What are the root causes of the undesirable futures we currently keep creating? Wherever you live in the world, you will wake up every day to signs of human-made climate change and environmental degradation; wars, mass violence, forced migration, rampant inequality, radical nationalisms and populisms; and a collective mental health crisis manifest in angry protectionism, fear-based decision-making & leadership, burn-out & loss of individual meaning and collective purpose. Why are the very institutions that were once created progressive now often inhibiting transformation? Our rhetoric might have become more equitable. But glass ceilings sustaining inequality, distrust, and resentment are increasingly destabilizing the social infrastructures, which connect our political institutions to schools, universities, public cultural organizations, and homes. To tackle today’s daunting challenges, we need critical self-awareness and courage to dare to reimagine and reanimate our communal spaces of research, learning, and growth, and of our collective communication, purpose and action.
True to an enhanced version of MIT’s motto, “mens, manus et cor” (mind, hand & heart), the MIT Comparative Global Humanities Initiative (GHI) proposes a hands-on approach to addressing the pressing challenges of our time. Our own motto is “Legacies for Our Future,” setting our compass on promoting human flourishing now, and creating good legacies for the future of our children and descendants. Our approach is simple, ambitious, and transformational: first, embracing root-cause analysis; second, studying the millennia-old experience of humans on this planet, as it has come down to us through texts, artifacts or community rituals in deep time and space, in mutually illuminating comparison; next, devising tools that promote human flourishing, seeking inspiration from the best concepts and practices developed by our ancestors across the great diversity of cultures and periods of world history; and then, building new infrastructures of research, collective reflection & action that allow us to leverage systemic change in our communities & homes, educational institutions, political systems, and transnational diplomacy & collaborations.
Time is getting short and we cannot, as has been true so far, wait for a couple of generations until newly created knowledge makes it into our school books; our political, legal, social, medical, and business & media protocols; and into our best practices of living a good life, finding our place in healthy communities, and communicating across borders, languages, cultures, despite the burdens of traumatic shared histories and heritage.
As we face a drastic drop in enrollments and public support for the Humanities and the instrumentalization of the Humanities for nationalistic and economic purposes, GHI is also a safe haven for Humanities scholars and students under threat. We reclaim the centrality of the Humanities in today’s STEM-and-Business-driven world. We actively shape the empowering transformation of the Humanities in the 21st century by asking: How can we expand the cognitive & creative, ethical & social, healthful & playful contributions of the humanities to our world and its pressing challenges, beyond their traditional role as producer of scholars and educators? What new leadership roles could humanities graduates and scholars play in our societies? What should the “Business of the Humanities” include today? How can we reimagine the humanities to create a shared future for our world’s communities? A future that realigns people’s, scholars’, and governments’ attention, intention, and agency, with a combined tool-set of human making, namely the traditional Humanities, STEM, media & technology, business & entrepreneurship? GHI is an incubator: a think & sense & act tank that welcomes academics, public, private, business and community leaders, practitioners, performers, artists, writers and the broader public to come together and create Legacies for Our Future.
WHAT IS THE BUSINESS OF THE HUMANITIES? (November 8 & 9 2024, Dominican University of California)
Listen to the take-aways from GHI’s 3rd Annual Conference, featuring Keynote Speaker John Silvanus Wilson (Former President of Morehouse College & Former Director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities)