The New York Times’s latest contribution to the humanities death vigil is making the rounds amongst the many grad students peering over into the chasm of unemployment and obsolescence. It’s a disheartening read, sure, but hardly news: the humanities, at least on the twin registers of undergrad enrollment and social prestige, have been in steady decline for at least two decades now. Scarcely a week goes by without another sentimental elegy from an English professor near retirement or a cautionary tale from a penniless adjunct lecturer. The humanities took receipt of the Black Spot many years ago, and have since been doing exactly what Billy Bones did in the same circumstances: ginning up their courage before the inevitable stroke.
The trouble, of course, is that the humanities presumably do nothing instrumental. They don’t get you ready for a job, they don’t teach you how to solve problems or Chase The Dynamic New Economy, they don’t introduce you to venture capitalists at networking events. All of which gets abstracted to the point where the humanities are considered luxuries of a delicate mind, fields of learning which do nothing at all. Partly this is the result of the New Positivism creeping out of the cognitive sciences; partly it is the result of a secular shift towards market-impact measurement of scholarly work; and partly it is the result of the humanities themselves retreating into an ever-gauzier mirror world of auto-justification.
Yet one other reason, I think, why the humanities seem so non-instrumental is because we have grown politically timid around anything resembling “human engineering.” The term smacks heavily of Stalin, Zhdanov, and Xiaoping, of literary apparatchiks serving the cause of a petty, dogmatic, and totalitarian state. The term “social engineering” is widely used by conservatives to tar anything even with even a whiff of socialism. A twentieth century full of dastardly manipulators of the human mind have left us twenty-first century denizens understandably skittish around any attempts to design behavior. So the humanities talk vaguely about “learning to think critically” or “understanding what it is to be human,” and avoid any insurrectionary talk of building better people.
I think it’s time for the humanities to reclaim “social engineering” and “human engineering.” Just as chemical engineering can be used to create both nerve-gas chambers and polio vaccines, or just as mechanical engineering can be used to build both unmanned death drones and bionic legs for amputees, so too can an engineering aimed at humankind produce both oppressive conformity and a more neighborly tomorrow. And it is exactly these problems of how to get along with each other which are amongst the most important and most troublesome as we look ahead to life on an increasingly crowded planet. After all, we’ve figured out how to squeeze bushels of wheat out of a single acre, how to speed around the world at hundreds of miles an hour, how to call up a world’s worth of data at a moment’s notice, and how to manipulate the molecules of life itself. Yet we’ve still struggled to learn how to become better, nicer, happier, more decent, and more convivial people. We live in an age in which everything has been engineered with a wizardly proficiency—everything, that is, except ourselves.
I should point out that I don’t mean to suggest the humanities should collapse themselves into the applied social sciences. Nor do I think that humans—either in individuals or groups—are merely complex machines which can be managed with scientific precision. Instead, I think that the humanities remain our greatest and best tool for creating better people in the broadest sense of the term: people who can relate to both themselves and others by way of a generous moral imagination. The need for such people—not just a small class of them, but a whole world full of them—is far more pressing than the need for new iPhone games, cheaper taxi fares, or even clean energy sources.
At the same time as “human engineering” points at the humanities’ instrumentality, it also puts to rest the widespread assumption that the humanities are somehow easier or softer than the technical fields, the province of people who flunked out of math and prefer pretty things to hard facts. I’ve spent hours of my life debugging computer code, and I’ve spent years of my life getting along with neighbors and co-workers. It is the latter which is by far the more challenging intellectual exercise. The ancients asked questions both about how to solve complex polynomials and how to live. We’ve figured out the answers to many of the former questions. The latter we’re still picking away at, and we still have a long way to go. It’d be a shame if we gave up now.
http://viewshed.matinic.us/2013/10/31/565/