On the Value of Not Knowing Everything: http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_arti...lliams.php
EXCERPT: [...] But it’s unclear how much longer the humanities can nurture the Sam McNerneys of the world. Even at Hamilton—a solid liberal arts college—McNerney was, by his own assessment, something of a black sheep. As he indulged the life of the mind, grappling earnestly with timeless philosophical problems, his friends prepared themselves for lucrative careers in law, medicine, and finance. They never criticized his choice—“They never said, ‘You’re going to live a shitty life, Sam,’” he told me—but they didn’t rush to join him in the mosh pit of thought, either.
For all of McNerney’s curiosity—one deeply reflective of a humanistic temperament—it has led him headlong into a topic (the Hard Problem) that has the potential to alter permanently the place of the humanities in academic life. If, after all, Nagel is proven wrong—that is, if subjectivity is in fact reducible to an identifiable network of neural synapses—what is the point of investigating the human condition through a humanistic lens? If what it is like to be human, much less a bat, turns out to be empirically situated in the dense switchboard of the brain, what happens to Shakespeare, Swift, Woolf, or Wittgenstein when it comes to explaining ourselves to ourselves?
It’s perhaps because of this concern that Nagel’s famous essay stays famous, playing a rearguard role in philosophy seminars throughout the country. By challenging the very notion of a biological understanding of consciousness, by positing individual consciousness as an existential reality that defies objectification, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” breathes continual life into a phenomenon—the inner subjectivity of experience—that science has yet to illuminate with empirical exactitude.
The critic Richard Brody noted as much when he wrote last year in The New Yorker that “the ideas that Nagel unfolds ought to be discussed by non-specialists with an interest in the arts, politics, and—quite literally, in this context—the humanities.” He continued:
If Nagel is right, art itself would no longer be merely the scientist’s leisure-time fulfillment but would be (I think, correctly) recognized as a primary mode of coming to grips with the mental and moral essence of the universe. It would be a key source of the very definition of life. Aesthetics will be propelled to the forefront of philosophy as a crucial part of metaphysical biology…. The very beauty of Nagel’s theory—its power to inspire imagination—counts in its favor.
And thus Nagel’s essay—and the humanities—abide.
Behind Brody’s optimism there’s a much-discussed backstory. You’ve heard it repeated like a mantra: The humanities are in crisis. They’re dying. There is a mass exodus of literature and history and anthropology majors. Some say this is overhyped angst. As a history professor who has seen twenty years of change, I disagree. It’s real. A shift is underway in higher education, and that shift, in many ways, mirrors—or at least is a microcosm of—the frenzied quest to solve the mystery of the Hard Problem.
The numbers don’t deny it. Nationally, the number of students majoring in the humanities has fallen substantially since 1970.5 At Stanford, 45 percent of the faculty is trained in the humanities, but only 15 percent of students major in humanities fields. At Yale, between 1971 and 2013 the proportion of humanities majors dropped from 53 percent to 25 percent among women, and from 37 percent to 21 percent among men. Meanwhile, economics has skyrocketed as a preferred major, with the number of economics majors growing almost threefold at traditionally humanities-inclined institutions such as Brown University. The acronym STEM—science, technology, engineering, mathematics—is now part of every university’s lingua franca.
It hardly helped the humanities when a 2012 Georgetown University study found that students in non-technical majors had unemployment rates ranging from 8.9 to 11.1 percent, while graduates in engineering, science, education, and health care had an overall unemployment rate of 5.4 percent. It is for good reason that the top five majors at Duke are now in biology, public policy, economics, psychology, and engineering. English majors must cringe a little bit when they learn that STEM majors make $32,000 more the year they enter “the real world.”
Plausible explanations for the withering of the humanities run the gamut. Writing in The New Criterion, Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, blames old-school identity politics: “The minute professors started speaking of literary works as second to race and queerness, they set the fields on a path of material decline.” (Cranky.) The essayist Arthur Krystal points to the rise of postmodern theory—particularly deconstructionism—as a culprit. After a “defamiliarized zone of symbols and referents” gutted Western thought, he explains, the result was “the expulsion of those ideas that were formerly part of the humanistic charter.” (Stodgy.) But by far the loudest and most controversial response to the crisis in the humanities comes from William Deresiewicz. In his recent book Excellent Sheep, he highlights the scourge of “credentialism” among “entitled little shits.” He asks, “Do young people still have the chance, do they give themselves the chance, to experience the power that ideas have to knock you sideways?” Run ragged by status-driven career agendas, they seem not to. They seem pre-channeled, alienated from the whole notion of ideas for ideas’ sake. “Nothing in their training,” Deresiewicz writes of his pressure-cooked subjects, “has endowed them with a sense that something larger is at stake."
