The Importance of Studying Humanities and the Social Sciences

This is sort of a companion piece to the one I wrote last week on the importance of studying math and science. While I really hate the idea that there is some sort of strict dichotomy between the two areas of studies and that a person can only be proficient in one or the other, I grew up thinking I was a “math and science person” and so this is going to be written from that view point. I guess an alternative title would be “The STEM person’s guide to why humanities and social sciences is valuable.” If you identify as a math/science person; if you see yourself the Spock to your colleagues McCoy, then above all I ask you read this with an open mind. While I was proud in many ways of the engineering community I was a part of in college, my biggest complaint was a sense of superiority over the folks studying literature, history or arts. A sense that the engineers were studying a more worthwhile study. If you ever felt like english or history or anthropology classes were a waste of time, this one’s for you.

Mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace proposed an idea in an 1814 essay that was termed Laplace’s Demon. Laplace postulated that if you knew the exact position and momentum of every particle in the universe at any single time, then using classical mechanics and an understanding of all the laws of physics that could enact on those particles, you could in theory know the position and momentum of every particle at any other time. We think of a coin flip as random, but really if you knew exactly how much force you exerted on exactly what point on the coin and could measure the air flow around the coin as it flipped, you could theoretically calculate with 100% accuracy what the angular velocity would be throughout the entire spin and ultimately what side the coin would land on. Just because we can’t know it doesn’t mean it’s not knowable. The result of the coin flip was determined at the point of striking the coin. Extending the idea out to the entire universe, it’s a troubling idea since it suggests a total determinism to the universe. Even if we can’t know what the future holds, the future is theoretically knowable, and therefore already determined. If that bothers you, know that Laplace’s Demon is impossible and doesn’t hold up to experimental observations in quantum mechanics, so don’t give up on free will yet. But the other thing that Laplace’s Demon suggests is that every facet of the universe today is determined by an initial state of the universe and a set of universal laws. Today didn’t just appear or get created from nothing, it was created by a long string of physical events that led us to this point. I think we are generally pretty comfortable with this idea. That today doesn’t exist in isolation but is rather the product of many many forces over a long period of time. To really understand the intricacies of today, we need to understand the myriad of forces that created today.

People and culture aren’t that different, but I see a lot of people treat them that way. It is a mistake to think that people and culture exist in temporal isolation, and are not the product of a set of forces that have been in play for a long time. We would not have the understanding of our modern physical world that we have today if we ignored the history of our universe. We cannot have any real understanding of our modern culture if we ignore the history that got us to where we are today. As an example, a deep racial prejudice underlies the United States and on its own, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense until you look at our history of explicitly teaching Americans to hate African Americans. We have a history of those in power recognizing when white indentured servants and black slaves drew close from their common class struggle. Of enacting policies and laws with the explicit goal of causing tension between disenfranchised groups in order to maintain power. The effects of those policies are still seen today. Modern day culture is seldom random, and for us to understand who we are today, you have to look at how culture was created.

One of the hardest classes I took in college was a Fantasy Lit class. It sounded easy enough, we were going to read a ton of fantasy novels and write a bunch of essays. How hard could it be? Harder than I was expecting, as it turns out. The thing that really stuck with me throughout the class was how stupid I felt the entire time. How everyone around me seemed so much smarter than me. I would read these books, go to discussion and realize that I have a reading comprehension that was just embarrassing. I knew the plot, I knew the characters, but seldom else. The other people in the class however were able to recognize that each book we read carried cultural context. They didn’t exist in isolation but rather existed in a world with culture and history. And the authors constantly alluded to other works, historical events, cultural ideologies and a whole host of other thoughts and ideas that preceded the book. And having no arsenal of literary or historical background, I was hopelessly lost. I can’t recognize an obvious nod to a literary classic when I haven’t read them. And so I got the sense that I only read about 10% of every book we read in that class and that I didn’t have the background to really understand what the author was trying to say.

I feel the same way when I see stuff on the news that I don’t understand. When people from other cultures and backgrounds act in ways that don’t make sense to me. It feels random. It’s because I lack cultural context. India’s obsession with fair skin and western culture feels weird to outsiders, but after centuries of a class system that favored white people (through colonization) it doesn’t sound that crazy. And even if you have a decent grip on your own cultural context, people are terrible at recognizing that other people exist in a different and unique context. That your peers came from different places and that your experience isn’t the global experience. That your experience so far can appear completely foreign to another person. That your experience isn’t the default experience. That’s hard to internalize. What is normal to you seems like it should be normal to everyone but that’s just fundamentally inaccurate. I see people assume that what is instinctual must be biological and not the product of culture. People who think that an attraction to skinny hairless women is biological and not cultural. People who think that we have a biological need to acquire goods/property and that that’s not a product of culture. People who see racial difference as biological and not cultural. Those who can’t see how culture affects them and their thinking are doomed to be controlled by those who do.

So study how people and cultures evolve. Understand the effect that various forces have on culture. Learn how other cultures socially organize and how they encourage necessary labor. Study how we form our moral codes and how we create structure to enforce them. Read about the history of class differences: how they were formed, how they were maintained and how they were disrupted. Just as there are millions of tiny forces subtly manipulating the trajectory of a coin flipping, there are millions of hidden forces that make our society run the way that it does.