A practical case on why we need the humanities

I think Francis Bacon made the best point about this: knowledge—real knowledge—is about the ability to reliably recreate some effect. With something like the material characteristics of a metal, we can use the rigor of experiment to figure out how to create metals with desired characteristics. We subject the metal to varying levels of heat, pressure, etc. and see what happens.

With governments this is basically impossible. You can't run controlled experiments against governments that are similar in all aspects but one. But it is still useful to study governments if we want to design good ones. You can make a good argument that much of America's success is the result of the Founding Fathers studying the many forms of government that preceded them.

I would argue all other humanities are essentially the same. Literature and philosophy are collections of "experiments" conducted and suppositions made by our predecessors about how to live good lives. English composition is about how humans can effectively communicate in that language. Etc, etc. Are the various stories, rules of thumb, and bits of wisdom in these disciplines scientifically rigorous? Of course not. They can't be. But they can still improve our odds of reproducing some desirable effect, and that makes them knowledge worth having.

STEM funding doesn't marginalize the humanities; there's no reason STEM funding needs to reduce the value of a humanities degree or needs to decrease the number of people majoring in the humanities.

The core of teaching in the humanities is the expression of the grand breadth of human experience

There is a lot of motte and baileying (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy) among humanities defenders: the humanities are hugely important, but the way they're practiced by many in contemporary universities is not so good. Harold Bloom called the current practice "The School of Resentment," but it goes under other monikers as well.

The other thing we ask students to do, beyond merely encountering these things is to use them to practice argumentation, to reason soundly, to write well, to argue persuasively about them

This is good! But many humanities professors now think they have the answer, and their job is to become activists, spreading the answer they've found to everyone else.

There are two big problems with getting students and grad students to major in the humanities: the cost of college is one, and the way the humanities have largely morphed into a particular form of political activism is the other. The humanities as learning "to practice argumentation, to reason soundly, to write well, to argue persuasively about them" is and would be great. The experience on the ground is quite different.

I majored in English and went to grad school in it: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo.... Here is one version, albeit not the only one, of the intellectual problems that occur widely: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/10/02/what-happened-with-decons...

I forgot to add: I used to try and keep a list of examples of the kind of thing one sees in the humanities, but Real Peer Review does it better: https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview.

But what seems new is the humanities coming into politics in what seems like a big way.

It's gone from what you should think, to what you have to think.

That's why I think it should be smashed.