Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

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No, it's because of the narrative that nothing that happens in the humanities matters.

> Is anything valuable coming out of the humanities these days?

You know, back in the late 19th century things were the other way around. The sciences had to argue for their value while the humanities held sway over the mind-share in academia. Google the debates of Huxley and Arnold -- many people think the culture clash only goes back to the C.P.Snow era, as if.

A part of the problem with the humanities is its amnesia. The humanities sprang from humanism. The humanities is academic humanism. Secular humanism is what has given us the idea of the separation of Church and State, among many other society-altering changes. Academic humanism has been a great moderating influence on the world, and continues to be. The smartest people I meet in academia are in the humanities, not the sciences. It is only relatively recently the the notion that the sciences are pre-eminent came to be. Since the time of their birth in the Renaissance the humanities grew in the shadow of the theological scholastics, and then brought about the Enlightenment. Which was nice.

You've bought into a narrative. The humanities teaches us about how narratives and ideologies shape our minds, so your comment dismays me.

edit: I don't blame you though. I was in the humanities for nearly 10 years before I bothered to look into the history and philosophy of humanism and the humanities.

I made my comment because I wholly agree with you about the importance and the past contributions of the humanities, and because I'm so disappointed in how deeply they've lost their way.

The biggest problems in the world today are humanities problems (although tech and science may be able to indirectly end-run around them if we survive long enough), and the humanities are completely failing to make any useful progress. I'm bitter about it, because there are so many smart people wasting themselves in trivial cleverness-competitions rather than solving meaningful problems, and because they're my tribe and they're betraying their potential. (And, bias disclosure: at least partly because I can't find anyone to date who's interested in the things I'm interested in, whose work I don't think is ultimately useless and unimportant.)

Despair not my friend.

To criticize something as useless and unimportant is a value judgement. How you arrive at those values is what the humanities is all about. Tech and science can't do an end-run around the humanities because whilst their domains overlap (somewhat) their methods and materials differ.

> I'm so disappointed in how deeply they've lost their way.

No. No they haven't. See my reply to you above. The more you repeat phrases like this the more I'm going to believe that part of your identity is invested in this world-view. It's a brutally pessimistic one, and it rests on the prongs of a false dichotomy.

> they're my tribe

I'm in the humanities and I'm not your tribe.

I'd be happy to hear about the important things that the humanities have produced recently. In your comment above, the only claims about their current value that I see is the statement that they continue to be a moderating influence on the world, and that they teach us how narratives shape our ideas.

I'm dubious that their moderating influence is significantly more than the residual influence of old moral ideas, albeit with newly enforced reach (i.e., hey guys, "do unto others" should maybe also apply to women/black people/gays). You couldn't get a patent for that kind of obvious development of an old idea. And the notion that narratives shape perceptions doesn't strike me as a particularly profound insight, although I suppose it could be argued that's a post hoc bias.

Secular humanism and democracy are more than two hundred years old. What have the humanities given to the world since then that compares to those, or that compares to the changes to the world that science has made in that period?

If you care about these kinds of questions, that's what I mean by "my tribe", regardless of the answers we each give. I'm not invested in my perception that the humanities are under-performing their potential, but I don't currently see a strong argument on the other side. Maybe I'm failing to consider something.

If you don't want people to buy into the narrative that the humanities doesn't produce anything of value these days, would it not be best to mention something that has happened in the last century?

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