A practical case on why we need the humanities

https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case-on-why-we-need-the-humanities/

by jpeanuts • 6 years ago

47 72 6 years ago

acoup.blog

recursivedoubts4• 6 years ago

The academic humanities departments have made their bed over the last fifty years.

Now they may lie in it.

apsec112• 6 years ago

Sorry, I'm not sure what you're referring to?

eggsmediumrare• 6 years ago

I'm guessing over-admission, watered down standards and acquiescence to bad ideas, but I can't speak for the original poster.

lr4444lr• 6 years ago

The Sokal Hoax was a loud canary in the coalmine that was ignored:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

pnako• 6 years ago

Humanities departments becoming de-facto meetings of the party, as opposed to a cafe where philosophers of all strokes meet to exchange ideas.

throwawaysea2• 6 years ago

The article suggests that many of the current fields of humanities are markers of wealth and status symbols, and that we need to move away from this. That may be true but a bigger problem to me is that the modern humanities have fragmented into many narrowly focused sub fields, which seem to be based on presuppositions about how the world works. These fields seem less like a legitimate area of study and more like pseudoscientific political tools, often working to legitimize perspectives that aren’t grounded in reality, and radicalizing students and our culture as a result. The grievance studies have drastically undermined the legitimacy of the humanities as a whole even though “core humanities” may not deserve the same critique. Unfortunately even though much has been written on this issue (https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...), I don’t see it affecting the momentum of these dubious programs at modern universities.

sinker3• 6 years ago

There appears to be little to no self-reflection. There are no objective markers of quality compared to science or engineering. I suppose that's a duh. But experience and strong intuition should guide you and one's own consciousness and rationality should hold you to a standard of intellectual honesty. That's a lot of "shoulds" though. In the end, intellectual honest is always going to require voluntary participation.

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.

currymj3• 6 years ago

apart from the benefit of the humanities in an undergraduate education, there are big positive externalities from the scholarly work as well.

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.

papeda• 6 years ago

It's a little strange to me to use history as the representative for the humanities, because history seems like the most "scientific" one -- there's some truth of what happened, and historians are trying to navigate toward it, figure out how to talk about it, identifies whys and hows.

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.

currymj3• 6 years ago

i don't know, I think the new criticism didn't deny that books were written by specific authors, the authors had intentions in their minds, wrote in a historical context, and so on -- they just felt it was not interesting or fruitful to consider those things when trying to make sense of how a text worked.

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.)

haihaibye2• 6 years ago

Historians wanted to push the narrative that primitive people were less violent, that seeing the pots dug up during different eras was due to cultural transmission not people being wiped out and replaced, "Pots, not people"

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.

dragonwriter• 6 years ago

Your description of history and anthropology is about at the level of accuracy that one would expect of someone who conflates the two.

currymj3• 6 years ago

thanks for posting the article, which is fascinating and presents a complex and interesting picture of how archaeologists and anthropologists are reacting to advances in genetics -- much more interesting than your summary suggests.

Frippy5• 6 years ago

This article has some good points but is a bit meandering. The best point is right there at the beginning: the humanities study things which are not (entirely) subject to scientific rigor, but which are still worth studying. This sort of begs the question, why is anything worth studying?

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.

aliante• 6 years ago

humanities study things which are not (entirely) subject to scientific rigor

That is putting it mildly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

Frippy5• 6 years ago

Yeah I agree, there are some particularly egregious examples. If you want a good laugh about this stuff, "Fashionable Nonsense" is a great book.

mc323• 6 years ago

” the humanities study things which are not (entirely) subject to scientific rigor, but which are still worth studying.”

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).

ianleeclark6• 6 years ago

An issue with these things is that institutions and government make major decisions ... what you get is agenda driven decision making

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.

Frippy5• 6 years ago

Agreed, I think the points others have made about the humanities being used as political weapons are valid. As a rule of thumb, any time knowledge is being used in the drunk-with-a-lamppost fashion (for support rather than illumination), it should be subject to scrutiny. And because of the lack of rigor, the humanities are more open to abuse than some other fields. But we shouldn't kid ourselves and pretend that scientific knowledge and mathematics aren't also weaponized to push agendas. That's a risk to a greater or lesser degree with any subject.

noch• 6 years ago

An issue with these things is that institutions and government make major decisions based on the output from these fields.

