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And the fine arts gave us Literal Hitler, so I guess they’re out, too.
Your bogeymen are no substitute for an actual argument. Especially not if you’re just going to slam them in there.
Being critical of X does not mean that X is "out". (And yes we should also be critical of art, literature, philosophy, etc.)
My actual argument is that STEM sometimes does bad things, so we should be critical of it. Pretty straightforward. This is hardly a radical conclusion, by the way. It's harder to name things that we shouldn't be critical of! "Critical" doesn't mean "throw out completely". It means "skeptically evaluating", as opposed to "dogmatically accepting".
If you have an issue with one of the specific examples I raised in the bullet points, I'm happy to discuss it further.
It’s fine to be skeptical of the results of scientific research being used improperly. Most of which are policy issues anyway. Science can tell us how a disease spreads, but it cannot tell us to lock the population up in their homes and weld the doors shut. Science can tell us how to create nuclear fission, but not tell us to cram it into a bomb and drop in on a major city.
And to be honest, if anything we are actually much too skeptical of science and math. These tools of reason are the best methods available to understanding the universe. If we didn’t have the tools of science and mathematics, you’d be wearing a toga and writing this post on sheepskins as was tradition. You’d live in a world full of angels and demons and superstition where getting sick was punishment from God and the cure was bloodletting.
The problem is that we’ve done such a piss poor job of explaining what rigorous, scientific exploration of the universe has actually done for us that most people come away afraid of people they see as practical wizards reworking the world and conjuring new ideas from the ether. This was why COVID responses were so bad. It wasn’t science people were follow, it was lab-coated priests bringing down The Word from the mountain. Thus Saith the Experts is not remotely how real science works. Real science is about asking questions and looking for physical evidence of the answers.
Humanities could have been a good counterpoint and balance against excessive technophilia where everything you do with tech is good forever and we should never question it. But since it’s become unserious, ideologically corrupted, and lacks any sort of academic rigor, it’s mostly lost. A discipline that can regularly get obvious jokes printed in their academic journals isn’t going to save anyone. A discipline that argues mostly about words cannot save anyone.
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Motte: STEM gave us , so we should “skeptically evaluate” it.
Bailey: STEM isn’t more valuable for mankind. Therefore, we shouldn’t favor STEM in universities.
I don’t mind your motte. I don’t think most people would mind it. Even @f3zinker’s original proposal allows it, because skepticism is not unique to the humanities.
It’s the bailey that gets me, because it hangs on this idea of (unfettered, “dogmatic”) STEM as a net negative. But where’d you do the work to justify that? You’ve just sort of thrown out all these boo lights. Even if I agreed with you on all of them, which I don’t, why fund the humanities instead of buying a cabin in Montana?
What is the value that you place on your heart? I mean your literal heart, the organ of flesh and blood.
In one sense, it is inestimably high. You can't live without your heart; you would sacrifice almost anything to keep it, if it was threatened. In another sense, it is essentially nothing, an afterthought, a pure zero. When was the last time you even thought about your heart? You will never compose panegyrics to it, or perform rituals in its honor; memories of it do not comfort you in times of want, thoughts of it will never enter your daydreams or fantasies. Living without it would make no difference to you, assuming such a thing were possible. How can such a thing be said to have any value?
We can say that something is necessary without thereby saying that it is valuable - and rightly so! The man who went out of his way to honor his own heart, who gave it a rank ordering of value higher than his own blood relations, would rightly be called perverse - even though, in the last analysis, he can live without his kin, but he cannot live without his heart.
When it comes to science - and for this one instant science is simply identified with technical vocational training, with "having a good head on one's shoulders", with the exertion of power over man by impersonal technological means - do we not risk making the same sort of error? Do we not risk confusing what is necessary with what is valuable? Do we not risk confusing the drudgery of life with life proper?
Of course there are many senses of the term "science" that we could disambiguate here. I do not paint my target equally over all of them. I have no quandary with theoretical science qua theoretical science, for example. There's nothing wrong with wanting to dedicate yourself to fundamental physics - it's a perfectly admirable pursuit. It is certainly not my aim here to adjudicate between, say, the aesthetics of the experience of reading early Latin poetry and the experience of studying string theory. There's room for both, there's no need to fight. I was once in training to become a mathematician, so I would like to believe that my taste in these domains is not entirely untutored.
