19 October 2000, 805 words
Scientists are intellectually superior to literary people.
John Carey, a professor of literature at Oxford University, writes: "The annual hordes competing for arts places at universities, and the trickle of science applicants, testify to the abandonment of science among the young. Though most academics are wary of saying it straight out, the general consensus seems to be that arts courses are popular because they are easier, and that most arts students would simply not be up to the intellectual demands of a science course."
It's not only the students, though. Recently, I did some research in literary criticism. It was the first time I had done any intensive humanities reading since my university days; in the past four years, I have mostly read books by analytical philosophers, physicists, biologists, linguists and anthropologists.
While the critics were all erudite people, the contrast between my scientific readings and the literary ones was marked. The scientists, no matter what their field, had been rigorous, concise and logical. The critics dealt in generalizations, were rarely rigorous, and were often philosophically incompetent.
Moreover, the scientists usually displayed knowledge outside their particular area of expertise: of literature, religion, psychology. The critics were mostly scientifically illiterate, even when a knowledge of anthropology or psychology or linguistics would have been very useful to their topics.
It may be argued that, because science is so technical, it is easier for scientists to have knowledge of the humanities than the other way around. But this is not quite true. Scientific literacy does not necessarily require you to know what a fermion is or derivational morphology or mitochondria. But you must understand concepts like the uncertainty principle, natural selection and chaos theory. You must have an appreciation for the hypothetico-deductive method, falsifiability, and empiricism.
Literary people often try to defend their mental flabbiness with the argument that great literature needs no defence. Their (usually tacit) assertion is that reading good novels makes you a better, more civilized human being.
But the critic Harold Bloom holds that, "If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political or moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation...The Iliad teaches the surpassing glory of armed victory, while Dante rejoices in the eternal torment he visits upon his very personal enemies. Tolstoy's private version of Christianity throws aside nearly everything that anyone among us retains, and Dostoevsky preaches anti-Semitism, obscurantism, and the necessity of human bondage."
Personally, too, I have not found literary people to be more civilized than other middle-class, educated persons (which is, not very); and, in their works, I have found literary writers to be less civilized (meaning knowledgeable, rational, democratic, even compassionate) than the leading science writers.
Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works and perhaps the best science writer of all time, makes a telling point when he writes, "People throughout history have invented ingenious technologies that turn one part of the mind against another and eke increments of civility from a human nature that was not selected for niceness: rhetoric, exposés, face-saving measures, contracts, deterrence, equal opportunity, mediation, courts, enforceable laws, monogamy, limits on economic inequality, abjuring vengeance and many others. Utopian theoreticians ought to be humble in the face of this practical wisdom. It is likely to be more effective that 'cultural' proposals to make over childrearing, language, and the media..."
But Lloyd Best argues that our problems in the Caribbean are cultural rather than technical. I think he is right, but I also think that nearly all our cultural spokespersons are intellectually effete, because all their talk about ancestral wisdom and obeah and historical wounds shows how disconnected they are from the real world. And that is largely because they have no respect for the scientific method, knowledge or mindset.
The biologist E. O. Wilson in his book Consilience, says, "...the vast majority of our political leaders are trained exclusively in the social sciences and humanities, and have little or no knowledge of the natural sciences. The same is true of the public intellectuals, the columnists, the media interrogators, and think-tank gurus...Only fluency across the boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is, not as seen through the lens of ideologies and religious dogmas or commanded by myopic responses to immediate need."
A society like ours, where scientists are rare enough, needs to educate its humanities people to be scientifically literate. Only then will we discover solutions that are both persuasive and pragmatic. It is hardly coincidental, I think, that our two most astute political commentators, Best and Denis Solomon, do not come from a background in political science (an oxymoronic term), but from the only true scientific branches of the humanities: economics and linguistics.
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh