I often laugh out loud at Ross Douthat’s New York Times columns that worry over strange spiritualisms taking over America, or try to unravel cultural knots that he always suggests might best be resolved by Catholicism (or even one of those lesser faiths), but I did enjoy his take today on the perishing of the humanities in America’s universities and colleges. I routinely read into the 18th and 19th centuries as an exploration of how language was once used. I read analytically, that is. Plots are picked apart. Characterization is considered. Clausal embedding is almost always more ornate than contemporary writing where such elaborations are pretentious or, at least, overwrought. I also (try to) read original versions of Balzac or Flaubert as an exercise in improving my French. What is less interesting to me are the class conflicts, racism, and gender roles from those bygone days. People are rotten enough today; I hardly need a reminder that we were always rotten and had reinforcing institutions and traditions overlaying that malaise.
But is there a threat to a decline in the participation in the humanities and a shift to STEM fields among university students? The argument is that it impacts our understanding of history and the drivers that got us here today. Perhaps it also diminishes our knowledge of logic and reason when philosophy is subtracted from the curriculum. Or just that the student never learns to articulate complex ideas and arguments.
An alternative to Douthat’s calls for monastic recitation and memorization as a grounding for the transmission of ideas is to make it more relevant to the STEM fields that have money and mindshare. In other words, inveigle the humanities into STEM; don’t fight, infiltrate. Biology has a rich tradition that extends back before Darwin to vitalism and Aristotle. There are the writings of the Social Darwinists and how they influenced Nazism and Muscular Christianity. There is a rich philosophical tradition in the arguments of evolutionary epistemology and the conflict over how science works, including distinguishing logical processes like abduction, deduction, and inference. Physics is equally rich, extending to pre-Classical Greek ideas of atomism and playing a central role in the rise of deism and pantheism in the Enlightenment that were influential to the founding of America. Computer science is tangled up with cognitive science that builds on notions like dualism and connects to the cultic imaginings of Pythagoras, including transmigration of souls and conflicts over democracy. And in a modern America where everything is political, everything can also be deconstructed into conflicts over class and gender, and imbued with a kind of political animism that emerges from verbose Continental traditions, but that also provides an opportunity to argue against, write for, and interrogate the pillars of rationality and empiricism that the STEM student takes for granted as true and valuable.
This is a kind of consilience rather than a retrograde fear of being extinguished. It requires reacting not with distress but embracing change and finding a channel for influence. The methodology remains the same but it requires expanding the canon and enriching it with relevance to a broader audience. Retreating to a monastery with precious Jane Eyre just accelerates the loss of great ideas that can have impact.
Edits