Despite the ostensibly significant etymological link between "humanities" and "humane," humanities scholars, for some reason, love to eat their young. And in the event that market conditions make no young available, those scholars will, and happily, start to eat themselves.
Over the past year or so, Stanley Fish has occasionally devoted his New York Times blog to the notion that, as he put it recently, higher education is "distinguished by the absence" of a relationship between its activities and any "measurable effects in the world." He has singled out the humanities for lacking what he called "instrumental value," writing that "the value of the humanities cannot be validated by some measure external" to the peculiar obsessions of scholars. The humanities, Fish claimed, do not have an extrinsic utility—an instrumental value—and therefore cannot increase economic productivity, fashion an informed citizenry, sharpen moral perceptions, or reduce prejudice and discrimination.
Unsurprisingly, many rose to the bait, and for a month or so, the professing classes bickered about the usefulness of the humanities. This argument always reappears during the recurring, if increasingly frequent, periods of public suspicion of humanities professors and their research. There seems to be an unstated (or, on occasion, quite loudly stated) feeling that humanities professors are somehow ... what ... trying to get away with something; that they are ... how shall we say ... trying to put one over on us. This sentiment reached its logical apex last year in an article in The New York Times titled, "In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth."
(Given that these "tough times" were almost single-handedly caused by graduates of our nation's business colleges, it seems that they, if anyone, should have to "justify their worth." But maybe it's just me.)
So when Fish claimed that the benefits of humanities research were limited to the researcher or the classroom, and that the public should therefore not have to "subsidize my moments of aesthetic wonderment," he was drill-baby-drilling into the zeitgeist quite nicely.
The real issue, as Fish concedes, is not whether art, music, history, or literature has instrumental value, but whether academic research into those subjects has such value. Few would claim that art and literature have no intrinsic worth, and very few would claim that they possess no measurable utility. Students at Harvard Medical School, for instance, like students at a growing number of medical schools across the country, now take art courses. Studying works of art, researchers believe, makes students more observant, more open to complexity, and more-flexible thinkers—in short, better doctors.
And bioethicists, working at least in part out of the discipline of philosophy, have been at the forefront of applied humanities since 1974, when Congress created the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. Since then, and especially after President Clinton established the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, in 1995, bioethicists have played a crucial role in policy debates arising in medicine, biotechnology, and the law.
While teaching Picasso or applying Kant probably involves some scholarly mediation, those examples do not prove the usefulness of humanities research so much as they prove the usefulness of the subjects of that research. Medical-school art classes aren't concerned with scholarship on Monet's paintings, they are concerned with Monet's actual paintings. So the question is this: Can academic analyses of art, philosophy, literature, or history—that is, academic research in the humanities—have recognizable utility?
In fact, humanities research already has instrumental value. That value, however, is rarely immediate or predictable. Consider the following examples:
In the 1970s and 1980s, the computer scientist Donald E. Knuth was struck by how designing computer software was essentially an aesthetic act, analogous to writing literature. As detailed in his book Literate Programming (1992), his work on computer languages was shaped by his engagement with the humanities. Knuth wrote two computer programming systems—WEB and CWEB—in part because he sought a language that would allow "a person to express programs in a 'stream of consciousness'" style.
"Stream of consciousness" was a phrase first used by William James, in 1890, to describe the flow of perception in the human mind. It was later adopted by literary critics like Melvin J. Friedman, author of the 1955 book Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method, who used the term to explain the unedited forms of interior monologue common in modernist novels of the 1920s. However, by his own acknowledgment, Knuth's innovations were most clearly influenced by the work of the Belgian computer scientist Pierre-Arnoul de Marneffe, who was in turn inspired by Arthur Koestler's 1967 book, The Ghost in the Machine, on the structure of complex organisms. And that book took its title and its point of departure from a key piece of 20th-century humanities research, Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949), which challenged Cartesian dualism.
There is, then, a visible legacy of utility that begins with research into Descartes and leads to important innovations in computer science.
Research in history and literary studies has also shaped the world of national intelligence. When the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, predecessor of the CIA) was established, in 1942, the director, William J. Donovan staffed his agency with humanities professors. More than 50 historians alone were hired to develop the OSS's analytical methods. These scholars adopted the framework of humanities research—the footnote, the endnote, the bibliography, cross- and counter-indexing—to give order and form to the practice of intelligence analysis. That, in turn, enabled the OSS to do things like compile a list of foreign targets in order of importance on less than a day's notice.
James J. Angleton, who became chief of counterintelligence for the CIA, understood that the interpretive skills he had cultivated by studying works of literary scholarship like I.A. Richards's Practical Criticism (1929) and William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) could help create new methods of intelligence synthesis and information management. Research methods developed by humanities scholars, in sum, essentially invented the science of intelligence analysis.
What unites those stories is not that they exemplify times when humanities research has had instrumental value, but rather times when it has had unintended instrumental value. Those scholars did not intend, nor could they have anticipated, the applied value of their work. Yet that's not to say the application of their work was the point of their work. After all, scholars weren't studying Shakespeare with an eye toward establishing the CIA. Instead, research in the humanities, like research in all disciplines, is valuable precisely because we never know where new knowledge will lead us.
This principle was demonstrated recently by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who put together a graph demonstrating the complex web of influences among researchers in different disciplines. They tracked the reading patterns of nearly 100,000 online scholarly journals, charting when a researcher in one academic field cited an article in another academic field. The resulting graph—a "clickstream map of science"—looks like a wheel in which the hub is composed of humanities and social-science journals, and the rim is made up mostly of natural-science publications. The spokes are formed by journals from emerging interdisciplinary fields like alternative energy, human geography, and biodiversity. The graph suggests that the humanities act as a bridge among disciplines, sparking new ideas and areas of research. As the study's authors conclude, their findings correct the "underrepresentation of the social sciences and humanities" in outcomes of scientific research. So even if, as Stanley Fish argues, the humanities provide pleasures of "aesthetic wonderment," that's obviously not all they do.
One might reasonably point out that all of the historical examples above are from humanities research performed in the early to middle part of the 20th century. ("Where's the new stuff? Where's the frozen-yogurt technology inspired by Foucault's The History of Sexuality?") But that's part of the point. It takes decades to make sense of the present, and it is only now that the unintended contributions of 20th-century humanities research can be discerned. Forty years from now, people might look back on the 1980s and 1990s as a golden age of inadvertently useful humanities research. We simply don't know how or if such research might yet acquire use value.
Consequently the issue of utility and intended outcomes is a thorny one. Fish hedges by claiming that he's talking about only a "direct and designed" relationship between humanities research and any ultimate instrumental value. But no research project, in any discipline, has a direct and immediate relationship between the academic procedures characterizing it as research and any eventual, extracurricular effects it might have. If it did, the researcher wouldn't be doing research, but rather something else entirely, like policy implementation or asset management. So if one wants to claim that humanities research has no immediately obvious nonacademic utility, I suppose that claim is basically correct. But making that argument is like hurdling a toothpick. The yawning gap between intended outcomes and eventual use value is one common to all research, regardless of discipline. That's what makes it research. We don't know what we don't know, and we also don't know how—if at all—what we learn might be used in the future.
This is nothing new. Examples of research with unclear instrumental value abound, in all disciplines. Scientists at the University of British Columbia have found that working in front of a blue wall (and not a red one) improves creative thinking. Scholars of business and sociology at the University of Nebraska and at Washburn University have discovered that female golfers often feel unwelcome on golf courses, in part because of the misperception that they are slow players. And civil engineers at the University of California at Davis have found that the kind of vehicle one purchases is determined partly by lifestyle considerations—status seekers, they learned, are more likely to buy expensive cars, while family-oriented people are more likely to buy minivans. Viewed superficially, that sort of research may seem obvious, or at least devoid of instrumental value. But its real usefulness is, paradoxically, that we don't yet fully know how it will be useful.
Americans have long appreciated the virtues of pure research. In an address to Congress advocating the establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in 1958, President Eisenhower said the new agency would be necessary in part for national security—the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik the year before—but also for more-abstract reasons. He indicated that NASA would be a boon because of the "compelling urge of man to explore the unknown"; because it would increase "national prestige," which would then lead to additional "science and exploration"; and because it would create further "opportunities for scientific observation and experimentation which will add to our knowledge."
