John S. Wilkins over at Evolving Thoughts poses an interesting question:
is this the era of anti-intellectualism? Have we seen the best of western philosophy and history?
More specifically, he’s referring to the decline of funding for, and graduates in the humanities programs of Australian universities. In the article, it is pointed out that funding for universities is increasingly dependent on industry, wealthy investors and foreign students paying full fees. All have a vested economic interest in the makeup of their graduating classes, and tend to emphasize computing, business and scientific or engineering disciplines, particularly medical in the degrees programs they support (whether by endowment or simply choosing a degree pathway with a high likely return on investment, in the form of high-paying jobs in the host country or elsewhere). While the author is writing about Australia, much of the same could be said for tertiary education in the United States.
It’s John’s contention that this hurts not only the humanities departments, but also society at large:
So the result is a society that simply doesn’t think. A society that won’t learn about its past. A society that governments find remarkably easy to manipulate, especially when it comes to loss of rights and engaging in wars that to a historical and philosophical perspective look like they benefit only the wealthy and powerful.
This essay struck a chord with me; I tend to focus on the sciences more than the humanities, but it’s obvious that both areas of academia suffer, in some sense, when the driving force behind student’s choice of majors is simple profit. More people learn about a field only to the degree they need to in order to find gainful employment, but there may not be any passion for the subject.
Of course, not every scientist in a given field is going to be involved in paradigm-shifting research or contributing to advancement in the body of theory. For every Einstein, Curie or Hubble, there are going to be an awful lot of people who simply wind up teaching, or whose research is not especially novel. These contributions are important too–those reams upon reams of interesting-but-unremarkable material filling journals and archives may provide jumping-off points for synthesis and the formulation of new theories, and in a literal sense they increase the body of knowledge. As for teachers, someone has to train incoming students.
However, many of these graduates are motivated less by love of their field and more by the bottom line. Especially in industry, their efforts will be very focused into specialized areas of inquiry, potentially preventing them from making revolutionary discoveries (although I will concede they probably enable others), and forcing much of their work into proprietary lockboxes. Of those who do wind up working in an academic or governmental research position, there are still the usual limiting factors of funding and politics. Simply put, your work has to justify your salary to someone, and even if your results are world-shattering in their implications, they may also be inconvenient. Taxpayers and Congress in this country seem to have very little patience for science–look at the Superconducting Supercollider project (abandoned partway through) or the Terrestrial Planet Finder (shelved indefinitely)–both of them costly, but also subject to tremendous funding cuts during wartime. Military operations in Iraq were evidently more important in 1993 (SSC), and again in 2006 (TPF), than the advancement of scientific knowledge. While the House of Representatives did approve funding for the TPF again later that year, the money has yet to actually materialize.
More and more, the argument seems to be that there’s no profit in pure research–you can’t commercialize alien worlds or the Higgs boson (if it exists), so it’s a net waste. In short, as John puts it:
Society in general is now becoming pragmatic about the use of funds – why have a space program when there are problems here on earth; why fund basic research when you can’t tell us (ahead of time!) what the practical benefit will be. Why learn something we’ll never need in ordinary life?
This attitude dismays and disheartens me, not only with regard to science but the humanities as well. I grew up with a quietly romantic attitude towards knowledge, and libraries have always felt more home to me than most places I’ve lived. I find myself wondering if this is simply how things are, or if (as I suspect; I have little hands-on experience with the world) it is a developing trend, which is what John maintains in the linked article.
I recall that as a child, the culture I grow up in seemed to have at least some vestigial respect for pursuing knowledge for it’s own sake. Perhaps it was simply the influence of my father (himself an intellectual and with a keen interest in a dizzying variety of scholarly topics, science and humanities alike), touched by reruns of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” on television when I was growing up (and early exposure to science fiction, which definitely didn’t hurt). However, when I look at older television, writing and magazine articles from about 1960 to the mid-’80’s, I get a sense that the valuing of knowledge for it’s own sake, and a sheer passion for some section of academia, were not so widely dismissed simply because they were abstract, obscure or “unprofitable.”
The sheer emphasis on money in this society is worrisome. Is this simply an inevitable result of the way advertizing and business shape our culture these days? If there is a trend, is it reversible? I don’t think anyone can simply steer a culture (not even that culture’s iconic leaders), but can it be nudged off of the image-obsessed, money-focused path that Western society (and that of the USA especially) seems stuck on? How do you foster an appreciation for abstract knowledge (or at least, respect for it’s place in a culture) in a culture that seems so distrustful of academicians, scientists and any statement about the world too complex for a sound byte?
P.S. In reference to “Cosmos”, a portion of this post was inspired by an episode of “Wild Kingdom” my roommate was watching today. The show was an exceedingly drawn-out attempt at schlocky suspense in which hippos and crocodiles were being compared, to see which was “more impressive” or “better” or some other nonsensical quality. It took the form of a ten-round competition, and though I didn’t stick around to watch beyond a few minutes, I called it anyway–the hippo “won.”
This is the state of nature shows? I remember now precisely why I stopped stopped watching television programs altogether…
Idle Session 