It's Not a Crisis in the Humanities, It's a Crisis in the Society

Next time I hear about a university closing a French Department or a Film and New Media Studies Department on the grounds that the humanities are not relevant in an age of technology, I'm going to start a protest if not revolution.    Oh, wait!  We already did that.  

That's what we did, in large part, back in 2002 when David Theo Goldberg and I were at a meeting of leading humanists and they were all throwing in the towel, insisting that the humanities could not thrive in a world of technology.   We wrote "A Manifesto for the Humanities in an Age of Technology" to insist that, if the humanities cannot make a case for themselves in the Information Age, something is very very wrong.   This should be the great Renaissance of humanism.  As in the Renaissance, another time of enormous technological change, we should be seeing a great flourishing of the arts and humanities and all varieties of humanism that includes  scientific humanism.  This should be a new Renaissance for humanistic values given that this is a time when we are thinking about and reinventing imaginatively every major issue and possibility of how we communicate, how we publish and preserve our ideas, how we interact across cultures, how we make  art of all kinds, how we parse our words and our ideas, and how we understand complex world histories (because it is intrisically worthwhile to do so but also because histories of how change happens help us grapple with the present or have some sense of control over a future).  All the conditions are right for this to be a great age of interdisciplinary humanism.    Why isn't it? 

This radical separation of the doing of science from the serious profound thinking about the role and importance and implications of our science and engineering is a social disease.  Think about it:  can we really make great science in an interconnected global world without thinking about social and cultural implications of the science we make? 

For at least 140 or so years, we have been in a quantitative turn more pervasive in its interpretive power and in its polemical push even than religion.    And more worldwide.  Scientific isolationism leads to the problem of the object of study always being relative to the assumptions deeply embedded in the metrics for understanding it.  Is our metric futurity, sustainability, or profit?  Those kinds of questions are embedded deep within the measures we use.  Take deviation from the mean, the concept at the basis of our national educational policy.   Standard deviation and modern statistics are born with Galton (yes, the eugenicist cousin of Darwin who believed that aristocrats should be paid to reproduce and the poor should be sterilized).   There is a "mean" and a "medium" of human quality embedded in the numbers that have become the foundation for much of the way we think we understand the world in the 21st century.   Is that why so many of our youth have ADD?  Is that why we are having an "epidemic" of attention deficits of all sorts?   Is it how we act and feel and read and know?  Or is it in how we measure?   

Those are the big kinds of questions humanities and interpretive social sciences grapple with.  Or should be.  You can't have great science without great art and great thinking.  It's not the humanities that are in crisis but society if the humanities are faltering, whispering, insipid, and weak (hear that, Mr. Hobbes).  

Because the other founding principle of HASTAC is that the revolution must be within or we deserve to lose.  In other words, if the humanities have not rethought their own institutional structures in the light of the upheavals in communication, reading, writing, publishing, multimedia interactivity, then our redundancy is built into the future we are ignoring.  

Thank you to the almost 200 HASTAC Scholars from over 70 institutions who have signed on for a different future than the one most humanities departments have fossilized.   I still believe, as we did in 2002 when we began HASTAC, that if we all work together about what new ways we need to think, that all fields of study will be as vital and vibrant and essential as we need them and want them to be.    An economic crisis is a terrible thing.  It is also, as with any crisis, an opportunity to remake ourselves.   Let's do it.