Against "The Humanities"

Committing to the bit

don quixote as a physicist

One of my recurring low-key bits on this blog-like thing is that I write around using the term “the humanities” when I talk about academia and the politics thereof (and use scare quotes when I can’t). I probably ought to settle on a short and catchy alternative reference to the amorphous cluster of disciplines that get shorthanded that way— “Qualitative Academia,” maybe?—just to, you know, have a catchphrase, but there’s a part of me that enjoys doing the verbal dance without the lampshade.

My objection to the term is that by claiming the mantle of humanity for the study of arts and literature, it casts the sciences as inhuman, an inherently alien mode of thought. Which feeds all the worst stereotypes of science and scientists, while flattering the most obnoxious prejudices of those of a literary bent. And, like most stereotypes and prejudices, it’s not remotely universally applicable.

I’m back on this particular brand of bullshit thanks to somebody whose name is lost to the deliberate ephemerality of social media linking to this New Criterion piece by Wilfred McClay titled “The Burden of the Humanities”. As you could probably guess from the venue and the author’s affiliation with the (in)famous Hillsdale College, it’s got a pretty conservative approach to academia and the world in general, but there’s some good stuff in there as it tires to reason through both how to define that particular clump of academic disciplines and why they matter.

At the same time, though, the place he eventually lands for the definition made me sigh heavily:

The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing or translating them into something else—as into physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, the agent as well as the acted upon.

It’s a noble attempt, but at the same time, kind of crystalizes the thing that’s at the root of my petty terminological grievance. To be fair, he walks back from that a bit in the very next paragraph, allowing that “science is also a pursuit unique to humans,” and might have some lessons for his preferred branch of academia. But still, claiming subjective experience as “human things” and qualitative description as “human terms,” standing in opposition to science rankles a bit.

I think this gravely misunderstands the centrality of science, broadly defined, to the human experience, in both practical and more abstractly intellectual ways. I would argue (and have at book length) that at the most fundamental level both qualitative and quantitative academics are engaged in exactly the same enterprise: seeking to understand how the world works in a way that allows us to influence it in our favor.

This is most obvious in the context of science, which is inextricably bound up with the history of our species. One of the indelible signatures of humans, dating back tens of thousands of years, is the use to tools to shape the world around us— stone weapons, sewn or woven clothing, colored pigments daubed on walls to make pictures. These are all the products of the scientific process: looking at the world to identify interesting phenomena, developing models for how those things work, testing and refining those models in ways, and sharing the results with other humans in ways that allow them to be adapted to useful ends. There’s a long and unbroken chain of scientific thinking running from the first flint scraper to the Large Hadron Collider, from the first hand print on a cave wall to computer-generated posters for fake Pixar movies.

A frequent claim at this point, and one that likely fits naturally within McClay’s definition, is that the development of science and technology involves a drive to re-shape the world by imposing structure on it that stands in contrast to the study of arts and literature. I don’t think that holds water, though— the arts are not any less about the imposition of structure or the shaping of experience than the sciences are. The end goal of art, it seems to me, is an attempt to induce a particular subjective experience in another person, and to that end we have constructed massive edifices of arbitrary structures: literary and artistic forms, systems of ethics and theology, the various modes of societal organization that make everything else possible. Like the products of science, these have gone through millennia of investigation, testing, and refinement to end up where we are today.

There is no more fundamentally human drive than the desire to understand the world and shape it to our advantage, and that same drive is the core of both quantitative and qualitative scholarship. The sciences aren’t engaged in a distinctly different project than “the humanities,” they’re pursuing the same goal by different means. Picking one of these groups of approaches out to celebrate as “grasp[ing] human things in human terms” is an insult to the other.

Of course, the terminology is so deeply entrenched at this point that my little blog bit is quixotic to an extreme degree. But, you know, it’s my bit, and I will continue to quietly hate it when people from qualitative academia attempt to claim more-human status for their areas than mine.

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