A practical case on why we need the humanities(acoup.blog) |
A practical case on why we need the humanities(acoup.blog) |
I think Francis Bacon made the best point about this: knowledge—real knowledge—is about the ability to reliably recreate some effect. With something like the material characteristics of a metal, we can use the rigor of experiment to figure out how to create metals with desired characteristics. We subject the metal to varying levels of heat, pressure, etc. and see what happens.
With governments this is basically impossible. You can't run controlled experiments against governments that are similar in all aspects but one. But it is still useful to study governments if we want to design good ones. You can make a good argument that much of America's success is the result of the Founding Fathers studying the many forms of government that preceded them.
I would argue all other humanities are essentially the same. Literature and philosophy are collections of "experiments" conducted and suppositions made by our predecessors about how to live good lives. English composition is about how humans can effectively communicate in that language. Etc, etc. Are the various stories, rules of thumb, and bits of wisdom in these disciplines scientifically rigorous? Of course not. They can't be. But they can still improve our odds of reproducing some desirable effect, and that makes them knowledge worth having.
An issue with these things is that institutions and government make major decisions based on the output from these fields. It’s not that we discount them completely but we should also consider opposing data from alternate studies, but what you get is agenda driven decision making (on all sides, this isn’t the province of one ideology).
Indeed, the mere proliferation of x-studies (where x is arbitrary) in universities is a ringing indictment. The classic/liberal humanities (e.g. history) should be taught but it shouldn't be the case that one must go to a university, and get into debt, to learn them, and within a university where they are taught, they shouldn't be degree courses unto themselves.
Music is taught excellently in conservatoires and art taught in ateliers imho produces better artists than are produced by universities. Both are often an order of magnitude cheaper than a 4-year university education and encourage/reward the repetition necessary to achieve excellence in those who aren't naturally gifted.
Any field that has to append "science" to its name usually isn't scientific e.g. political science, social science.[0]
[0] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/peter-thiel/
What do you think politics is? Everyone in politics has an agenda.
> It’s not that we discount them completely but we should also consider opposing data from alternate studies
Politicians already do this. Whenever there's a decision being made, it's being processed through a host of ideological positions.
That is putting it mildly.
Sure there's an upside in letting smart people try to figure things out. But there's a downside in legitimizing the practice. Especially since academia isn't so just about intelligence but as much or more about self-agency. The people who push hardest for agendas get the funding, write the books, etc.
Completely and strongly disagree with both of these.
Even in the sciences, there are many who value gaining knowledge for knowledge's sake, for the joy of discovery, and for a better understanding of the world -- quite apart from its utilitarian value in "reliably recreating some effects".
Now on to the humanities... just a couple of examples:
Do you feel that you know your children, your siblings, your lover, or your parents? Is the point of that knowledge to recreate some effect? Or is that not "real knowledge"?
Historians write about what happened, and would probably consider themselves to be imparting knowledge, but they are not necessarily after giving people the power to recreate some effect.
Now on to your claim that literature and philosophy are about how to live good lives. This sounds like a view influenced by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and is about a couple of thousand years out of date. Both literature and philosophy have grown in many different directions since then (though even then this was hardly the only aim of literature or philosophy), and plenty of people who work in both fields don't concern themselves with the aim of how to live a good life.
Plenty of literature in the last century, for instance, is about pointing out the futility of trying to live a good life, or the absurdity of life, about humans constantly and inevitably being frustrated in their striving to live any kind of life, about going mad, about going in circles, about failure. The Existentialists were some of the most well known of such authors, but there are thousands of others.
Representatives of analytic philosophy have often sneered at the aims of ancient philosophy, such as trying to find what it means to live a good life, and have (in an echo of scholastic philosophy) instead often focused on endless technical minutia such as analyzing sentence structure or logical forms of argument.
Some other forms of philosophy are more about pointing out underlying assumptions. Yet others point out problems with these assumptions, such as Hume's critique of causality. And others still, such as some phenomenologists or the cognitively-oriented analytics, are more interested in describing how perception works or what phenomena appear. Yet others are interested in what we can know, what reality is, or what science is, etc.
Sure, some philosophers are still interested in how to live a good life, or what makes for a good life.. but that is a rather specialized and narrow concern of a relatively small number of philosophers, and there's a lot more to philosophy in general than that.
Incidentally, Francis Bacon had a highly scientistic view, and believed that every field should be more like the hard sciences, and that science was the only legitimate or best way of understanding the world (a view you seem to be echoing). Many people in the humanities do not agree with this view.
The ideal of the humanities and of the holistic, cosmopolitan citizen with a broad education in every field of human activity is not new. Humboldt (and others) formulated it long ago.
In that sense I think the humanities aren't just needed in education. They're needed in churches, in political debates, in homes and families. Humanities as a practice rather than as a four-year degree.
If you really want to democratice and popularize the humanities don't treat them as a grooming mechanism for leaders or an intellectual exercise as is common in the anglosphere, but as a part of everyday life.
