads, “Anyone who thinks the humanities makes people more expansive should spend four minutes in an English department meeting.” It’s too true. I would never go over to the other side of my campus for one of their meetings, but here in the sciences building we have a statistician as chair who bangs through the meeting agenda on a tight schedule and doesn’t permit too much digression. We’re scared of the anarchy in the English department.
I don’t want to try to imagine what’s happening in the Art or Music departments. I’m pretty sure it involves other-worldly horrors and ritualistic chanting.
A cheerful “Cthulhu R’lyeh Ftagn” to you from Liberal Arts!
It’s a confusion between cause and effect. Just because most sensible people will appreciate the value of art does not mean that teaching art will result in sensible people.
Once people have lost their empathy, teaching arts and humanities will not correct the issue. It’s like teaching proper driving rules to someone who actively wants to ram their car into a crowd of innocent people. It’s trying to fix the wrong problem.
As the sensationalist reporter said during the airship crash: ‘Oh, the Humanities’
Speaking of Reason vs. Emotion:
https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/ReasonandPassion.png
Our founder was a librarian in a college music dept. He remembers an old joke:
boy1: my mom plays piano by ear!
boy2: That’s nothing, my grandpa fiddles with his whiskers!
I’ve gotta’ lighten things up after all the doomscrolling with morons in PZ’s article /2026/03/30/they-never-learn-2/
We really like this site. To get a better, more complete experience, see:
https://existentialcomics.com
Easter Egg: If you hover over the headline (with any decent browser), you will get a different remark of the day each day.
All of the offices in the Humanities building have papier-mache jammed into the inner angles of the rooms. If the meetings go on too long you can sometimes hear the hounds trying to get through.
Rich refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hounds_of_Tindalos
@#6 Not to be confused with the Sounds of Tindalos
We need to teach empathy. As in, classes specifically geared towards teaching students empathy, at every level of education. Teaching arts and the humanities is about teaching arts and the humanities first and foremost. Those things are valuable in and of themselves, and they may foster the growth of empathy in people who already understand empathy to some extent, but they’re not about teaching empathy.
The simple truth is that, if you want people with little or no understanding of the concept to learn empathy in a classroom, then you have to teach them empathy in the classroom. We have this idea that empathy is an innate characteristic that one either has or doesn’t, but that’s simply not true. Empathy is a skill, and it can be taught like any other.
Empathy must be taught, if we are ever to have a hope of creating a society in which people understand civilization- and survival-critical concepts like the common good, or why things like enslaving millions and ruining the environment to produce cheap crap for the short-term enrichment of an extremely tiny minority of humans is bad.
vucodlak: “We need to teach empathy. As in, classes specifically geared towards teaching students empathy, at every level of education.”
Futile. Equine hydration syndrome.
Analogically, I was taught religion. It did not take, to understate it.
Same thing. All you can teach is to fake it, if it’s not in one’s nature.
(That is, affective vs. cognitive)
“Empathy must be taught”
It can be developed and improved, but it cannot be taught.
You can’t change people’s basic nature by teaching shit.