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/

jseliger2• 6 years ago

One big issue is how the humanities are widely practiced today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23728642

Frippy5• 6 years ago

Yep I agree, I had some horrible professors as a history postgrad that embodied this exact approach.

unishark2• 6 years ago

If you can't control the experiment and identify causation or limit the number of changed variables, you really shouldn't even use the word "experiment".

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.

Frippy5• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what a better word would be. We use the same word informally to describe how babies learn—they poke and prod at their environment and see what happens. Just because they aren't rigorous doesn't mean the process doesn't give them some idea (with an implicit confidence level, of course) of how things work.

pmoriarty• 6 years ago

"knowledge—real knowledge—is about the ability to reliably recreate some effect. ... Literature and philosophy are collections of "experiments" conducted and suppositions made by our predecessors about how to live good lives"

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.

hunipol• 6 years ago

I think you took OP the wrong way. Bacon doesn't say knowledge has to have utilitarian value. He says that something only IS KNOWLEDGE if it can predict an effect. He was arguing against the many theories of people before him like Aristotle who said a bunch of things that sounded reasonable but were actually purely speculative nonsense, no matter how reasonable they sounded. In so doing, Bacon was establishing the foundations of induction and criticizing the long history of deductive reasoning.

arminiusreturns• 6 years ago

The trivium and quadrivium are the foundation that, to me, ties the importance of the humanities into the non-humanties areas of study. It has a compounding effect on not just breadth, but also depth of knowledge, and in particular, offers greater potential for novel insights over "1 mile deep, but one inch wide" knowledge.

jseliger2• 6 years ago

The great rush of STEM funding that has slowly marginalized the humanities within our education system

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.

peter303• 6 years ago

Very old debate. Famous 1959 essay by Brit CP Snow about the two cultures of STEM and humanities leading to misunderstandings between the two. UK colleges pretty much tracked you into one of the two cultures with little exposure to the other.

aaron695• 6 years ago

Some people have always hated the humanities, nothing to new there.

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.

throwaway2048• 6 years ago

It should be smashed, because what you think its obviously correct yes?

Chathamization• 6 years ago

Does anyone look at the present moment and conclude that we have an over-abundance of humble, empathetic, well-trained and effectively communicating leaders?

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.

m0zg• 6 years ago

> claim that studying the humanities will give people a better way to question things and think critically

Approximately 100% of these articles are written by humanities majors though, so I'm not sure what else you're expecting to see.

Barrin92• 6 years ago

What gets me the wrong way about these arguments, and it is even itself addressed somewhat in the article is the reduction of 'the humanities' to formal or academic study.

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.

mcguire5• 6 years ago

That's one of the reasons why there are required humanities courses: to try to ensure that graduates are "well rounded".

As for their emphasis in higher education, where else are you forced to face different and conflicting ideas? Certainly not in political debates.

mixedCase• 6 years ago

Are students in higher education currently facing different and conflicting ideas? That goes to humanities students, specially. It seems like when it comes to worldviews universities are almost monocultural, or maybe it's just a regional thing here?

rsj_hn• 6 years ago

The "Humanities" come from the story of Oerestes, who was being chased and tormented by the screeching furies, often portrayed in art as harpies or other shrieking, biting spirits that yell into Oerestes' ears.

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.

rayiner• 6 years ago

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.

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?

sinker3• 6 years ago

I don't buy it either. Some people are just inherently more rationally grounded, I suspect in large part due to their personalities. I doubt that if you were to take a student who doesn't possess these traits, that they would look any different at the end of four years.

JamesBarney2• 6 years ago

I also suspect that you get a lot more bang for your buck focusing on teaching kids how to reason, write, and persuade by teaching those skills specifically as opposed to hoping they pick it from transfer learning in an English or history class.

ThrowawayR2• 6 years ago

"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.

JamesBarney2• 6 years ago

Then maybe we shouldn't be spending billions of dollars leading a bunches of horses that aren't thirsty to water.

sinker3• 6 years ago

What about the opportunity cost of studying the humanities as opposed to science or engineering? This a question for the individual. As a boy I fell in love with Orwell which led me to strongly appreciate literature.

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?

libra1• 6 years ago

I watched an a documentary about early humans a couple weeks ago, and felt really grateful that we have people passionate enough to dedicate their lives to learning about our ancestors. On one hand, it would be really heartbreaking if the number of people deeply focused on the humanities starts to dwindle, and our culture gets more and more monotonous. On the other hand, maybe this shift could cause us to automate more of the boring parts of this research or discover new research tools that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

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.

A practical case on why we need the humanities

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