At the end of the play Apollo arrives and turns the Furies into Eumanides - Humanities, who comfort Oerestes. The humanities were created to heal us, but in modern academia, they have been turned back into shrieking furies, and the response we are seeing -- the only sane response -- is to flee them like Oerestes did.
There are still humanities out there, and it is important to seek them out, but you wont them in modern humanities departments.
As for their emphasis in higher education, where else are you forced to face different and conflicting ideas? Certainly not in political debates.
for instance, even if most people never read any of the written work of historians, the existence of that community and its scholarly standards helps prevent a lot of bizarre, erroneous historical narratives from gaining traction, and society is much better off for it.
STEM funding doesn't marginalize the humanities; there's no reason STEM funding needs to reduce the value of a humanities degree or needs to decrease the number of people majoring in the humanities.
The core of teaching in the humanities is the expression of the grand breadth of human experience
There is a lot of motte and baileying (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy) among humanities defenders: the humanities are hugely important, but the way they're practiced by many in contemporary universities is not so good. Harold Bloom called the current practice "The School of Resentment," but it goes under other monikers as well.
The other thing we ask students to do, beyond merely encountering these things is to use them to practice argumentation, to reason soundly, to write well, to argue persuasively about them
This is good! But many humanities professors now think they have the answer, and their job is to become activists, spreading the answer they've found to everyone else.
There are two big problems with getting students and grad students to major in the humanities: the cost of college is one, and the way the humanities have largely morphed into a particular form of political activism is the other. The humanities as learning "to practice argumentation, to reason soundly, to write well, to argue persuasively about them" is and would be great. The experience on the ground is quite different.
I majored in English and went to grad school in it: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo.... Here is one version, albeit not the only one, of the intellectual problems that occur widely: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/10/02/what-happened-with-decons...
I forgot to add: I used to try and keep a list of examples of the kind of thing one sees in the humanities, but Real Peer Review does it better: https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview.
If the purpose of teaching the humanities is to teach kids sound reasoning, good writing, and effective persuasion, then why is so little of that evident today when more kids than ever go to college?
The answer is simple: "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink." Even here on HN, we have a large number of people saying that going to college is merely to get a credential and that they didn't learn (or, more accurately, didn't bother to learn) anything of importance there.
It'd be a lot easier to justify a humanities education if it resulted in a high-paying job. Just image a Udacity for the humanities where the end of the program resulted in a career coach helping you get a $300k job as a historian. To me, that is truly utopian.
Yet do we have a dearth of leaders with experience in the humanities? Just doing a quick look at the current politcal leadership, and Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi both have a degree in political science. Trump has a degree in economics, but Obama and George W. Bush both majored in the humanities. [Edit: I thought I'd take a look at the past three vice-presidents as well - Pence, Biden, and Cheney all majored in the humanities.]
Saying that these qualities are important is fine, but one has to consider whether or not the current way that academia teaches the humanities is a good way to instill them in people. If something doesn't achieve its goal, then it doesn't matter how lofty said goal is.
I'm constantly impressed by how articles like these claim that studying the humanities will give people a better way to question things and think critically about the world around them, but then fail to do so themselves.
Approximately 100% of these articles are written by humanities majors though, so I'm not sure what else you're expecting to see.
If you weave a sophisticated enough tale with enough novelty to draw attention, you can convince people of anything. If enough people buy into it, you can create a framework from it, no matter how far off course it is from basic intuition about human behavior.
Now a little older I realize what is actually meant by "knowledge is power." Knowledge is a lever. When you're young there's absolutely nothing you can do of any consequence because you live inside someone else's bounds. In a modern economy it's not enough to produce a bushel of corn a day to feed one person. To operate in the economy as anything more than a consumer requires levers in the form of skills, experience, education, and knowledge. Otherwise, you live off the fat of our capitalistic system as some unimportant facilitator, or entirely as a consumer.
Knowledge in the sciences and engineering effectively makes the individual more than what he's worth in just labor. You can effectively leverage our modern day infrastructure of virtually infinite water, electricity, materials, connectivity, and information to do more than what a person in the past could only accomplish with their hands and feet.
What is worthwhile in the humanities preferable to understanding the power of technology and being able to create objective value in society?
Now they may lie in it.
But what seems new is the humanities coming into politics in what seems like a big way.
It's gone from what you should think, to what you have to think.
That's why I think it should be smashed.
On the other hand, there seem to be broad swathes of humanities academia that strongly reject the notion of some kind of "truth", e.g. new criticism. I find this strain of humanities work a lot harder to appreciate.
at the same time, it's not like they just thought you could make up whatever bizarre misreading you wanted about the text -- you had to present some kind of convincing internal evidence for your reading. even the standards of new criticism rule out a lot of interpretations.
as an outsider it seems like there's a lot of debates in humanities fields that are like that -- what perspective gives the best view of things? what is worth talking about? what kind of evidence and argument is acceptable and convincing?
but it's almost always the case that there are standards, even if people within disagree on them and even if there's no hope of getting to one objective truth.
(there's a lot of very dubious and poorly-done literary criticism, but the same is true of every STEM field.)