Even if you assume that Eisenhower's downplaying the military potential was a rhetorical ploy, it is striking how abstract his justification for NASA was—how rooted in pure research, ambiguity, and the pleasures of unknown outcomes—and how much that basic logic has persisted to this day. NASA costs a tremendous amount of money. But ask any fourth grader, or any adult, for that matter, about the purpose of NASA, about what it has produced, and you will very likely get some mumblings about "the effect of gravity on tomato seeds," or something about "satellite technology," or maybe just that "Tang is delicious." (Contrary to popular myth, NASA didn't actually develop Tang, Teflon, or Velcro, three useful inventions for which it is commonly credited.) But in the post-cold-war era, the point of NASA is not to acquire some questionable data about floating tomato seeds; the point of NASA is to learn new things. We go into space because we learn stuff, not because we get stuff. NASA is our greatest monument to pure research, and it is foolish to suggest that its importance can be determined on the basis of particular utilitarian outcomes.
We can't know the ultimate instrumental value of research in advance. But we perform that research anyway, because we have decided that, on balance, it is good to learn new things, whether or not they eventually lead to new technologies or other useful things. All researchers, NASA scientists and poetry scholars alike, possess an essential cluelessness about the ultimate outcomes of their work. Common to the act of research across all disciplines is the core principle of the unknown outcome: We don't know exactly what we're going to find out—and that is precisely the point. After all, if we knew in advance precisely how a research project would be useful, why would we need to do it at all?
Comments
1. generally_academic - May 23, 2010 at 07:41 pm
Ho, hum, here we go again!
I know my research in Literature had all the above values because many, many students changed their views of their own lives and the lives of others after taking my "Visionary and Mystical Literature" course, which was the direct result of my research in Comparative Mythology (post-structural archetypal criticism). And no, it was not a bunch of plastic-shaman, California-New-Age b*lls**t. They actually had to read the texts, which are not at all easy (e.g., Blake, Hart Crane), and then do some serious thinking, and analytical and interpretive writing. The result was students help along on their path toward Wisdom. The best outcome.
2. graemeharper - May 24, 2010 at 06:57 pm
You'll know it by now, but perhaps not, if I have spoken too tamely here in The Chronicle: I disagree, Stephen. The ultimate outcomes of reseach we know all too well (and say it all too infrequently). These are: the joy of discovery, the celebration of human ingenuity, the belief in getting closer to the truth, the joy of exploration, the possibility of human advancement. Make no mistake: this is not national, this is not academic subject-based, this is for the truly great university a fact of worldwide academic life.
3. marty40 - May 24, 2010 at 07:41 pm
Is it not the scholarships on Monet's paintings that elucidate the complexity of Monet's painting? If future doctors should understand the complexity of art, shouldn't they be grateful to that which discloses that complexity?
4. lroelofs - May 25, 2010 at 06:18 am
Very nicely done, Prof. Mexal! I am an academic physicist of long experience, but have come to respect my colleagues in the disciplines of the humanities both for their synthetic virtuosity, as on display in your piece and for their creativity in meaning and nuance. (And for being more adept at avoiding the banal than my colleagues in the natural and social sciences--family orientation correlates with minivan preference, who'd have thought it?) And thankfully, as noted wearily by generally_academic, many professors of literature, philosophy, religion and the arts can pass those abilities and habits of mind on to their students, so that some of my fellow citizens will be interesting people and likely to contribute helpfully to our democratic institutions and processes. I tell my physics students that they are not educated unless they've read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Appiah's Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in the World of Strangers, Whittier's "Snowbound",...
5. williamchace - May 25, 2010 at 01:30 pm
Yes, some times acquaintance with the humanities deepens and opens the mind, makes one more sympathetic with complexity, and eases the speculative intelligence towards a more nuanced understanding of the human condition. But one piece of "evidence" cited here, that of the schooling James Jesus Angleton had at Yale when he studied with the New Critics of the time, is particularly unconvincing. Angleton applied his nuanced understanding to the world of espionage and wound up believing that everything was just the opposite of what it was, that absolute complexity ruled the world, and that reality was "a wilderness of mirrors." Whatever it was that he drank of the humanities, he drank too much of it. Literature can help the balanced mind; it can hobble the infirm mind.
