Twitter: Hur hur, English Lit is useless.

Also Twitter: Why oh why don't schools teach a subject all about the kinds of critical thinking and textual analysis that would challenge the spread of misinformation?

Likewise, "science is always already useful" can also do one. At a recent research funding event, we heard that the subject that struggles the most to justify itself in terms of public impact and utility is... pure mathematics.

My point is not that we should ditch pure mathematics; I'm glad that we can pursue knowledge for its own sake. But it's worrying that certain kinds of knowledge only get granted that privilege without being branded decadent.

The COVID19 crisis - only science will save us, right? But while science can (hopefully) produce a vaccine, that's barely any use if you can't grasp why a sizeable chunk of the population won't trust it. And that's a job for... The A-Team- sorry, I meant The Humanities

Likewise, how people have behaved (somewhat erratically) during COVID19 has depended on how they have compared their reality to familiar models of catastrophe. And where do those models come from? Literature.

But hey, what would be the use in studying that?