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

~~~
mc32
>” 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).

~~~
ianleeclark
> 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.

~~~
mc32
I’m fine with these if they have some data that’s withstood scrutiny —but I’ve
seen governments make decisions based on studies published by second tier
educational institutions because it dovetails with their ideology.

~~~
ianleeclark
I still would like to know what your conception of politics is.

> 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.

------
Barrin92
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.

~~~
mcguire
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
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?

~~~
throwawaysea
Students in American and European universities are definitely not facing
different and conflicting ideas. More often than not, expressing different and
conflicting ideas will make you a social pariah, or even get you fired if
you’re the instructor trying to truly make your students well rounded. In fact
it is often those very same students that file petitions and participate in
protests to get professors fired when they face an idea that they don’t agree
with.

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/](https://www.thecollegefix.com/)

~~~
antepodius
Man, he was asking a rhetorical question. You're (most likely) preaching to
the choir.

~~~
mcguire
I don't know about preaching to the choir (I don't buy it, anyway), but

" _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.

------
currymj
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.

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

~~~
haihaibye
I point out that far from preventing it, academia has caused "bizarre,
erroneous historical narratives ... gaining traction"

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?

------
rayiner
> 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?

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> " _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.

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

------
arminiusreturns
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.

------
libra1
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.

------
Chathamization
> 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
>> 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.

------
jseliger
_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](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...](https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-before-you-
start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and-
opportunity-costs/). 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...](https://jakeseliger.com/2014/10/02/what-happened-with-
deconstruction)

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](https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview).

------
throwawaysea
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...](https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-
the-corruption-of-scholarship/)), I don’t see it affecting the momentum of
these dubious programs at modern universities.

~~~
sinker
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.

------
peter303
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.

------
sinker
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?

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

Now they may lie in it.

~~~
apsec112
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're referring to?

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

~~~
recursivedoubts
Yes to all of that. A culture of fear and loathing. Charging obscene levels of
tuition for it while piling the real work onto adjuncts. Close-mindedness that
would make John Calvin blush. The list is extremely long.

There is no chance I would let a university humanities department anywhere
near my children at this point.

~~~
ianleeclark
> A culture of fear and loathing.

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?

~~~
honksillet
Here is an example... [https://reason.com/2020/06/10/ucla-business-school-
lecturer-...](https://reason.com/2020/06/10/ucla-business-school-lecturer-
placed-on-leave-for-e-mail-to-student-rejecting-request-for-exam-leniency-for-
black-students/)

~~~
mcguire
" _On June 3, Klein was placed on involuntary administrative leave until June
24. The notice states that the leave is necessary to give UCLA the opportunity
to consider "allegations regarding behavior made in the course and scope of
your position … inconsistent with [UCLA's Faculty Code of Conduct]."_"

What exactly is the university to do while it pondering the issue?

~~~
barry-cotter
They’re not supposed to ponder the issue. They’re supposed to tell the
students that if they don’t like departmental policy the door is that way.

------
aaron695
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
It should be smashed, because what you think its obviously correct yes?

