Learning is one way of being human.
The various academic departments in a college or university can be ranked on their relative prestige rather than as a menu whereby students have to try a variety of courses so as to get an ample meal. One way to track the various departments is by how hard they are. Mathematics seems the most demanding and abler students stand out quickly but some still decide that they cannot compete with the real stars and so fall back into other fields, like languages, their intellects superior enough to master those fields, though there seems to be a cleavage between mathematical and language ability, some very good at one but not the other. Classics are said to always attract people even if there are few jobs in it because it is so hard and so it is not surprising that classicists go deeply into related areas like foreign policy or not so related areas such as psychoanalysis to use their acquired skills. Most of the humanities are not regarded as being as hard as the natural sciences or economics, the sole difficult discipline in the social sciences that is regarded as hard, though I note that historians or sociologists can view as naive the speculations on these other matters by people who do hard fields of study because they can form coherent arguments about them while a humanist cannot say anything intelligible about scientific matters. While the natural sciences are ranked hard to relatively easy, humanists are generally ranked from deep to superficial. Low end on the ranking of prestige by difficulty are area studies such as feminist studies because they engage in advocacy more than rigorous methods or include newer fields like mass communication where film production is more important than film criticism.
Another prestige ranking for academic departments is popularity. Political science is popular because its subject matter is so available as a subject: government. There are Presidential candidates and platforms to master as well as the intricacies of governmental agencies and because political science is considered an entry for law school. Some subject matters are not really recognized as a subject matter. That is the sociology of everyday life which concerns common activities in familiar settings, such as courting, friendship, vacations and competition , topics of the sort developed by Georg Simmel. All of these seem too obvious as to elude being an area of study. An assignment on vacations leads to an essay on what you did on your vacation rather than a consideration of whether it is a controlled adventure or a visit or a time to do nothing. What is an area that deserves notice is a very deep cultural matter. There was a time before scientific psychology though it can be traced back to Aristotle and Spinoza, in which cases psychology was very deep.
Yet another ranking of the academic departments is the extent to which they have disciplines, which means a more or less rigorous methodology. The physical sciences have that and the social scientists have more or less of them, so economics is considered hard because it relies on mathematics, and anthropology is soft because it just uses just available terminology like culture even if it is very rigorous when engaged in finding facts of human evolution. A scientist once said that English literature was not very demanding because all you had to do was master ten or twelve writers and that made you an expert on literature, to which Frank Kermode, the very distinguished literary critic who seems to have read everything, said that was pretty much right in that if you mastered Dickens and Shakespeare and Chaucer and the rest, then you had become expert in criticism, never mind that there was not an extensive bit of methodology other than what had been run across that might be considered an apparatus, like Northeope Frye and Kermode himself, who are to be regarded as just other writers rather than for a discipline itself.
Medical doctors, whatever their prestige as an occupation, can, therefore, think of themselves as applications of the queen science of biology because they borrow what they know from that and it is a bit forced for a lawyer to treat law as a discipline rather than a way to master and treat laws whose legislation involves an application of implicit laws about moral philosophy and political science even though it claims that jurisprudence or textual analysis and interpretations of statutes are regarded as a kind of expertise rather than what many have called “legal history” so as to distinguish its failures from being what real history accomplishes by being objective 9in the sense of following the canons of how to proceed with history, such as only selecting the evidence that supports Anthony Scalia’s view on the second amendment rather than what other strands of intellectual and social history that might complicate Scalia’s conclusion. Discipline orientation is the opposite of a great books approach or an area studies approach whereby you rely on consulting the greats or learning language and history so you can study southeast asia or black studies., black studies an application largely of historical and literary studies rather than a thing in itself.
So Russian studies which were difficult and relatively popular especially during the Cold War, was an application of political science and languages rather than a discipline in its own right, just as American Studies, which flourished for a while, was just an amalgam pof literature and history. Feminist studies, these days, are popular and not too difficult because they are bound together by advocacy rather than even a subject matter, using literature and philosophy as best it can be served.
Now here is a very different and unusual kind of ranking for academic departments where people say and sense this but not a clear object of attention of a ranking rather than a form of comparative derision. Courses of study are ranked by whether or not they are frivolous as opposed to useful. Law and medicine are then very highly valued even if they are dependent on other fields of study. You need doctors and lawyers and each of them require mastery of a great deal of esoterica such as various kinds and doses of blood pressure medications or how one state or another differs on grand larceny.The humanities are by and large frivolous and superfluous. You don’t need scholars to tell you what a novel means. Everyone is a judge of whether you like or don't like a book. Every theatergoer makes up his or her own mind whether the play was meaningful or emotionally successful, judging its plot and characters and level of suspense. As a professor of business put it to me, there is no need for literary studies. You can buy a book after you become rich.