Perhaps an even deeper reason for the humanities’ shrinking status is the intensification of a certain and perhaps temporary habit of mind among today’s undergraduates, a habit that Nagel reminds us has severe limitations: the fierce adherence to quantification. Why this turn has happened at this point in time is difficult to say, but it seems fairly certain that a renewed faith in the power of radical empiricism—not to mention the economic advantages it can confer when judiciously applied post-graduation—has decisively lured students out of the humanities and into fields where the defining questions are reducible to just the facts, thank you.
Those left in the wake of this trend scratch their heads and prove the rule. Consider the experience of Logan Sander, a Princeton freshman majoring in comparative literature. In tenth grade, Sander wrote a paper on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in her English class. As with McNerney, the impact of the experience unexpectedly transformed her ambitions. She quickly fell in love with literature and began to read and study fiction with an inspired urgency, reveling in more questions than answers, seeking insights rather than data.
After graduating first in her class at Southview High School in Sylvania, Ohio, Sander was invited to an event celebrating valedictorians from twenty-five public high schools. There she discovered, a little to her dismay, that she was the only valedictorian planning to pursue a non-scientific field of study. Today, Sander has discovered a dynamic humanistic bubble at Princeton, but still, she observes, “there’s this assumption that if you’re pursuing the humanities you’re not likely to get a good job or make a lot of money.” She remains committed to literature. “Those in it seem to really love what they’re doing,” she told me. Plus, she wondered, “Since when is the value of the humanities based on money?"
Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with an undergraduate shift toward empiricism. Nor is there a problem with pursuing money. Gathering and mapping and deploying objective data will produce everything from a cure for cancer to an app for identifying the finest coffee within a ten-block radius to the best fertilizer for sub-Saharan farmers (and probably has, as far as I know). The quality of human life will surely improve because of such endeavors, and those pursuing them are bound to live accomplished and well-remunerated lives. The world will be better off for their contributions. But…
As Sander says, “The humanities…touch the inner parts of our minds and souls the way technology cannot.” Indeed, what about the inner parts of our minds? Our souls?! What about the shimmering but elusive beauty of subjective experience? What about those things you can’t measure or convey?
When it comes to these questions, it’s worth wondering if empiricism hasn’t run amok in the halls of academe....
EXCERPT: [...] But it’s unclear how much longer the humanities can nurture the Sam McNerneys of the world. Even at Hamilton—a solid liberal arts college—McNerney was, by his own assessment, something of a black sheep. As he indulged the life of the mind, grappling earnestly with timeless philosophical problems, his friends prepared themselves for lucrative careers in law, medicine, and finance. They never criticized his choice—“They never said, ‘You’re going to live a shitty life, Sam,’” he told me—but they didn’t rush to join him in the mosh pit of thought, either.
For all of McNerney’s curiosity—one deeply reflective of a humanistic temperament—it has led him headlong into a topic (the Hard Problem) that has the potential to alter permanently the place of the humanities in academic life. If, after all, Nagel is proven wrong—that is, if subjectivity is in fact reducible to an identifiable network of neural synapses—what is the point of investigating the human condition through a humanistic lens? If what it is like to be human, much less a bat, turns out to be empirically situated in the dense switchboard of the brain, what happens to Shakespeare, Swift, Woolf, or Wittgenstein when it comes to explaining ourselves to ourselves?
It’s perhaps because of this concern that Nagel’s famous essay stays famous, playing a rearguard role in philosophy seminars throughout the country. By challenging the very notion of a biological understanding of consciousness, by positing individual consciousness as an existential reality that defies objectification, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” breathes continual life into a phenomenon—the inner subjectivity of experience—that science has yet to illuminate with empirical exactitude.
The critic Richard Brody noted as much when he wrote last year in The New Yorker that “the ideas that Nagel unfolds ought to be discussed by non-specialists with an interest in the arts, politics, and—quite literally, in this context—the humanities.” He continued:
If Nagel is right, art itself would no longer be merely the scientist’s leisure-time fulfillment but would be (I think, correctly) recognized as a primary mode of coming to grips with the mental and moral essence of the universe. It would be a key source of the very definition of life. Aesthetics will be propelled to the forefront of philosophy as a crucial part of metaphysical biology…. The very beauty of Nagel’s theory—its power to inspire imagination—counts in its favor.
And thus Nagel’s essay—and the humanities—abide.
