A discourse request, mostly directed at @slatestarscratchpad –
Can we not casually equate “fuzzy / empathy-oriented / non-systematic thinking” with “the humanities?”
“The humanities” is a field of intellectual inquiry. Practiced properly, it involves rigor and clear logic – not experiment, not quantification (usually), not empirical data (usually), but definable principles and arguments that proceed cogently from those principles. The people who are good at it are not that different, in ability or in temperament, from the people who are good at science.
[…you know that philosophy counts, right? That High Holy Utilitarianism itself is a product of the humanities?]
If you want to point out that we live in a world in which humanities scholars and humanities departments often seem to prefer feelings to reason, well, I can’t really argue with that. But making a bad-thinking totem out of “the humanities” in the abstract…cedes a lot of ground, unnecessarily, to people who don’t deserve it. And insults a lot of people who do good work.
I staunchly maintain that math belongs with the humanities and not with the sciences.
IMO “the humanities” is an ambiguous term in much the same was as, say, “intellectuals,” or (in a more obvious/straightforward way) “theory” – terms that can semantically cover vast swaths of human mental activity but carry a lot of more specific connotations/implicatures
Consider “intellectuals,” for instance – the word is often casually used to just mean “people who think a lot” or even “smart people,” but because of its history, my prototypical image of an “intellectual” is something like one of the New York Intellectuals, while my imagine of a “person who thinks a lot” or a “smart person” are much vaguely and less tied to specific historical circumstances
Likewise, “the humanities” has a history of use in recent conversations about the American academy, which lends it a whole cloud of associations.
It’s important not to conflate the broad meanings with the narrow ones, but this doesn’t require (say) critics to take the pose of “the current narrow meaning is a corruption of the good, broad concept.” Perhaps the very idea of the broad concept is a-historical (just a succession of narrow concepts we may not want to lump together), etc.
True, as far as it goes. But I am actively asserting that – what’s the phrase the kids love these days? – the usage of “humanities” that we see here fails to carve reality at the joints, and leads to confusion (and in fact to concrete harm).
My social circle contains mathematicians, physicists, biologists, philosophers, scholars of literature, and historians. These are basically the same people, culturally and temperamentally, with random very-granular differences in the distribution of their talents and interests. They read the same stuff and play the same games. If you hung out with the lot of them for an hour, and didn’t ask domain-expertise-specific questions, I very much doubt you’d be able to sort them by field.
And yet we live in an age when “STEM” (ugh) and “the humanities” are basically at war. When someone like @slatestarscratchpad, who talks all the time about how he’s not a doer-of-math, who is famous literally for writing critical essays about culture and society, apparently finds it intuitive to use “the humanities” as the umbrella for the group of people containing crystal-healers, Islamists, and Trump.
The much-ballyhooed negative consequence here is “there’s a reputation war, the humanities lose hard because Science is the Future, a lot of worthwhile scholarship gets unfunded and a lot of kids never learn Valuable Humanities Things.” Maybe that actually bothers you, maybe it doesn’t; speaking for myself, I’m not thrilled about this outcome.
The less-ballyhooed-but-worse consequence is that it drives people mad. Science folks are repeatedly told that nothing worthwhile is ever generated on the other side of the academy, and so they fall prey to ancient errors, or waste huge amounts of time and effort reinventing intellectual wheels. Humanities folks know perfectly well how hard they’re losing the reputation war, and so they manage to simultaneously (a) debase their work in a frantic futile attempt to look as “hard” and “sciencey” as the next-hardest-and-most-sciencey discipline, and (b) despair, and come to view logic and reasoning as the enemy, and put ever more resources into the once-miniscule Actual Worthless Gibberish sub-branches of their fields.
I am not prepared to let this usage shift go without a fight.
I should perhaps clarify that my original post was (somewhat elliptically) agreeing with you.
There is a real (if continuously varying) difference between “the sciences” and “the humanities”. I claim that math is on the “humanities” side of it.
But if one is looking at the divide between “systematizing, numerical, utilitarian” and “empathizing, feelings, fuzzy”, no one is going to put math on the latter side of the divide. (You can make the same argument with the field of philosophy, but math is my field so I feel more comfortable speaking to it).
