So, there’s this cute little graphic making the rounds on the internet. Take a look, and tell me what you see:
If you laughed, I’m disappointed. This joke, to me, represents absolutely everything wrong with the humanities these days.
The joke, essentially, is that scientists are narrow-minded eggheads. They have knowledge, but not wisdom. But your lovable humanities types? Well, they may not know their ass from their elbow as far as recombinant DNA goes, but boy have they got wisdom. Buckets full of wisdom, actually. And as far as they are concerned, letting a 40-foot theropod loose in a modern laboratory is asking for trouble. Scientists, on the other hand, are apparently too stupid to work this out on their own.
I mean, think about this for a moment: pretty much anyone with the intellectual maturity of an 8 year-old, and who has seen Jurassic Park, could understand the dangers of having a T-Rex wandering around (the reptilian ones, anyway – there are also dangers to having 70s glam-rock bands wandering around, but you need to be older to work that one out). How arrogant do you have to be to assume that only humanities training can give you the necessary wisdom to work this out?
The thing is, scientists are actually really good at working out the ramifications of their discoveries on their own. Take the 1975 Asilomar Conference, for instance. When scientists gained the technical ability to start swapping DNA across species in the early 1970s, the entire biological profession took notice. Concern about the implications of these techniques – whose effects at the time were largely unknown – persuaded the entire profession into a 16-month moratorium on its use. The top people in the profession then came together at Asilomar to debate the issue, and come up with guidelines for ensuring the safe use of recombinant DNA techniques (summary available here). And they did this, so far as I can tell, on their own, without help from superior, wisdom-stuffed humanities types. Thus, the joke, at one level, stems from rank ignorance of how science works.
I get that humanities feel picked upon these days. What I don’t get is why they react to this not by saying “humanities have their place”, but rather by exclaiming that “everyone without a humanities degree is a subtlety-free buffoon” (bonus points if you can wedge in something about humanities and citizenship, thus implying nobody else is as qualified to talk about politics). It’s juvenile. And it sure as hell doesn’t win the humanities many friends.
And yes, I know it’s supposed to be a joke. But it’s a poor one, and reflects poorly on those who make it.
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I agree completely. Humanities types, like myself, should be making the case for the value of what we do, not participating in the very us vs them dichotomy that is putting Humanities in peril. We will lose that battle and look foolish doing so.
But let’s be clear, it isn’t lovers of the humanities who are driving the utilitarian, “prove it or lose it” rhetoric in education and in society at large. It is sad that in a poster like this we participate in the debate over the value of the humanities in the very terms dictated by others. But I get the impulse to speak up, even if only in the simplistic terms that reign in the discourse on education these days. Indeed, it seems to be the only language being used and heard.
The idea that a humanities-based education is useless and has no value is likewise “a poor one, and reflects poorly on those who [support] it”.
It’s a bit problematic to say “I know it’s a joke, but…” when you’ve only engaged with the joke at the most literal level. But leaving that aside for a moment, a more charitable reading would suggest that a scientist benefits from both a rigorous scientific education and exposure to the humanities. Not one group of disciplinarians looking down on another, but rather the need for a balanced (dare I say, liberal) education.
That would indeed be a charitable reading of it.