6. ehyslopm - May 25, 2010 at 03:06 pm
My friend Stanley Fish never cast the bait quite far enough into the academic pond. The more pertinent question is what instrumental value does any non-scientific "research" afford? The answer, I'm afraid, is precious little indeed. I regularly read a range of manuscripts in the social "sciences" and most of it is either contradictory with other research on the very same subject, or so epistemically weak as to be legitimately deemed completely useless. The gig is up not only on humanities' research but on the pseudo sciences as well. Let's come clean and return to what we do best and holds the most utility: advance analyses and formulate arguments on topics of both social and intellectual import.
Emery Hyslop-Margison
University of New Brunswick
7. generally_academic - May 25, 2010 at 05:42 pm
I'm heartened to see that humor (satire) is alive and well at the Chron.
8. hilde - May 25, 2010 at 10:55 pm
It's brave to write an essay on this topic, which inspires so much pontification and bloviation. I'll do neither, and just say that I enjoyed this essay, found it expressive of much that I'm glad for in academia, and think it offers useful talking points for those of us explaining to a skeptical and thing-driven world why universities contribute to the good life.
9. ksledge - May 26, 2010 at 10:09 pm
A lot of this could be applied to science as well. NSF funds basic research...which essentially means research that doesn't have immediate value, but will likely have value down the line when it can be applied to technology and health. Most of my field falls in that category, and yet most of my colleagues (including myself a little) don't really understand the value of humanities research. So this article was a nice reminder to me that there is "unintended" value that doesn't mature until much later.
10. richardtaborgreene - May 27, 2010 at 09:37 am
Not quite, THE question is the instrumental value of instrumentality itself! Instrumentality, the collapse of something into willingness to have a world and attend too it, is neither obvious, always, nor natural (computer science version of nor), to wit, the Roman Catholic Church's otherworldliness for generations and its relic---tendencies of nations catholic to not develop economically as far as nations protest othernesses of worlds.
11. mdl06g - May 27, 2010 at 10:24 am
It seems that Fish's work struck a nerve. Ironically, your protest does little to contradict Fish's argument and draws more attention to the question than Fish could've hoped.
Perhaps his point is too blunt when he suggests that there is no measurable effect of the study of the humanities. Perhaps it's more appropriate to say that we sincerely believe that study of the humanities can make our lives more pleasurable and our exploration of ideas a more fascinating journey.
However, we must also admit that it is only because we are so unimaginably wealthy that a portion of our population can spend their entire adult lives doing nothing that feeds a person or cures an illness or even builds a better mousetrap... and is therefore questioned by the likes of Fish.
I believe the simplest response to an article like Fish's is, "The study of the humanities enrich everyday life for those who can afford it." As long as we are blessed to the point that we can pay for art and literature... let's do it. It makes our lives more enjoyable. Plain and simple.
12. recurver - May 27, 2010 at 11:31 am
The five "use" values of the humanities--prolegomenon in a comments thread.
(This will be a bit discipline specific.)
First, a response to Fish might also have begun by investigating what is taken as self-evident, that is, that the measure of instrumental value is economic--this is not the only from of value, not the only currency, that it has become essentially ossified within the bones of the public discourse in the west (and more and more the world) as the only value does not make it as universal as we would like to make believe that it is; it is not even backward/forward compatible with the values of other ages (important to restate this point, the economic as the dominant value is compatible with neither the pasts nor the imaginable futures). In fact, the economic as the measure of instrumental value is only the value of "now". This leads us to recognize that one of the fundamental uses of humanities research is precisely its lack of contextualized "use value"--thinking the new thought, research ground deemed unworthy might be important and expensive research, but doing so in service of values other than economic ones, values of the future or the past or even of other worlds--all imagined--flies in the face of the hubris of now and prepares the way for values, facts, and dreams other than those of this context, this now. (What was fact 100 years ago, what was valuable 200 years ago has become the dust of the past. What fact of today will be dust in a hundred years? What value that we cling to will be forgotten by all but scholars 200 years from now? Which things will not change? To decipher such answers is a pressing concern for understanding who we are and where we are going. How are we ever to answer such questions unless we foster imaginations that can cross boundaries?)
However, there is other more concrete contextual use values, first Stephen Mexal's point, which I see as the secondary use value of the humanities. What I see as the third use value is research as the sharpening of the intellectual swords of those researchers who teach. This might seem trivial but it is not. If you all can cast your memories back to the transition from undergrad to gradschool, from course work to completed diss, from new-minted PhD in first job to promotion to tenure, you can remember how stupid you once were and how much you now know--and how aware you are of the multitude of things you don't know but need to know. This is the third instrumental purpose of research: keeping our minds sharp. We pass this sharpness on to our students. Even the most uncited humanities text gets read by a few people, produces knowledge and has an impact beyond just its author.
