Evolving Perspectives on Humanities and Mental Health

Amidst all the doom and gloom of the current zeitgeist, Harvard University literature professor & DLD 2025 speaker Martin Puchner remains cautiously optimistic about our high tech future. Reflecting on cultural and technological changes over the past 20 years. Puchner explains how digital technology has transformed academic research and teaching since 2005, noting how the internet has made obscure texts more accessible and changed how scholars work. While acknowledging concerns about declining humanities enrollment and student reading habits, Puchner maintains a cautiously optimistic outlook. He observes that while fewer top students choose to study literature, there's been a growth in public engagement with humanities through book clubs, podcasts, and adult education. Puchner offers nuanced perspectives on several contemporary issues, including the rise of student anxiety (which he attributes more to psycho-pharmaceuticals than technology), the paradox of people valuing reading while actually reading less, and the role of AI in education. He suggests that AI's ability to summarize texts might complement rather than replace deep reading, particularly for fiction where the reading experience itself is central. Looking ahead to 2045, Puchner is particularly optimistic about education's future, believing that interactive online platforms and AI could help democratize high-quality education globally. However, he maintains that human teachers will remain essential due to the affective, interpersonal nature of education—something demonstrated during COVID-19 when in-person interaction was lost. He sees technology as augmenting rather than replacing traditional educational experiences, much as print didn't eliminate lectures and film didn't replace theater.

Martin Puchner, the Byron and Anita Wien Professor at Harvard University, is a prize-winning author, educator, public speaker, and institution builder in the arts and humanities. His writings range from philosophy and theater to culture and technology and have been translated into many languages. Through his best-selling Norton Anthology of World Literature and his HarvardX MOOC Masterpieces of World Literature, he has brought four thousand years of literature to audiences across the globe. His book, The Written World, which tells the story of literature from the invention of writing to the Internet, has been widely reviewed in The New York Times, The Times (London), the Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Atlantic, The Economist, among others, covered on radio and television, and has been translated into over twenty languages. It appeared on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list and received the Massachusetts Book Award. His book The Language of Thieves has been praised as an unusual combination of scholarship and memoir, and the writing, compared to Stevenson's Treasure Island and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. An adventurous foray into the philosophy of language, it is also a reckoning with Germany's past. His book Literature for a Changing Planet is based on the inaugural Oxford University Lectures in European History, delivered in November 2019, has been reviewed in the Financial Times, The New York Review of Books and other venues. It calls for a new approach to storytelling and climate change. His most recent book, Culture: The Story of Us, tells a global history of culture that raises fundamental questions about how culture works, and how different cultures should relate to one another. In hundreds of lectures and workshops from the Arctic Circle to Brazil and from the Middle East to China, he has advocated for the arts and humanities in a changing world. At Harvard, he has instituted these ideas in a new program in theater, dance and media as well as in the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research, which lasted from 2010-2022. Among his prizes are a Guggenheim Fellowship, fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin and at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Berlin Prize, and the 2021 Humboldt Prize. He is a permanent member of the European Academy.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe