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Another Terrible Defense of “The Humanities” [Uncertain Principles]

Tuesday, October 27, 2015 7:17
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Somebody in my social media feeds passed along a link to this interview with Berkeley professor Daniel Boyarin about “the humanities,” at NPR’s science-y blog. This is, of course, relevant to my interests, but sadly, but while it’s a short piece, it contains a lot to hate.

For one thing, after the dismissive one-two of “so-called ‘scientific methods’” (Scare quotes! “So-called”! Two great tastes that taste great together!) in the process of trying to re-brand “the humanities” as “the human sciences,” Boyarin offers the following on methodology:

The primary method for the study of humans through the investigation of their cultural products is interpretation. Any discipline, including, obviously, anthropology and history (frequently, as at Berkeley, listed as social sciences) may have significant truck with interpretation as well, and then form part of this formation of “the sciences of the human” that we propose. I would say that the greatest difference, as far as I understand scientific method, is that for us hypotheses emerge from the data as we study and interpret, and are constantly being modified and corrected, while the natural sciences seem to begin with hypotheses that they test.

That’s a misunderstanding of scientific practice that ought to embarrass an undergraduate, let alone a distinguished professor claiming to offer a useful perspective on the grand sweep of human knowledge. Science is all about hypotheses that emerge from the data, and going where the data lead. Nobody just sat down and said “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if electrons had wave nature?” They were led to that idea because it emerged from a long chain of odd experiments. Nobody said “Wouldn’t it be cool if the universe were full of stuff we can’t detect?” The notion of dark matter emerged from careful observations of galaxies.

If I were to spout equivalent nonsense about “the humanities”– “Literary scholarship is about reading dusty old books and identifying the symbolism in them,”– I’d get ripped apart, and deservedly so. There’s no excuse for a scholar of the “human sciences” to be working off the model of science you would use for a fifth-grade science fair.

The other infuriating thing about this is the last three questions, which are really different angles on the same question, which Boyarin dances away from each time, closing with another cheap shot at science:

So what would you say to persuade someone who is skeptical of the value of basic research in the humanities?

Simply that the understanding of humans by humans is as important an endeavor as understanding the physics of distant star systems.

Again, this is exactly the kind of grandly dismissive arrogance that scholars in “the humanities” bristle at when it’s directed their way. If I wrote “Understanding the fundamental laws governing our universe is more important than learning to read poetry in dead languages,” my colleagues on the other side of campus would jump all over me. And rightly so, because I’d be a condescending dick. It’s no less offensive coming the other way.

I wouldn’t be where I am and doing what I do if I didn’t find value in the study of art and literature. But it absolutely drives me nuts when people who do this stuff for a living offer defenses of their field that are just smugly elitist platitudes and soaring vagueness. Again and again, I read these supposedly stirring defenses of “the humanities” and come away with the impression that their principal virtue is teaching you how to sound smart while avoiding answering a direct question. And that’s a skill set we could stand to have a lot less of.



Source: http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2015/10/27/another-terrible-defense-of-the-humanities/

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