Don’t Dismiss the Humanities

What use could the humanities be in a digital age?

University students focusing on the humanities may end up, at least in their parents’
nightmares, as dog-walkers for those majoring in computer science. But, for me, the
humanities are not only relevant but also give us a toolbox to think seriously about
ourselves and the world.

I wouldn’t want everybody to be an art or literature major, but the world would be
poorer — figuratively, anyway — if we were all coding software or running companies.
We also want musicians to awaken our souls, writers to lead us into fictional lands, and
philosophers to help us exercise our minds and engage the world.

Skeptics may see philosophy as the most irrelevant and self-indulgent of the humanities,
but the way I understand the world is shaped by three philosophers in particular.

First, Sir Isaiah Berlin described the world as muddled and complex, with many
competing values yet no simple yardstick to determine which should trump the others.
We yearn for One True Answer, but it’s our lot to struggle to reconcile inconsistent goals.
He referred to this as pluralism of values.

Yet Sir Isaiah also cautioned against the hand-wringing that sometimes paralyzes
intellectuals, the idea that everything is so complex, nuanced and uncertain that one
cannot act. It’s the idea pilloried by Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.”

Sir Isaiah argued for acknowledging doubts and uncertainty — and then forging
ahead. “Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed,”
he wrote. “Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and
secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of
childhood.”

Second, John Rawls offers a useful way of thinking about today’s issues such as
inequality or poverty, of institutionalizing what our society gravely lacks: empathy. He
explores basic questions of fairness, leading to a compelling explanation for why we
should create safety nets to support the poor and good schools to help their kids
achieve a better life.

Rawls suggests imagining that we all gather to agree on a social contract, but from an
“original position” so that we don’t know if we will be rich or poor, smart or dumb,
diligent or lazy, American or Bangladeshi. If we don’t know whether we’ll be born in a
wealthy suburban family or to a single mom in an inner city, we’ll be more inclined to
favor measures that protect those at the bottom.
Or, in the context of today’s news, we may be less likely to deport Honduran
children back to the desolate conditions from which they have fled.

We still will allow for inequality to create incentives for economic growth, but Rawls
suggests that, from an original position, we will choose structures that allow inequality
only when the least advantaged members of society also benefit.

Third, Peter Singer of Princeton University has pioneered the public discussion of our
moral obligations to animals, including those we raise to eat. Singer wrote a landmark
book in 1975, “Animal Liberation,” and cites utilitarian reasoning to argue that it’s wrong
to inflict cruelty on cows, hogs or chickens just so that we can enjoy a tasty lunch.

It has long been recognized that we have some ethical obligations that transcend our
species; that’s why we’re arrested if we torture kittens or organize dog fights. But Singer
focused squarely on industrial agriculture and the thrice-daily question of what we put
on our plates, turning that into not just a gastronomical issue but also a moral one.

I’m not a vegetarian, although I’m sometimes tempted, but Singer’s arguments still
apply. Do we skip regular eggs or pay more for cage-free? Should I eat goose liver pâté
(achieved by torturing geese)? Do we give preference to restaurants that try to source
pork or chicken in ways that inflict less pain?

So let me push back at the idea that the humanities are obscure, arcane and
irrelevant. These three philosophers influence the way I think about politics, immigration,
inequality; they even affect what I eat.

It’s also worth pointing out that these three philosophers are recent ones. To adapt to a
changing world, we need new software for our cellphones; we also need new ideas.
The same goes for literature, for architecture, languages and theology.

Our world is enriched when coders and marketers dazzle us with smartphones and
tablets, but, by themselves, they are just slabs. It is the music, essays, entertainment and
provocations that they access, spawned by the humanities, that animate them — and
us.

So, yes, the humanities are still relevant in the 21st century — every bit as relevant as an
iPhone.

(Kristof, N., August 13, 2014, Don’t Dismiss the Humanities)

Why liberal arts and the humanities
are as important as engineering
Earlier in my academic career, I used to advise students to focus on science and engineering,

believing these subjects were a prerequisite for success in business. I had largely agreed with Bill

Gates’s assertions that America needed to spend its limited education budgets on these

disciplines, rather than on the liberal arts and humanities, because they produced the most jobs.

This was in a different era of technology and well before I learned what makes the technology

industry tick.

In 2008, my research teams at Duke and Harvard surveyed 652 U.S.-born chief executives and

heads of product engineering at 502 technology companies. We found that they tended to be

highly educated, 92 percent holding bachelor’s degrees and 47 percent holding higher degrees.

Hardly 37 percent held degrees in engineering or computer technology, and just 2 percent held

degrees in mathematics. The rest had degrees in fields as diverse as business, accounting, health

care, and arts and the humanities.

We learned that although a degree made a big difference in the success of an entrepreneur, the

field it was in and the school that it was from were not significant factors. YouTube chief

executive Susan Wojcicki, for instance, majored in history and literature; Slack founder Stewart

Butterfield in English; Airbnb founder Brian Chesky in the fine arts. And, in China, Alibaba

chief executive Jack Ma has a bachelor’s in English.

Steve Jobs touted the importance of liberal arts and humanities at the unveiling of the iPad 2:

“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal

arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing, and nowhere
is that more true than in these post-PC devices.” With this focus, he built the most valuable

company in the world and set new standards for the technology industry.

Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell, who majored in English, also emphasized this. I recently asked

him how he had turned his company around and caused its stock price to increase by an

astonishing 450 percent over five years. He said that it was through relentlessly focusing on

design in every product the company built; that engineering is important but what makes a

technology product most successful is its design.

And now, a technological shift is in progress that will change the rules of innovation. A broad

range of technologies, such as computing, artificial intelligence, digital medicine, robotics, and

synthetic biology, are advancing exponentially and converging, making amazing things possible.

With the convergence of medicine, artificial intelligence, and sensors, we can create digital

doctors that monitor our health and help us prevent disease; with the advances in genomics and

gene editing, we have the ability to create plants that are drought resistant and that feed the

planet; with robots powered by artificial intelligence, we can build digital companions for the

elderly. Nanomaterial advances are enabling a new generation of solar and storage technologies

that will make energy affordable and available to all.

Creating solutions such as these requires a knowledge of fields such as biology, education, health

sciences, and human behavior. Tackling today’s biggest social and technological challenges

requires the ability to think critically about their human context, which is something humanities

graduates are trained to do.

An engineering degree is very valuable, but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts,

literature, and psychology provides a big advantage in design. A history major who has studied
the Enlightenment or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire gains an insight into the human
elements of technology and the importance of its usability. A psychologist is more likely to know

how to motivate people and to understand what users want than is an engineer who has only

worked in the technology trenches. A musician or artist is king in a world in which you can 3D-

print anything you can imagine.

When parents ask me now what careers their children should pursue and whether it is best to

steer them into science, engineering, and technology fields, I tell them it is best to let them make

their own choices. Rather than telling our children what to study and making education as a

chore, we should encourage them to pursue their passions and to love learning.

To create the amazing future that technology is enabling, we need our musicians and artists

working hand in hand with our engineers. It isn’t either one or the other; we need both the

humanities and engineering.

Vivek Wadhwa is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School and Carnegie Mellon’s School

of Engineering.
Why Social Science Risks Irrelevance
Why do we do social-science research? Is it to advance our careers or to elevate
human knowledge? If we are really committed to the latter, are we on the right track?
As a working-class kid, I was stunned when I realized that some people had the
privilege of getting to think all day long. I’ve never let go of that sense of awe, but to
riff off of Spider-Man, with great privilege comes great responsibility.

I believe in the professorial mandate, the deep commitment we must have to giving
back knowledge because we get the privilege of being able to spend our days
thinking. But that isn’t just a matter of toiling in our worlds and then throwing
knowledge out of the ivory tower. It’s not just about making material open and hoping
people will come. It’s about actively engaging the very people that we seek to
understand, contributing to the communities we spend time analyzing. To treat them
respectfully and to understand our moral and ethical responsibility to them.

One of the hardest parts of doing social-science research is coming up with a question
that matters. As Kenneth Prewitt rightfully points out in an essay in Items, a
publication of the Social Science Research Council, "Matters to whom?" I would also
add, "Matters how?" As scholars, we fret a lot about the quality and rigor of our work.
Those who fund us also think about "impact." This is precisely why, when we think
about "accountability," we quickly turn to metrics. Unfortunately, we then spend less
time thinking about the very impact of our questions, the implications of what we
choose to study, the processes that influence our choices, and the social implications
of seeking knowledge.

friend of mine once told me that scholars study things that conform to their values.
This is precisely why we need scholars from diverse experiential, cultural, and
political backgrounds. Although forces outside academe influence the decisions about
what to study, so too do disciplinary and institutional incentives and pressures.
My first research paints a clear portrait of where I was both in my identity and my
organizational position. That project was concerned with how depth-cue prioritization
was dependent on levels of sex hormones in the body. I knew that computer scientists
and engineers were obsessing over the possibility of 3-D virtual reality, and I had
stumbled on a footnote in an old Air Force report that noted that women got sick in
asimulators at much higher rates than men. And I started noticing female computer
scientists failing at basic 3-D tasks while playing video games for which no
explanation of inexperience could be justified. I ended up following my hunch to
work in a gender clinic to understand how vision changed as people underwent
hormone-replacement therapy. Along the way, I learned that the baseline research that
underpinned depth-cue research had been done exclusively on college-attending
males, forcing me to redo a lot of seminal experiments to even get at my question.

If we want social science to matter, we

need to be much more thoughtful about
the questions we ask.
My path of inquiry, like that of most scientists, was shaped by the context in which I
was operating. As a queer woman trying to sort out sexuality and identity, questions
about gender felt natural. I was also a computer scientist at the time, but I knew that
computer-science methods could not help me answer my question. So I embarked
on a path that forced me to learn psychology, cognitive science, and gender studies.
And, as a result, I began a lifelong battle to define my disciplinary identity. Am I a
sociologist? An anthropologist? An internet-studies scholar? In the process, I quickly
realized that I queered my disciplinary identity as a way of resolving my gender
identity and sexuality.
Academic disciplines are brutally myopic, judgmental of anyone who chooses to
explore a path of inquiry outside of the acceptable boundaries of the field. This is the
byproduct of existential identity crises mixed with funding and legitimacy battles.
Social science wasn’t always about discrete fields at war with one another. Over time,
we narrowed the scope of questions, the possibility of asking questions that matter
outside of the academy, outside of the boundaries of our field. This is by no means
new — it has been part of a long and arduous path of legitimacy, accountability, and
meaning-making. Consider this infamous quote from Erving Goffman:

I have no universal cure for the ills of sociology. A multitude of myopias limit
the glimpse we get of our subject matter. To define one source of blindness
and bias as central is engagingly optimistic. Whatever our substantive focus
and whatever our methodological persuasion, all we can do I believe is to
keep faith with the spirit of natural science, and lurch along, seriously
kidding ourselves that our rut has a forward direction.
I have always held Goffman’s critical take on various social-science fields dear
because I fear that our seriousness as scholars and determination to justify our
existence often leaves us unable to laugh at the absurdity of the infrastructure that
we’ve built to support it. And to realize the degree to which we are to blame for why
social science often doesn’t matter.