Remember the story about the elephant seen from different perspectives? Here’s a twist.
A biologist with a telescope peered at the animal and said, I see a hairy grayness horizon to horizon.
A toenail fungus specialist examined its feet, and prescribed antibiotics.
A climate change specialist didn’t see the elephant because he was fixated on plucking the dry grass.
A physicist looked at the elephant and had nothing to say.
Elon Musk was there, and he told them not to waste their time standing around an elephant. We need results in quantum mechanics, he explained; we need superconductivity at room temperature, we need research piped straight to technology. We need science to serve technology, which as you know improves man’s condition.
This may not be the story as you remember it, but I assure you that a few things about it are true.
The people around the elephant are scientists, but even in science, we can only see with the tools we have, and we create those tools in anticipation of what we might see. As a result, we are limited in our capacity to break out of this circle. We are primed to see or not in a certain way. However, breakouts can and do happen — often when two incommensurate ideas meet each other. Consider what happened when homo economicus, or “economic man,” theory met psychology: a new field was born, behavioral psychology. Or consider the friction between gravity and God, a meeting of concepts that caused a huge shift in human society’s relationship to astronomy and divinity.
Second, it’s not by chance that the examples cross the bridge between what we call humanistic knowledge and what we call science. Their conceptual distance from each other results in the possibility for innovation. The role played by metaphors in biology introduces future paths for research. Schizophrenics have a better prognosis when they are told they’re like shamans. Darwin’s nature acts, despite herself, as a causal force — like the very God that evolution puts into question. Falling in love felt so powerful that the ancients thought seeing the love object caused a wound in your eyes. It worked well with the theory that eyes emitted rays. You cannot, it turns out, take the human out of the science.
Third, in separating the humanities and science, we are voting to blind ourselves for the future and to deplete the richness of multiple perspectives on reality. Worse, our now-isolated sciences are in danger of being kidnapped and reared as technology’s handmaiden. It wasn’t always so: the Aristotles, Leonardos and al-Haythams — even the Turings — had an intellectual background that incorporated the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences, and their discoveries came out of that multifaceted approach. Now we have teams of specialists working for market-minded research that is not about truth, or even the search for truth, but for profit. Science is done at scale, and that is making a huge difference to its relationship to other fields of knowledge.
There’s a place where we can intervene, but no one seems to be doing it. That place is higher education. We could teach our students that there is no hard boundary between science and humanistic learning. We could teach them how these fields influence each other. We could take down the hard walls around different fields, both bureaucratically and literally. Instead, we reproduce these unhealthy gulfs in our university’s outdated departments and divisions, which generate the kind of specialist knowledge without context that is our growing problem.
If we want education to be relevant to the bigger problems we all face, this has to change. Perhaps the public feels this already, or our colleges wouldn’t be in a crisis of irrelevance. We need to put these forms of knowledge back together so that they can work with each other.
Shadi Bartsch is a professor in humanities at the University of Chicago and former director of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.