Behind Brody’s optimism there’s a much-discussed backstory. You’ve heard it repeated like a mantra: The humanities are in crisis. They’re dying. There is a mass exodus of literature and history and anthropology majors. Some say this is overhyped angst. As a history professor who has seen twenty years of change, I disagree. It’s real. A shift is underway in higher education, and that shift, in many ways, mirrors—or at least is a microcosm of—the frenzied quest to solve the mystery of the Hard Problem.
The numbers don’t deny it. Nationally, the number of students majoring in the humanities has fallen substantially since 1970.5 At Stanford, 45 percent of the faculty is trained in the humanities, but only 15 percent of students major in humanities fields. At Yale, between 1971 and 2013 the proportion of humanities majors dropped from 53 percent to 25 percent among women, and from 37 percent to 21 percent among men. Meanwhile, economics has skyrocketed as a preferred major, with the number of economics majors growing almost threefold at traditionally humanities-inclined institutions such as Brown University. The acronym STEM—science, technology, engineering, mathematics—is now part of every university’s lingua franca.
It hardly helped the humanities when a 2012 Georgetown University study found that students in non-technical majors had unemployment rates ranging from 8.9 to 11.1 percent, while graduates in engineering, science, education, and health care had an overall unemployment rate of 5.4 percent. It is for good reason that the top five majors at Duke are now in biology, public policy, economics, psychology, and engineering. English majors must cringe a little bit when they learn that STEM majors make $32,000 more the year they enter “the real world.”
Plausible explanations for the withering of the humanities run the gamut. Writing in The New Criterion, Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, blames old-school identity politics: “The minute professors started speaking of literary works as second to race and queerness, they set the fields on a path of material decline.” (Cranky.) The essayist Arthur Krystal points to the rise of postmodern theory—particularly deconstructionism—as a culprit. After a “defamiliarized zone of symbols and referents” gutted Western thought, he explains, the result was “the expulsion of those ideas that were formerly part of the humanistic charter.” (Stodgy.) But by far the loudest and most controversial response to the crisis in the humanities comes from William Deresiewicz. In his recent book Excellent Sheep, he highlights the scourge of “credentialism” among “entitled little shits.” He asks, “Do young people still have the chance, do they give themselves the chance, to experience the power that ideas have to knock you sideways?” Run ragged by status-driven career agendas, they seem not to. They seem pre-channeled, alienated from the whole notion of ideas for ideas’ sake. “Nothing in their training,” Deresiewicz writes of his pressure-cooked subjects, “has endowed them with a sense that something larger is at stake."
Perhaps an even deeper reason for the humanities’ shrinking status is the intensification of a certain and perhaps temporary habit of mind among today’s undergraduates, a habit that Nagel reminds us has severe limitations: the fierce adherence to quantification. Why this turn has happened at this point in time is difficult to say, but it seems fairly certain that a renewed faith in the power of radical empiricism—not to mention the economic advantages it can confer when judiciously applied post-graduation—has decisively lured students out of the humanities and into fields where the defining questions are reducible to just the facts, thank you.
Those left in the wake of this trend scratch their heads and prove the rule. Consider the experience of Logan Sander, a Princeton freshman majoring in comparative literature. In tenth grade, Sander wrote a paper on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in her English class. As with McNerney, the impact of the experience unexpectedly transformed her ambitions. She quickly fell in love with literature and began to read and study fiction with an inspired urgency, reveling in more questions than answers, seeking insights rather than data.
After graduating first in her class at Southview High School in Sylvania, Ohio, Sander was invited to an event celebrating valedictorians from twenty-five public high schools. There she discovered, a little to her dismay, that she was the only valedictorian planning to pursue a non-scientific field of study. Today, Sander has discovered a dynamic humanistic bubble at Princeton, but still, she observes, “there’s this assumption that if you’re pursuing the humanities you’re not likely to get a good job or make a lot of money.” She remains committed to literature. “Those in it seem to really love what they’re doing,” she told me. Plus, she wondered, “Since when is the value of the humanities based on money?"
Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with an undergraduate shift toward empiricism. Nor is there a problem with pursuing money. Gathering and mapping and deploying objective data will produce everything from a cure for cancer to an app for identifying the finest coffee within a ten-block radius to the best fertilizer for sub-Saharan farmers (and probably has, as far as I know). The quality of human life will surely improve because of such endeavors, and those pursuing them are bound to live accomplished and well-remunerated lives. The world will be better off for their contributions. But…
As Sander says, “The humanities…touch the inner parts of our minds and souls the way technology cannot.” Indeed, what about the inner parts of our minds? Our souls?! What about the shimmering but elusive beauty of subjective experience? What about those things you can’t measure or convey?
When it comes to these questions, it’s worth wondering if empiricism hasn’t run amok in the halls of academe....