Foreign languages are also superfluous except for translators. You can never learn French well enough to compete with a teenage native speaker and nowadays pocket devices can translate languages, though it might have been useful for a political scientist to learn Russian during the Cold War on the of “know your enemy”. Political science is useful for its details and so people need to learn the governmental structures of African nations, but everyone has a sense of politics, just as is the case with literature,common sense the guideline for making voting decisions, which means custom plus ideology plus interests, but I did notice that my students exposed to my courses on social policy, which they thought a legitimate subject matter, seemed to me to have been inclined not to vote not because it was too time consuming, their usual excuse, but because they were embarrassed by not having a reason to choose one candidate over another. Similarly students who didn’t read novels would say they were too impatient to do so, even while comparing tastes in movies, some of them more elevated than others.
Similarly, in the social sciences, anthropology was passingly interesting because it was exotic to study Pygmies and inner city youth, but not the basis for forming even an evolutionary sense of social life, much less adopting cultural relativism, because they knew what they knew, however much som e people did indeed form their general view of life from anthropological works and perspectives. Economics was important because it was hard and mathematical, though there too ideology, often cited from economists, gave them a sense of how much to trust the market system.
I remain last with sociology as the lowest of the disciplines, clearly frivolous in that everybody understands society well enough so that they can function within it, and so a science of society is superfluous. All sociology taught you was a set of cliches that said people followed the norms of a society and that deviant and ethnic groups should not be subject to discrimination, when it was clearly the case that racial differences disclosed animous largely warranted and that gays and lesbians were indeed disgustin
Even lower than that were subfields of sociology that was not merely frivolous or a cliche, but was not recognized as a form of intellectual endeavor.I taught a course on the sociology of everyday life, where I covered Simmel an d Merton and such topics as courtship and friendship. I would talk about how vacations were ways to try alternative pastimes and forms of conspicuous consumption or to trying out living in the rough at least a little bit by renting a cabin away from your own home, but the papers students presented were about what they had done on their summer vacations rather than the nature of the social structure. I suppose that relationship specialists can talk about how to make friends and influence people and during courtship the girls will talk about their own particular relationship but the general idea of it as a subject matter is just not in play for most people. So people can recognize statistics or classics or history as a field but have difficulty grasping sociology. What is it about?
And yet people devote their lives to the study of ants or trees or some nearby stars or urban neighborhoods, often at the cost of the prestige of being doctors or the wealth of being entrepreneurs because they become so engrossed in the details and theories and research about them, part of their selves assign bed to that even if they have ordinary family life or conventional political opinions. Weber was correct to think that academics are a calling, somewhat akin to a religion in that the subject matter and its study for its own sake rather than for remuneration. My explanation for these preoccupations is not that they are worthwhile because they are frivolous, just superfluous, like a Rolex watch, and so today an inessential baubble, but that their topics, each in its own way, becomes objective, independent of oneself and conventions, earned so as not to be conventional, to be more sure than people are about most important things such as even religious faith which is based on trust rather than indubitable truths, and so allow people to feel as sure as possible, given the way facts and theories are. Some people really know about trees or novels or geology.
But not just academics know the pride of having mastered a subject matter. A furniture store manager knows the various lines of sofas and dining room tables and the “theory” about which purchases are seasonal or not and how much to keep on hand rather than readily orderable. Hardware salesmen know all the different kinds of screws and which ones to use with which as well as what handy appliance or glue can be substituted for another as well as a general sense or “theory” about how hardware works. The person who buys caviar at Zabar’s knows which kind tastes best and which is worth more money. People learn Bloomberg boxes because they like commanding the craft and not just to make money even if mastery of a subject matter is a means to an end, which is to make money, rather than an end in itself, which is the explanation offered for an academic even if studying cells might also lead to curing cancer. Look at what is the overwhelming one of such career activities. A person who studies water currents likes being at sea.
So people do not just become characteristically human because, as is often said, by expressing a feeling or idea in the creation of an art such as writing or doodling. Nor is it, as I have said recently, that to be human is to record one’s own life regardless of its artistic merit. A third way of being human is to master a subject matter, to become engaged within its parameters and aware of what can be done in those parameters. Truth makes you free by allowing you to become aware of what is a part of what is out there, never mind what other assist knowledge adds to your soul.