Nor is it particularly my aim here to raise a question about the value of technological development. Of course, there are absolutely issues here too, certainly. But they are issues that can be partially bracketed. As a manifestation of the Faustian spirit, as the apotheosis of the Freudian death drive, there is something commendable even in technology that may lead to the annihilation of humanity, to the annihilation of all value. That's not my preferred course of action, naturally; but there is something commendable there nonetheless.
Far more contemptible than even the will to destruction is the will to mediocrity, the will to utility, the silent subjection to "what simply must be done". Homo economicus throws himself at "what must be done" with eyes wide open and a smile on his face; he eschews any identity of his own, he grinds himself down into something that is more machine than man, he becomes the willing accomplice of the protection racket that is modern science in its merger with capitalist economics. You can't stop doing science, you can never stop doing science, because the other guys have science too, and they're going to get us if we don't get out ahead of them. There's no time for a "humanist" education - we need more engineers, more researchers, more output, more growth, otherwise we're going to get crushed by someone else's output and someone else's growth. You must accept more surveillance, you must quantify more of your life, you must accept being connected to work 24/7, in the name of the efficiency that will serve this growth. And don't even think about not building the best damn AI you can, because dear god what if China gets AGI first? Such is the vicious circle that science has ensnared us in.
In some sense this is nothing more than a new layer of ornamentation over the same natural condition of man that has existed since time immemorial. The "state of nature" is certainly not any kinder. If you do not run you will die, if you do not fight you will die, if you do not eat you will die. But at least we once had a proper sense of the tragic about it! At least we once felt a sense of righteous indignation about this reality - we felt that it demanded redemption. But now, even the sense that there is a problem has been forgotten. Man's subjection to the technological order is viewed as not only necessary, but desirable.
Should we favor STEM in universities? Should you empty your bank account for the maniac who has a gun to your head? In one sense - yes, obviously! But you don't have to like it. The attitude behind an action can in fact tell us a great deal about whether the action is contemptible or praiseworthy. If you conduct yourself with dignity, should you not bristle at the imperiousness of science? Should you not chafe at the seemingly ineluctable demands it makes upon you?
There can be no change in conditions unless there is first a change in desire. Without desire, there is no hope. And if a change in man's condition is impossible, then I can at least make him loathe to accept that condition, and upset his happy conscience.
I believe that is as direct and honest a statement of my position as I can give.
The framing of science and technology as competitive just strikes me as silly. Yes, there is an element of competition but that's not all that science and technology does. It also is the reason we're not subsistence farming and instead able to have this high minded conversations in the first place.
You can mope in the tragedy and indignation, some of us aim to fix it.
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I think having computers and jet engines and electric power plants is 'valuable', and thus sending many of our smartest people to institutions to learn science and engineering and create those things is worth doing. And that is much of why our institutions focus on STEM so much.
Also, the challenge and complexity of math/science/engineering is itself very interesting, for the same reason the challenge and complexity of MMA or having a written debate or making a good painting is interesting.
That is literally true, though. Groups of people who don't do science have been gotten over and over by those who do. Competition generally encourages improvement and growth, see evolution.
Societies that didn't do humanist education also get gotten by those who did it, in the past.
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I don't need to use STEM to answer that; I can use the humanities, specifically referencing the laconic "if". Or perhaps the quip about counterfactuals attributed to Abraham Lincoln. Or I can use STEM, formal logic, and note that
Assume A
A -> B
B
B
is bad logic -- that is, that if you assume A (I can live without my heart) and prove B (my heart has no value) under that assumption, you cannot validly say you have proven B without that assumption.
Seems unlikely, without some sort of sophistry you'd need formalisms to avoid.
This could mean at least two things. Either we expect a man to value his kin greater than his life -- in which case the fact that his heart is necessary to his life is not sufficient to make it more valuable than his kind. Or we somehow expect him to value his kin less than his life but more than his heart which is necessary to it.... which is incoherent, as Shakespeare might be able to tell you.
Miguel de Cervantes might be able to tell you the results of such chafing. Or Rudyard Kipling.
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