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A practical case on why we need the humanities

47 points by jpeanuts 6y ago

recursivedoubts 6y ago
The academic humanities departments have made their bed over the last fifty years. Now they may lie in it.
- apsec112 6y ago
  Sorry, I'm not sure what you're referring to?
  - eggsmediumrare 6y ago
    I'm guessing over-admission, watered down standards and acquiescence to bad ideas, but I can't speak for the original poster.
    - recursivedoubts 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        > 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 6y ago
        Here is an example... 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/ https://reason.com/2020/06/10/ucla-business-school-lecturer-...
        ianleeclark 6y ago
        Im sorry, but I'm not getting your point. A guy in a non-humanities field of study got put on involuntary leave, and, in your mind, this is due to the humanities department?
        mcguire 6y ago
        "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 6y ago
        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.
        recursivedoubts 6y ago
        Of course not. There are wonderful resources for getting a liberal education today. More than ever, in fact, and far less expensive than ever as well. They just have nothing to do with going into a humanities department.
        ianleeclark 6y ago
        A liberal education, by definition, includes the humanities. What's the point of using a forum for discussion if you're just going to make vague assertions and never bother to back them up? You talk of fear and loathing, yet seemingly operate on visceral reaction given that you continually refuse/are unable to list your grievances.
      - spacegod 6y ago
        "Close-mindedness that would make John Calvin blush." I swear that some of you (Silicon Valley autists) can think only memetically. Truly a tragedy. "There is no chance I would let a university humanities department anywhere near my children at this point." They wouldn't let your child in it to begin with. Let me share an anecdote: Out of the seven friends that I have that graduated with engineering degrees, only 1 is still an engineer. Most regret it since it hampered their social skills. On the other hand, the Chinese language and History double major is pulling in bank by luring in Chinese real estate investment. He is easily the most happy out of all of us. STEM is a meme that needs to die. America does not need any more biology, chemical engineering or physics undergrads. It needs stats, philosophy, and accounting undergrads. It needs people who can maneuver political systems with ease. It needs people who can approach a problem from 15 different angles and see them for what they are. Specialization is not king. Adaptability is.
      - glial 6y ago
        I went to St John's College. Loved every minute of it. It may be the exception that proves the rule, however.
  - lr4444lr 6y ago
    The Sokal Hoax was a loud canary in the coalmine that was ignored: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
  - pnako 6y ago
    Humanities departments becoming de-facto meetings of the party, as opposed to a cafe where philosophers of all strokes meet to exchange ideas.
throwawaysea 6y 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-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/ https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...), I don’t see it affecting the momentum of these dubious programs at modern universities.
- sinker 6y 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.
aliante 6y 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. Generating propaganda? As that is all they seem to do.
currymj 6y 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 6y 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.
  - currymj 6y 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.)
- haihaibye 6y 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 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.
aliante 6y ago
Humanities have been demonstrated to be often incoherent rubbish: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
Frippy 6y 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 6y 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
  - Frippy 6y 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.
- mc32 6y 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).
arminiusreturns 6y 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.
jseliger 6y 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 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-before-you-start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and-opportunity-costs/ 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-deconstruction 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 https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview.
peter303 6y 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 6y 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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  It should be smashed, because what you think its obviously correct yes?
Chathamization 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
- mcguire 6y 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 6y 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?
    - throwawaysea 6y ago
      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/
rayiner 6y 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?
- sinker 6y 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.
- JamesBarney 6y 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 6y 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.
  - JamesBarney 6y ago
    Then maybe we shouldn't be spending billions of dollars leading a bunches of horses that aren't thirsty to water.
sinker 6y 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 6y 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.

47 points by jpeanuts 6y ago

recursivedoubts 6y ago

The academic humanities departments have made their bed over the last fifty years. Now they may lie in it.

apsec112 6y ago
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're referring to?
- eggsmediumrare 6y ago
  I'm guessing over-admission, watered down standards and acquiescence to bad ideas, but I can't speak for the original poster.
  - recursivedoubts 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      > 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 6y ago
        Here is an example... 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/ https://reason.com/2020/06/10/ucla-business-school-lecturer-...
        ianleeclark 6y ago
        Im sorry, but I'm not getting your point. A guy in a non-humanities field of study got put on involuntary leave, and, in your mind, this is due to the humanities department?
        mcguire 6y ago
        "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 6y ago
        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.
      - recursivedoubts 6y ago
        Of course not. There are wonderful resources for getting a liberal education today. More than ever, in fact, and far less expensive than ever as well. They just have nothing to do with going into a humanities department.
        ianleeclark 6y ago
        A liberal education, by definition, includes the humanities. What's the point of using a forum for discussion if you're just going to make vague assertions and never bother to back them up? You talk of fear and loathing, yet seemingly operate on visceral reaction given that you continually refuse/are unable to list your grievances.
    - spacegod 6y ago
      "Close-mindedness that would make John Calvin blush." I swear that some of you (Silicon Valley autists) can think only memetically. Truly a tragedy. "There is no chance I would let a university humanities department anywhere near my children at this point." They wouldn't let your child in it to begin with. Let me share an anecdote: Out of the seven friends that I have that graduated with engineering degrees, only 1 is still an engineer. Most regret it since it hampered their social skills. On the other hand, the Chinese language and History double major is pulling in bank by luring in Chinese real estate investment. He is easily the most happy out of all of us. STEM is a meme that needs to die. America does not need any more biology, chemical engineering or physics undergrads. It needs stats, philosophy, and accounting undergrads. It needs people who can maneuver political systems with ease. It needs people who can approach a problem from 15 different angles and see them for what they are. Specialization is not king. Adaptability is.
    - glial 6y ago
      I went to St John's College. Loved every minute of it. It may be the exception that proves the rule, however.
- lr4444lr 6y ago
  The Sokal Hoax was a loud canary in the coalmine that was ignored: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
- pnako 6y ago
  Humanities departments becoming de-facto meetings of the party, as opposed to a cafe where philosophers of all strokes meet to exchange ideas.

throwawaysea 6y 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-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/ https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...), I don’t see it affecting the momentum of these dubious programs at modern universities.

sinker 6y 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.

aliante 6y ago

currymj 6y 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 6y 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.
- currymj 6y 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.)
haihaibye 6y 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 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.

aliante 6y ago

Humanities have been demonstrated to be often incoherent rubbish: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

Frippy 6y 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 6y 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
- Frippy 6y 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.
mc32 6y 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).

arminiusreturns 6y 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.

jseliger 6y 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 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-before-you-start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and-opportunity-costs/ 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-deconstruction 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 https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview.

peter303 6y 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 6y 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.

deleted 6y ago
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throwaway2048 6y ago
It should be smashed, because what you think its obviously correct yes?

Chathamization 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.

mcguire 6y 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 6y 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?
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    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/

rayiner 6y 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?

sinker 6y 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.
JamesBarney 6y 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 6y 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.
- JamesBarney 6y ago
  Then maybe we shouldn't be spending billions of dollars leading a bunches of horses that aren't thirsty to water.

sinker 6y 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 6y 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.