Guest Blogger - Springy Speaks!

Got a new comment on a very old post today, to which Springy has written a nice long response. (Thank you to Cosmic Variance for the extra traffic this week!)

Basically the jist of the post (quoted in full below the fold) is that maybe the presence of liberalism in academia is a product of thinking a lot about lots of stuff, rather than thinking a lot about money and consumer goods.

Lumo (a physicist) disagrees. Springy (a historian) responds.

Thanks for letting me on your blog, Joolya. I thought Lumo's comments were pretty hilarious and enjoyable in the same way as reading Ann Coulter or FoxNews - funny, but ultimately reactionary and ignorant. I'm not sure quite how much study in the humanities Lumo has undertaken. From his blog he appears to be a scientist. Perhaps he is not the ideal candidate to criticize the field. And from what he says - the humanities are "communist" and "disconnected from real political questions" and that feminism is "bigotry" - it appears he has no understanding of the humanities at all.

This seems to be part of a pattern: the American right and the general public have little idea of what the humanities actually do. This is the fault of humanities academics, who aren't doing enough to explain themselves to a wider audience, and confront this silly rhetoric.

So, in the broadest possible terms, the humanities are about the study of human behavior and cultural artifacts that they produce. This is in fact the dividing line between the social sciences and the arts, with history spanning the two. These two fields disagree with each other in a subtle and complex way; generally this can be termed the distinction between the “empiricists” and the “culturalists”.

From what I understand from his comments, and from a quick read of his blog, Lumo is an empiricist (although he might not know it). That's fair enough. Empiricists tend towards the social sciences, are keen on what is tangible and easily counted and organised into systems, and they like scientific ways of thinking. They try to discover the underlying laws governing human behavior through the analysis of data. Some social scientists hope governments will use these laws to form policy.

Other academics focus more on the study of ideas, and ways those ideas are professed in “culture”. They think that the variety of human cultures demonstrates that the empiricists’ laws of development and behavior are exaggerated or incorrect. For the “culturalists”, ideas and culture are stronger determinants of human behaviour than economic and social laws. These thinkers dominate orthodox history at the moment, and, obviously, literature and cultural studies.

The humanities are often also called “liberal arts”. But this term means something quite different from the recent and odd American redefinition of it. In the last 50 years or so, American conservatives have started to call the American left “liberal”. The lefties, in their view, reject Christianity and advocate dangerous social ideas like human rights and welfare programs. The American left, frightened of being labeled communists, willingly took up the name. This has unhappily made life difficult for academics. By mixing terms, they can call liberals “communists” (a sport Lumo engages in) and tactically associate liberal Enlightenment thought with Stalin and Mao.

It has become easy to call humanities professors “Communists” when they incorporate Marxist interpretations in their work. In fact Marxism is one strand of several competing forms of interpretation (and one which can lend itself to right-wing ideas, as Francis Fukuyama recently pointed out in his new book renouncing neoconservatism).

But what “liberal” really means, in the Western tradition, is that we should have a free debate about which ideas best explain human behavior and culture without constraints imposed by government or the church. This was the agenda of the 18th-century Enlightenment philosophers, and it spawned modern academic culture. Unfortunately for religious fundamentalists, Biblical ideas lost out to more empirical notions. The humanities are really Enlightenment scholarship, with a broad range of ideas within them. Some tend towards conservatism, like much recent thought in economics and international relations, and some towards left-wing ideas, like feminist cultural theory.

Recently, with resurgent American evangelical zeal, and Rove's strategy of courting Christians, there has been a broad attack by religious Republicans on the Enlightenment. For religious conservatives, the academy is inherently subversive, as its role is to criticize and analyze human affairs. This strategy has encouraged them to ignore the stream of secular right-wing ideas that came from the humanities.

Lumo, I find it odd that you as a "smart conservative" and a scientist are allying yourself from the evangelical wing of the Republican party. The real reason the humanities have come under attack from the religious right is because they offer secular, Enlightenment studies of human history, culture and society, which are inherently antagonistic to scriptural fundamentalism.