Humanities: The Soul of STEM
When Ezra Pound was in his right mind, he was a good poet and an even better critic. In the ABC of Reading, a slim volume in which he tries to distill the essence of his colorful literary wisdom, Pound writes, “Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.” To Pound, music is a sine qua non—it is essential to the poetic form. For a poem to be a poem, it must throb with rhythm, beat with melody. Otherwise, it lacks vitality. Or, as Pound puts it, the poem “atrophies.”
Between the humanities and STEM, there seems to be an ever-widening gulf. We are told that there are the humanities people, whose heads—swollen with over-developed right brains—are in the clouds and whose thoughts are furnished with verdant pastures and pipe-playing shepherds and limpid streams. And then we are told that there are the left-brained STEM people, who are coldly analytical and unfamiliar with many human emotions, especially love and affection and ardor. But this rift between the humanities and STEM is a misconception.
It is through a cross-pollination of the arts and sciences that we’ve achieved some of our biggest breakthroughs in engineering and literature, in technology and film. It is, therefore, dangerous to alienate the humanities from STEM because, despite the boom in STEM-related degrees, and despite the declining number of students interested in the humanities, the two fields desperately need each other. And given the imperiled state of humanities programs across the country, it is especially important, at this moment in time, to press the case that the arts are vital to the continued success of science and technology. Without them—without the humanities—STEM will languish. Or, to fashion a new dictum from Pound’s quote, which I shall conveniently set down as the Goodbar Principle, “STEM atrophies when it gets too far from the humanities.”
What inspired me to write about this particular topic? I had been casting about for subject matter when a series of intriguing events occurred in quick succession. It all began when Alex Karp, the wiry and stammering goon in charge of Palantir, made a highly inflammatory remark about the prospects of humanities students in an artificial-intelligence-dominated future. He said, “[AI] will destroy humanities jobs…hopefully you have some other skill.” This quote bothered me for several reasons.
Although Palantir is a technology company—it creates software that wolfs down massive amounts of data in order to find patterns—its leader, Karp himself, hails from the airy, sun-dappled halls of the humanities. Before he became a tech titan, Karp studied philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, where he received a Ph.D. in neoclassical social theory (I defy you to name a more humanities-sounding degree) and learned under the venerable Jürgen Habermas. This quote, then, struck me as being more revelatory of Karp’s essentially contradictory nature.
And, what’s more, Palantir is named after the palantirs in The Lord of the Rings (enchanted stones that enable whoever possesses them to observe other parts of Middle-earth). In other words, the tech company depended on a work of literature to build its brand. And it should be remembered that The Lord of the Rings was written by J.R.R. Tolkien, who was, in addition to being a writer, a tweed-jacketed professor of English language and literature (and Anglo-Saxon studies). Palantir’s name, then, wasn’t just coined by a writer. It was coined by a humanist.
A few days after the Karp incident, I stumbled across an article in The Atlantic that was, among other things, an autopsy of the current liberal arts system. The thrust of the piece was that the Mellon Foundation rarely offers grants to institutions or scholars who express an interest in the humanities alone. Rather, in order to receive Mellon’s alms, their research projects must be aligned with the foundation’s mission, which means their research must have some social-justice component. The author spoke with many academics, and their collective testimony limned a bleak picture in which scholars try to cloak their research proposals—creaky tomes on Italian poetry and Shakespeare—in the language of social justice.
But the most troubling part of TheAtlantic piece occurs when the author notes the paucity of funding for liberal arts programs. Of the $54 billion in annual federal funding that the government earmarks for higher education for research, a fraction of one percent goes to the humanities—a meager $69 million.
So the humanities aren’t just underappreciated. They are on the brink of extinction.
A day or so after I read TheAtlantic piece, I started Walter Isaacson’s famous biography of Steve Jobs. In the introduction, Isaacson quotes Jobs and then reflects for a moment on the import of what the Apple founder had said:
“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” [Jobs] said. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” It was as if he were suggesting themes for his biography (and in this instance, at least, the theme turned out to be valid). The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century.
Jobs and countless other innovators owe debts not just to the sciences but also to the arts. Through a reverence for technology and the humanities, they manage to make abiding contributions to our world and usher in changes whose reverberations are still felt to this day. While I believe—with a missionary’s zeal—in the importance of liberal arts for liberal arts’ sake, that is not what I hope to establish through these posts. Instead, I want to show that the border between art and science is porous, that innovators, since time immemorial, have drawn on the unique wisdom afforded by the humanities. And I want to show that the humanities, even in this day of straitened funding and dwindling interest, still have a big role to play in the future. Remember, STEM needs the humanities in order to prosper. To invoke, once more, the wonderfully named Goodbar Principle, “STEM atrophies when it gets too far from the humanities.”
The theme of Isaacson’s book will be the theme of this project: the significance of people who “stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences.” I think it would be fitting to start with the man whose biography inspired this undertaking, a man who straddled this intersection with admirable gusto. So join me next time when I explore how Steve Jobs used the humanities to invent the future.
