The Invisible Humanities

By Donal O’Shea, President, New College of Florida
Originally seen in SRQmagazine.com’s Saturday Perspectives Edition for Feb. 13, 2016
This past week, I was struck by announcements of two talks at New College by well-known statisticians. The first, entitled “The Fundamental Connection between Humanities and Data Science,” was given by Dr. Bill Kahn, the vice president of the Bank of America who oversees consumer analytics.  The second, “Ask not what Data Science can do for the Humanities, but what the Humanities can do for Data Science,” will be the subject of a talk by Professor George Cobb, an icon in applied statistics and statistical education. Both titles use the word “humanities.”  That alone is worth mention.
We understand the significance of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields.  So, no one has to make the case for the importance of data science. Many in our region of Florida understand the importance of the arts, if only because they contribute so much to our local economy. And, although some malign social sciences (psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science and economics), we at least hear about them. But our public discourse is oddly silent on the humanities, as if they are too insignificant to mention.
Our community loves the arts.  We read reviews of performances and books. So why is there so little interest in the disciplines that take these as objects of study, among them: literature, language, philosophy, history, religion, art history, music and theater?
C.P. Snow’s 1959 essay  “The Two Cultures” called attention to the two cultures of society at that time: the sciences and the humanities. He condemned the British educational system for over-emphasizing the humanities at the expense of scientific education stating that the American and German systems did a better job of preparing students in both. But Snow never would have dreamed that the humanities would have become so marginalized at many American universities.
Today more medieval historians live within a 10-mile radius of some of our greatest universities (e.g., Harvard, Ohio State, or Berkeley) than in the entire state of Florida. The same holds for classicists. Some maintain that those universities are so old, wealthy and conservative that they have neither needed nor bothered to shrink their humanities departments. I would suggest, however, that those universities are great partly because of their humanists.
Why? Let us look at what students can expect to learn from serious engagement with the humanities.
From history, they learn about the past.  Not everything about the past, of course, but enough to appreciate the limitations of the short window of time afforded by our adult lives. History helps us understand the choices that different individuals and societies made in the absence of full knowledge, and of what ensued. It counters and contextualizes the relentless and perilous presentism of our times.
Language learning teaches humility. One learns that some ideas and words do not translate well, that operating in or outside of one’s mother tongue imposes different constraints on expression and comprehension, and that mutual comprehension can be difficult to achieve. Having one’s native tongue be the dominant global language is as much a curse as a blessing.
Literature engages us with a far broader range of human experience and emotion and complexity than we could acquire by chatting with family, friends and colleagues at work. It teaches us to imagine ourselves in another’s place, with another’s thoughts, and in another culture.  Like literature, the disciplines of art history, film, and musicology and music history teach how to process and talk about the direct experience that the arts afford. They teach about different cultures, and therefore one’s own culture, and how it shapes us.
Philosophy teaches reasoning and invites us to grapple with the large questions we inherit by virtue of being human. Religion helps us learn how others, and we, ourselves, make meaning. From literature, philosophy and religion, one learns that the same fact can be interpreted in many mutually incompatible ways, and that human experience is inherently complex.
In a very real sense, the humanities are the sciences of uncertainty and complexity. They teach us to live with and handle ambiguity. Their study produces outcomes that are difficult to measure, and therefore difficult to test. But those outcomes matter. It is difficult to conceive of wisdom absent them. And an education without them is at best training.
And, so, it should be no surprise that the humanities are essential to data science, which seeks pattern and meaning in the large unstructured data sets that are so much a part of our times.