Genetics has revealed that no, it was people not pots:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03773-6
You'd have had a more accurate picture of prehistory watching Conan the Barbarian than sitting in anthropology lectures.
Then you point out that I'm conflating history and anthropology... how academic!
When looking at what happened to people in the past, does reality cleave neatly down history/anthropology lines? Or is that an artifact of bureaucracy?
There is no chance I would let a university humanities department anywhere near my children at this point.
Examples?
> Charging obscene levels of tuition for it while piling the real work onto adjuncts.
This is endemic to the US university system, in general.
> Close-mindedness that would make John Calvin blush.
Again, it's all fun and games to riff and instantly disregard a vast number of fields of study, but you're not doing yourself any favors by just throwing out a laundry list. You have an immense distrust towards these departments: air your grievances, I'm sure a lot of us are interested.
> There is no chance I would let a university humanities department anywhere near my children at this point.
Universities tend to admit adults. Also, if your children go into university, are you going to refuse to pay for their general courses? They're going to have to touch a literature or history course eventually. Are you going to forbid them from taking 3 credit hours of Spanish?
There are wonderful resources for getting a liberal education today. More than ever, in fact, and far less expensive than ever as well.
They just have nothing to do with going into a humanities department.
Although it's a bit of a side-track and you're quoting, what are your thoughts on applying this logic to "computer _science_" or "material science"?
I think it's more about the age of the field:
1. pretty old fields like physics (which just comes from the Greek word for nature), chemistry (comes from the art of making alloys) just have names describing what is studied without adding something that says "study of".
2. a lot of newer sciences (e.g. biology, geology, psychology, sociology) we use -logy as a suffix meaning "field of study", again from ancient Greek. Some of these are natural sciences, some others are social sciences.
3. in newer fields of study, rather than deriving new Latin/Greek names we just use "X science", which is not that different from what's being done in (2) A major exception to this is the medical fields (like oncology) where we still use -logy because Latin/Greek roots are still in common use in medicine.
For example:
UT Austin English (Humanities, no?) major requirements (https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/english/undergraduate-program...) and spring 2020 courses (https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/english/courses/index.php).
Or maybe UT Austin Philosophy requirements (https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/philosophy/undergraduate/The%...) and spring 2020 courses (https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/philosophy/courses/index.php). (Hey! Philosophy is still teaching 313 Symbolic Logic!) (Aww. Bob Mugerauer isn't teaching Contemporary Moral Problems. He's probably retired. But he was great; he looked like Captain Kangaroo. Dan Bonevac is teaching intro from his World Philosophy text. Cool.)
Anyway, most of undergraduate humanities are surveys of various sorts, with the specific goals of getting students to present arguments coherently.
(Hey! Computer Science is no longer requiring PHL 313K, or automata theory. They're dead to me now.)
There is only one set of ideas that truly experiences freedom of thought and inquiry in the humanities in Western universities, and that’s the progressive far left worldview. This cultural bias skews the humanities far more than it does STEM. You can see it institutionalized in the *-studies majors (e.g. ethnic studies), which have relatively little academic rigor. And because the humanities are so often skewed, I disagree with the notion that it makes students well rounded.
Without room for conflicting views, critical inquiry, and freedom of thought, the humanities seem to have devolved into a propaganda machine that teaches just this worldview. It is a ubiquitous enough problem that entire news outlets have been created to track the disturbing saga of college monoculture in America: https://www.thecollegefix.com/
"There is only one set of ideas that truly experiences freedom of thought and inquiry in the humanities in Western universities, and that’s the progressive far left worldview."
has been the complaint since before I was born (which was a long time ago) and "what are they teaching kids these days" has probably been the complaint since universities were first founded.
What's the point of using a forum for discussion if you're just going to make vague assertions and never bother to back them up? You talk of fear and loathing, yet seemingly operate on visceral reaction given that you continually refuse/are unable to list your grievances.
For a general overview of the situation, Allan Blooms "The Closing of The American Mind" covers it far better than I (or almost anyone else) could.
> I’ve seen governments make decisions based on studies published by second tier educational institutions because it dovetails with their ideology.
Do you have an example of this for a humanities specific field? I could see maybe philosophy, but I really don't think most humanities fields have the political power a lot of people attribute to them.
Agendas combined with half-truths which is where the bad faith and other problems come in.
How human beings make collective decisions. Why, what do you think it is?
Even when goals are the same you can have disagreement over how to achieve them. When goals and values are in conflict, i.e. people have different agendas, we need a mechanism for deciding how to end these conflicts. That mechanism is politics, expressed as some combination of persuasion and violence, how we form, sustain and define communities.
There are a lot of overlapping fields between the two, but economics isn't in the humanities.
MMT and inflation theories in general are constantly brought up by politicians and they are junk science.
Piketty’s work on inequality is a glorified regression built on an unfounded assumption about the return on capital always outpacing inflation. That work dominates politicians discussing the wealth gaps and is used as “evidence” to tax the wealthy.
Some economics is great (e.g. Nash equilibrium) and is consistently reproducible and observable. That’s not the kind dominating headlines though.
What exactly is the university to do while it pondering the issue?