There are seasons when a nation mistakes speed for clarity. When information multiplies but wisdom thins. And when outrage travels faster than understanding. This feels like one of those seasons. We are awash in data. We can measure almost anything. We can predict markets, track storms, map genomes, and automate memory. And yet, we are left with questions no machine can resolve:
Who are we becoming? What binds us? What is worth protecting? What is worth repairing? What do we owe each other? What makes our lives meaningful? How should we organize our lives together? How did we get here, and where do we hope to go together? Those questions belong to the humanities. The humanities are not life luxuries. They are not decorative electives tucked into the margins of serious work. They are the disciplines that ask what it means to be human and refuse to let power, ignorance, and hate answer alone. History, philosophy, literature, religion, the arts, and ethics. They form a long conversation about meaning, dignity, suffering, and hope.
It might sound fancy to defend “the humanities”, like I am speaking from some comfortable distance in an ivory tower. I’m not. I am talking about what people actually lean on when life breaks open. When something is lost. When something is unfair. When you are trying to forgive and are not sure you can. Without those tools, whoever holds power decides what matters. With them, we push back.
When my father died three years ago, I turned to scriptures, literature, and poetry. I turned to the essays of James Baldwin and the novels of Toni Morrison. I found myself returning to the poet Dylan Thomas, who wrote, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” The line was permission of sorts to feel the defiance inside grief. Permission to understand that love does not surrender quietly.
I turned to the questions that philosophy, literature, and religion have asked for centuries about mortality and what remains when a voice you love goes silent. Grief, I learned, is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be endured. After the death of his wife, C.S. Lewis wrote, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” Words helped me live inside the disorder of loss without pretending it was neat. I am a person who likes things orderly. Grief was not. It refused to accept timelines and my order of operations.
The humanities reminded me that I was not the first son to bury his father, and I would not be the last. They placed my sorrow inside a larger human story. My son and daughter will one day bury me. That, too, is part of the inheritance of being human in this world.
And yet, what feels intimate and sacred in our own lives often feels distant when it belongs to someone else.
We watch the loss of life. We see the pain of others and do not care. We watch, and we swipe, endlessly. I sometimes say this moment in our history is defined by a poverty of empathy. A season when zero-sum thinking dominates our civic imagination. A belief that if one group’s story is told, another’s must be erased. That memory is a competition.
But perhaps there is no poverty at all. Empathy is not scarce. It lives in most of us. It shows up in hospital rooms and kitchens, at funerals and in quiet acts of care. What we are witnessing is not the absence of empathy, but its distortion. Its denigration. Its manipulation by those who benefit from convincing us that someone else’s dignity endangers our own.
The real danger is not that we cannot feel for one another. It is that we are being trained not to. Trained to see every gain others make as our own loss. That seeing their story told threatens to take away from ours. That every act of remembrance for someone else subtracts from our memory.
For example, Embrace did not set out to build a monument. We set out to tell a story that deserved to be told. To intervene in the construction of public memory. To expand the moral imagination of the city. The Monument stands on Boston Common; it is not bronze alone. It is a question made visible. It asks whether Black love and Black leadership are central to the American story or peripheral to it.
Some see that centering as subtraction. But that is the logic of zero-sum thinking. It assumes dignity is a scarcity rather than the foundation of our shared humanity. If Black History is raised up, someone else’s history must shrink. Black History Month exists precisely because the national narrative was constructed with omissions. Zero-sum thinking tells us that increasing the visibility of one history requires the sublimation of another.
The humanities push back against this. They tell us that visibility is recognition. When an artist like Bad Bunny commands one of the largest stages in American life, it is evidence of demographic and cultural truth. America has always been multilingual, multiracial, layered, and hybrid. Representation does not displace Americanness. It reveals it.
As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, these questions sharpen. How will we represent ourselves? Will America250 be mythic and tidy, or honest and expansive? Will it acknowledge dispossession, enslavement, migration, resistance, invention, and reinvention? Or will it retreat to a simplified origin story? Will it include or erase?
Embrace’s research on social infrastructure argues that belonging is built. It is built through ritual, art, public markers, festivals, and shared spaces. Through study. Through storytelling. Through the disciplined work of remembering together.
If we neglect that work, zero-sum thinking fills the vacuum. And zero-sum thinking is often grief that has nowhere to go. It is the fear that if someone else’s story is told, mine will disappear. The fear that recognition is subtraction. When grief goes unnamed, it hardens into resentment. Representation begins to feel like a threat. History becomes a finite resource instead of an expansive teacher. But if we invest in the humanities and in the public work of collective memory, we strengthen the democratic core. We widen the circle without collapsing the center.
In grief, I learned that meaning cannot be automated. In civic life, I have learned that belonging cannot be assumed. Both must be tended. The question before us is not simply whether we will celebrate history, or diversify stages, or install monuments. The deeper question is whether we will cultivate our inherent capacity for empathy and see one another fully.
Because the future of this democracy will not be determined by speed nor by maintaining the status quo. It will be determined by our willingness to care about one another and create systems that proclaim that every person matters.