(Similarly, I would claim that psychology is definitely a science, but often on the “fuzzy empathizing” side of things within the academy).
So claiming that math is part of the humanities is very specifically rejecting the argment that “science” is “good and clear thinking” or even “systematizing and utilitarian” or whatever.
I agree with you that there’s no necessary difference.
The problem is, I’m trying to gesture at something that there isn’t a good word for. If I gesture at something like “rural Trump supporter”, you know that I’m trying to refer to something like an uneducated blue-collar hick. Technically this is probably totally wrong - some rural Trump supporters are probably patrician old-money WASPs who live in the Hamptons and vote Trump because he will lower their taxes. But I’m trying to gesture at a thing, you probably get what I’m trying to gesture at, and I feel like the communication has mostly worked and everyone knows what everyone else means.
I know that some people in “the humanities” are those people who do computer analyses of Shakespeare texts to see if they contain the word “the” more often than other Shakespeare texts with enough statistical significance to conclude that maybe they were written by different people. I expect these people cluster with mathematicians and computer scientists in whatever demographic ways it is people cluster together.
But do you have a point other than making me use annoying circumlocutions like “the humanities that are exactly typical of what you think I mean when I say ‘the humanities’, not including the computer-analysis-of-Shakespeare’ sorts”?
The point I’m trying to make is that you’re drawing the big dividing line in the wrong place, and that because of this you’re trying to gesture at a thing that does not actually exist.
Which is to say –
Let’s posit a really rough taxonomy of Humanities Scholars with three buckets.
1) Quantitative-thinking-oriented spreadsheet-loving nerds who write code to analyze the frequency of word usage in the text of famous playwrights, and people like that.
2) Foam-flecked post-structuralists who like to give lectures about how Science is a Lie of the Evil Western Penis, and people like that.
3) Bookish word-lovers who write papers about the ways in which you can’t properly understand various classic novels without knowing the proper historical context, and people like that.
Your model seems to be (rightly) dismissing Bucket 1 as a tiny collection of edge cases, and grouping Buckets 2 and 3 into…some greater cultural construct, taking Bucket 2 as the type-signifier.
This seems crazy to me on a couple of fronts. Bucket 2 is probably larger than Bucket 1, but it’s not all that much larger. The question that matters is what you do with the people in Bucket 3, which is by far the biggest. And it seems obvious that they have way, way, way more in common with the Science Nerds than they do with almost anyone else on Earth. Both in terms of personal temperament and in terms of the work that they do.
(This is somewhat confused by the fact that everyone seems to have agreed that the Bucket 2 people belong in the spotlight, because they’re the ones who actually enjoy being there, and because people on the other side of the culture war love hating them. It is more confused by the fact that nerdy methodical logic-minded Bucket 3 people often write papers with names like “Analyzing $TEXT_NAME From a Feminist Perspective,” which sounds like it might be Bucket 2 hooting if you don’t bother to read it, but probably looks a lot more like one of your blog posts than like that thing.)
I think you have your mental categories wrong. I think you are telling a big swathe of people who are Basically Just Like You that they are in fact Nothing Like You, and that all parties are likely to lose out as a result of this.
I really don’t think I am.
I think there are non-so-called-autistic people who are great people, who advance their chosen fields and society more generally, and who I have nothing but love and appreciation for.
I also think those people think differently than I do, that we probably have all sorts of complicated contrasts in our world-views that I’ll never be legibly able to explain, and that it’s reasonable to group them separately from me.
My joke about New Atheists believing in a conspiracy of crystal healers and Trump supporters was exactly a joke. I’m not all that worried about either. The people I’m talking about are exactly the reasonable, likeable, intelligent humanists. I have nothing against these people and agree they’re good in lots of ways. But there are going to be a lot of issues where we’re naturally on different sides, and I don’t want to them to have a weapon they can beat me over the head with forever.
