I’ve been reading “Oryx and Crake” lately, and while I am not finished and there may be some hope-giving twist at the end, it’s been getting me down a bit.

On the surface level, it is a book about genetic modification and the implications involved when technology progresses at an increasingly accelerated rate, leaving notions of morality to scramble to catch up.

However, it also features a society that doesn’t value the arts.

There’s a part of the novel that features the schooling experience of the narrator. He is not a “numbers” person, but a word person. However, the world that he lives in does not value words, so he ends up going to a subpar school and is left with desperately picking any job that he can find, which turns out to be the exact opposite of what would have been ideal—his senior paper is basically a critique of self-help books, and then he gets hired to write copy for a self-help company because his paper showed that he had a good understanding of the industry. His friend, who excels with the sciences, goes on to a fantastic college and is basically valued above him.

Obviously, as an English major, I uncomfortably relate to the plight of the narrator. Not literally, of course, (not yet anyways), but it definitely airs out some of my fears as to what could happen. I think that there is often a perspective, at least here in America, that the humanities are not important, or certainly not as directly useful as careers in technology or careers that produce a physical result. I suppose this tendency to privilege one kind of product over the other could be attributed to capitalism—if you can’t make money off of it, what good is it? What use does it have? If one can’t make money off of whatever they’re making, it literally has no [cash] value.

There’s also a game within the novel, Blood and Roses, where it is like Monopoly, but instead of properties, one trades for past historical atrocities and achievements. The exchange rates are things like “one Armenian genocide equall[ing] the “Ninth Symphony” plus three Great Pyramids”. The trouble with this game, according to the narrator, is that the “Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland”, and I can’t help but think of the current state of affairs when I read that.

Perhaps I just have the wrong perspective, but it’s pretty hard not to see the world as spiraling madly downwards sometimes. In class the other day, my professor played a video from 9/11 as an example of the sublime (more because of the speechless terror that the witnesses were experiencing). I couldn’t help but think how the world feels different now. It feels like there is another tragedy almost every day, and yet no steps seem to be taken to solve anything. And what would the right step be, anyway? It’s like there are so many huge and complex problems that just feed off and compound each other, and it is impossible to know where to begin.

It feels like the “bad”, the violent, the destructive, the greedy, are the things that always tend to win out, or at least tend to be the things that reign over the “good”, the peaceful, the kind, whatever. It feels naïve to even pit those words against each other, to think that these latter concepts are ones that could possibly ever be privileged above the former.

But at the same time, despite the seemingly overwhelming odds, I don’t want to give in. I get discouraged, yes, but there’s no point in giving in, giving up (whatever that would look like).

At the very least, I know a few people (probably the smartest people I know, honestly) who do have hope and who absolutely value the “humanities”. If being on the side of the Roses means fighting a losing battle, well, there’s nothing to lose by trying, if that makes sense. After all, it might only seem as if it is a losing battle, and it could very well not be the case. And if it isn’t, technically there wouldn’t be any surprise when the Blood side inherited a wasteland.

I suppose that is faulty reasoning but I guess my point is that it isn’t productive to just sit around and mourn the end of the humanities and give up without a fight. What that fight looks like, I don’t know, but at the least, it can perhaps start with not getting discouraged and keeping the hope and belief that humanity can be redeemed.