soft humanities and hard sciences

 

SOFT HUMANITIES AND HARD SCIENCES

 

The buzz imperative "follow the science"  associated with COVID-19 pandemic is vague.  Which science is to be followed?  The imperative is a mantra, a formula for belief.  Few people ask which science is to be followed. Science or "normal science" as described in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions  is an evolving complex of experimentation and observation; the process has limits; it is not absolutely objective . In the current practice of everyday thinking, the science is accorded magic authority. It locates faith where scrutiny ought to prevail. 

 

That is a clue about our rarely, if ever, being instructed to "follow the humanities."  C. P. Snow's 1959 treatise The Two Cultures ( which is justly discredited) still haunts the American mind as much as Allan Bloom's  1987 elite critique The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom's subtitle "How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished  the Souls of Today's Students" may be more crucial in 2021 than it was three decades ago.  Thanks to advancing technologies and our nation's rapid shifting from democratic experiments into a carnival of fascism,  more Americans can taste cognitive poverty as we descend into Unknowns.  Is this dread prospect "true"?  Truth be told, we do not have sufficient evidence.  Federal surveillance agencies have yet to conduct qualitative and quantitative inquiries that might yield valid evidence. If they did so, the specter of subjective tampering and methodological difficulties might stir up  doubts regarding the nature of "evidence."

 

 It is relatively true is that  humans possess a powerful will to survive, however hostile their environments might be.  That will leans  toward the material, spirituality notwithstanding. Thus, many people opt to "follow the science."  As Kathleen McCormick suggested in The Culture of Reading & the Teaching of English  (1994), "Their assumption is that reading is a skill, not unlike riding a bicycle, that one has to be taught at an early age, and that once one has learned how to do it, one simply does it, without much thought, when the need arises.  This 'commonsensical' definition of reading as simple taking in of information from a printed page is, to some extent, shared by most people…." (1).  One problem in higher education is the increasing reluctance of students to read printed texts; they have a penchant for reading the Internet screens.  That is the opinion of some of colleagues who still try to teach that careful examination of vocabulary choices and grammatical features in printed  literature and writing has value.  Their uphill struggles prompt me to empathize.

 

 

Consider one of the bullet points in the conclusion of a 2020 American Academy of Arts and Sciences report, The Humanities in American Life: Insights from a Survey of the Public's Attitudes & Engagement regarding  work---

 

"And finally ,  a substantial share of Americans has been hampered at work due to a deficiency in one or more humanities skills, though the survey also reveals that many Americans do not think they need humanities skills in the workplace." (85)

 

This point is immediately followed by a telling paragraph ---

 

"The divide between the academic and public humanities seems particularly relevant because so many of the current conversations about the future of the field are situated within the academic humanities, either in the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed or in blogs and editorials written by students and scholars for a more general audience.  Most of this commentary perceives that public attitudes about the humanities play a critical role in the health of the field, be it in the form of parents dissuading their children from majoring in the humanities, members of the public not reading books by humanities scholars, or administrators and funders shifting funds to other fields." (86)

 

Within the past decade many colleges and universities have shifted attention away from the humanities; they invest in the more lucrative domain of STEM disciplines, where the sciences can offer students better career-promises than can the humanities, can offer teachers of science better salaries and funding for costly research projects.  The trend is logical and pragmatic. It is consonant with the impact of digital humanities on the souls of American students, the temptation to reject "close reading" and to avidly embrace "distant reading." The temptation may involve a paradox. What  undermines the capacity and will for traditional  critical thinking might promote non-traditional forms of thinking we have yet to envision. The jury will be out for a long time.

 

Amoral 21st-century  capitalism profits from the paradox  as the quality of life on our planet  devolves. Would robust collaborations between the soft humanities and the hard sciences in the arena of empirical aesthetics  lead to desirable improvements?  Lacking certainty that improvement would be a result, I recall experiences from my 42 years of teaching literature and composition.  The Distant Reading website assures us that traditionally STEM students need a bridge into the humanities and that traditionally humanities students need to opportunities to explore the computational elements of STEM thinking. I recall bright moments of cross-fertilization in my classes and hope that the intersections of literary thought and humanistic history, soft science psychology and hard science neuroscience can strengthen knowledge about perception (the ancient meaning of aesthetics) in contemporary life. I believe there is credibility in a claim Gerald D. Fischbach made in the September 1992 issue of Scientific American ---"Our survival and probably the survival of this planet depend on a more complete understanding of the human mind.  If we agree to think of the mind as a collection of mental processes rather than as a substance or spirit, it becomes easier to get on with the necessary empirical studies.  In this context the adjective is less provocative than the noun" (48). With 21st-century panache, Katherine N. Hayles challenged us to think in pre-future ways about cultures of reading --"Because human cognitions are increasingly entangled with technical cognitions, it is no longer possible to regard meaning making as an exclusively human (or even biological) prerogative.  The questions that confront us shift accordingly from queries about what, how, where, and why we read to those about the nature of intra-actions in which meaning making occurs as a distributed process circulating in and through human and machine bodies" PMLA 133.5 (October 2018): 1240.  When I combine Hayles's ideas with those Alondra Nelson explored in The Social  Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (2016),  I choose to retain my exclusive human prerogatives.  I do not play with Trojan horses.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            June 7, 2021