Compare the difference between liberals and conservatives. Liberals can talk all they want about Richard Spencer, but the average conservative is your neighbor Joe who goes to church weekly and is a really nice guy. That doesn’t mean there’s no difference between liberals and conservatives, or that it’s not worth identifying some way that conservatives falsely accuse liberals of being bad people and responding to that accusation.
I apologize for somewhat piling-on, since I think balioc and bambamramfan have been doing an excellent job of articulating this position. But I did want to add a bit.
There are a few different distinctions we could make:
systematizing versus empathizing. I don’t like the term “empathizing” for the opposite of “systematizing” but it’s fine, I guess. I think this is your not-really-autistic axis.
Mathy versus non-mathy.
Clear thinking versus muddy thinking.
Humanities versus sciences.
(This way of writing is probably incredibly systematizing.)
I read you as explicitly claiming that 1 and 4 have a high degree of overlap. You’re implicitly but maybe not intentionally also sort of grouping 2 and 3 in there as well.
But when you (and @brazenautomaton) talk about how you “can’t hold people to logic”, then not only are you walking into the Achilles-and-the-Tortoise critique, but you also seem to be trying to wrap three in there.
And this is spectacularly unfair to most humanities scholars, who really are trying to do good work and come to clean conclusions that they can defend. And many of them do, and even when they fail they mostly fail in, like, super boring ways. Most published research is false, and all that. There’s a lot of good and rigorous and falsifiable humanities scholarship
(The connection between 4 and 2 should probably be obvious for the traditional divisions. And honestly drives most of the traditional divisions—this is why math is still lumped in with the sciences, despite my protests).
But there’s one more very important point that Balioc made. You’re underestimating how much the humanities side of the academy has with the science side of the academy, compared to, like, everyone else.
You talk about the difference between liberals and conservatives. And those are real differences. But when you’re talking about the sciences and the humanities, then at best you’re comparing the conservative wonks to the liberal wonks. And one of the eternal truths/ironies of political hores race coverage is that the conservative wonks and the liberal wonks have far more in common with each other than they do with the bases of the parties.
I agree with you that there’s a group you want to complain about. A couple of different such groups, honestly. But “the humanities” is terrible synecdoche for those groups, in a way that reinforces some really unfortunate prejudices and beliefs on all sides of the issue.
The balioc post on holding people to logic was a different, not-really-related thread of conversation. He was the one who brought up these hypothetical people who don’t believe in logic, not me. I never claimed this was typical of humanities scholars, and I feel like this entire conversation has been people saying “You believe all/most humanities scholars are like X!” and me insisting “NO I DON’T” and nobody believing me.
I wrote the gender attitudes post within the context that some people really hate systematizing types and try pretty hard to lower their status in various ways. Sam Kriss is the first name who comes to mind, though I won’t claim he’s 100% typical or exactly what I’m trying to gesture at or anything like that. I don’t know how many of these people explicitly operate under the banner of “the humanities”, but something like that is clearly implied.
Granted that 99% of humanities people don’t care about this and just want to read Shakespeare or something, and 99% of tech people don’t care about this and just want to write compute programs or something. This is about as relevant as the fact that 99% of Americans and Iranians don’t care about their respective countries’ disagreements, or how there are a bunch of Iranians who support democracy, or how there are a bunch of Americans who support Shia Islam, and so on, and whatever else you care to make me concede about the complexity and nuance of the situation.
The point is that in real life, there is a conflict (albeit a small and smoldering one that’s worth trying to minimize rather than fight) it probably does have something to do with different ideologies, and if one side is spreading falsehoods about the other, it’s okay for the other side to identify that and mention it without having some sophistcated theory about exactly what hyperplane most accurately separates ideologyspace into two sides. I agree “tech vs. humanities” is not actually the name of the conflict, which is why I avoided mentioning either “tech” or “humanities” except in the context of portmanteaus like
“humanities/empathizing/intuitive” to try to make it clear that I didn’t have a good name for what I meant, but that all of those things were not-quite-right-but-suggestive pointers.
I think everyone in the world knows what “STEM vs. humanities” means, and would say “Oh, yeah, that’s an ideological difference that exists”, which I think makes it a useful pointer alongside things like “empathizing vs. systematizing” which nobody has a good feel for.
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