The fourth instrumental value is that our work, regardless of the subject, is a record of now--whether we intend it as such or not. It does reflect the moment and tells a story of what we think about where we (collectively) are. By studying other discourses lit scholars cast light on those contextual discourses in which we are enmeshed. This is done in a radically unique way that frees some fundamental element or assumption from its moorings allowing for a glimpse of "reality" without every single trapping or ideology we carry around with us. These zeitgeist-y homunculus-like concepts are the disembodied matrix of our life. (Harrumph if you must old guard, but I am not California new-ager, but a scholar who did manual labor for over a decade before becoming an academic--I know the value of humanities thinking in a world where the hammer rules.) This is the lesson poets have been trying to teach us for generations, when they haven't decided to just ignore us. Art--its production and its study--can free us, if just for a moment, from all of that which pins us down. Even the most un-cited humanities text, like a tree falling in the forest, marks an event that has import beyond its fall within the web of its context.
The fifth instrumental value, is the easy one, the smash hit work that is frequently produced by the "big dogs" at the "big schools." These texts frequently reach a broader audience and therefore carry with them the traces from the other sorts of texts. These texts directly influence the contextual discourses forming the imaginations of "thens" and "nows"--the work that all humanities texts produce. This value most directly resembles teaching for each of us, although obviously the preceding "values" are also of pedagogical import. It is beyond question that the works of the famous humanities scholars have a significant use value. Sure, the Fish-crowd might argue, that that is a small minority, the "upper" percental of humanities scholars who are actually doing something. But the refutation is equally obvious: such research is a product of the system of humanities scholarship. It is not some lone scholar siting in a top ten Ivory Tower who produces these peaks of humanities research, but a whole system of scholarship that culminates in one fortunate individual with a unique position from which to articulate it.
This is a discussion of the scope of imagination. Stanley Fish's argument fails in this regard as does much of the discourse upon "use value" and instrumentality. We must think bigger. We are supposed to be the people that get paid to do that. Leave the interest in completely pragmatic thinking to those who swing hammers for a living--far smarter than us, those laboring geniuses are also far better at turning the use value trick. Scientists these laborers are not, for science is often as wasteful as we, certainly from an economic standpoint they are FAR more expensive--no carpenter would build each house as an "experiment" any more than she would spend her days writing about building houses rather than actually building them. However, this does not mean that such activities are pointless in either case. We humanities folk are best left to stretching our imaginations, and everyone elses, stretching the scope of our thinking, and everyone elses, applying a rigor produced by peer-review that sharpens our generally less than brilliant wits to a luster than passes for scholarly at least and at best thinks something entirely "new" or something old in a "new" way or pushes someone else's wit to that generative act. In the end what is use value? Who judges it? When? Like "facts" there is no bottom to this well, and this is the work of people comfortable with such ambiguity. It is the work of science as well, but only after it has worked so hard to establish the very facts it will eventually destroy. In a world without such facts what values remained or will remain?
These are amongst the many worth questions to be taken up in humanities research. Even if we cannot immediately see why, it doesn't matter. We cannot see what reality 2050 will hold but we know that it will come and it will hold a reality different and the same as our own. Would it be useful--in a sort of Flash-forward sort of way--to know what 2050 will hold? Absolutely. Do we know how to do that? Nope. All we can do is guess. The humanities are where we learn how to do that. There is no scientific time machine only an imaginative one. Perhaps when the two become one again we will not have need to dream of such a machine. But who knows, that might be 10,000 years from now, or 100,000 or 10,000,000, 1,000,000,000 years from now. This is the kind of scope before which now's use value is exposed as the scarecrow to the wings of imagination that it is. The year 2510 CE will come, as will 4210, as will 14,050 as 2510 BCE did. But if all we know all we care about is what is in front of us, what is useful now, we will certainly be little changed as the centuries pass. We will be like the undergraduates in our classrooms who refuse to learn because they think that they have the world figured out at 19.
But I've let this get too far into my morning and I am going to leave it there and let these ideas germinate some and see what form they take.