Walter G. Andrews, January, 2009
When Vladi Chaloupka talks about “the humanities” he uses terms such as “political scientists, philosophers, and other representatives of the humanities” or “political science, international affairs, or other branches of the Humanities”. I imagine that the emphasis and the points where he refers to particular humanities disciplines are understandably indicative of the places where he believes he will find people who work in ways that scientists will understand and who speak a more or less similar language. Moreover, these are the humanities people who have shown an interest in what he has to say and those who have influential ideas about possible directions for broad scale governmental and institutional programs and initiatives. I must admit that, until recently, my thinking in this regard has been much the same.
What recent events have led me to believe—and this would certainly demand more evidence than I will give here—is that it is also precisely these disciplines that are most apt to produce conclusions that ground ineffectual (and at times harmful, “kill the cats”) solutions to problems of human interactions occurring on the scale that is the most worrisome. The reason for this is, in part, that scholars in such disciplines are accustomed to working directly with informants (the sources of whose motivations are not obvious) or with gross social and political movements and aggregates (because these are statistically significant, provide “hard” data, and are more amenable to “scientific” analysis) or (in the case of some “philosophers”) because they are often theorizing on the basis of inadequate evidence. I now suspect that the most realistic potential for solutions to some critical aspects of the Basic Problem lies in cooperation with the “other branches of the Humanities” and especially some branches that might seem, at first glance, to be the most distant from the practical problems of the day.
As Chaloupka and others point out, in our present situation as regards intentional misuse of technology, the greatest danger is not from the activities of nation states or other aggregates with large armies and conventional (even nuclear) weapons, entities that can be approached or dealt with through the established diplomatic and military channels. The danger is from small highly motivated, extra-national groups with access to potentially lethal technologies (from gene engineering to nano-machines) that could be created and manipulated using readily available equipment by trained individuals operating outside of institutions and institutional controls. Such groups may work out of “friendly” countries—or even out of our own country. Their motives may be personal (mischief-making, extortion, theft, like today’s computer hackers) or apocalyptic rather than political. They may value destruction of the present (evil or degenerate) “civilization” or “system” over self-preservation. They may even see threats or acts of “mass destruction” (by an engineered lethal virus, for example) as a rational and legitimate response to what they experience as bullying and abuse by nations with large armies and plentiful “conventional weapons of mass destruction”—a response that is usually encapsulated in the term “asymmetric warfare”. Beyond preemptive police actions, which are often counter-productive and have serious prior restraint implications for civil rights and freedom of speech, there exists no other truly comprehensive plan for dealing effectively with or even talking with such groups (or individuals), especially when threats of death or imprisonment have no deterrent effect.
The difficulty is that when we start looking at the backgrounds of participants in suicidal and non-suicidal terror attacks, we see that generalizations about class or economic status or education or “sophistication” or region (or religion!) are extremely difficult to make and are largely unproductive of solutions. When we take motivations into account, we also see that even the most political rhetoric is supported by a framework of emotional responses—from the “anger” felt by some highly educatedMuslims in the face of their inability to counter what they see as Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians to the longing for “heroism” on the part of Moroccan young men brought to Afghanistan as suicide bombers. In understanding what motivates such people and the broader social networks that encourage or support them, or even in communicating meaningfully with any of these in their terms, we are operating well outside the usual boundaries of political science or international studies. We are, to a large extent, operating in a psychological realm, the realm of stories and poems and art and music and religion—cultural products that amplify and, in some cases, direct emotional energies. When we do not understand or account for unfamiliar or radically different cultural elements and their psychological effects, we are apt to assume mistakenly that our way of seeing and talking about the world is, on some level, “natural” and “universal” and that people who see and speak differently are somehow deviant or even less than sane. The point is that, in some frameworks, cultural differences make us alien to one another in very fundamental ways without any possible appeal to a non-alien reference point. (Depending on where you stand “we” are just as “alien” as “they” are, which means that “self-knowledge”—a form of humility—is just as important to us as knowledge of “others”.) Without recognizing this alien-ness in all its complexity and developing strategies for taking it into account, our attempts at communication, amelioration, and prevention will continue to be haphazard and often counter-productive. And, as you also point out, very alien perspectives exist—even dangerously, perhaps—within our own country and so-called “friendly” countries: for example, fundamentalist, polygamist Mormons or suicide cults such as the Jim Jones group and the Branch Davidians or the murderous Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan.
On the positive side, I think that the “big gap” is, in actuality, not nearly as large as it might appear, nor is it necessarily increasing. What is increasing is the dangerousness of the situation caused by the “democratization of science”. To be sure, we have not eliminated “love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, wisdom and foolishness”—the stuff of Greek tragedy—from human interactions (and will not ever, until such a time as we evolve different brains). But, from my perspective in the “other humanities”, we have made huge progress in developing methodologies, terminologies, and discourses for thinking productively about and understanding these fundamental interactions. We have amassed huge amounts of data about human cultures, cultural products, and the social and psychological impacts of art, for example. In the course of this progress, we have begun seriously to question romantic notions about cultural and psychological “universals” and hitherto unexamined premises of knowledge creation in the humanities. We understand that love and loyalty and wisdom can mean very different things at different times and in different places, that they can be motivated and appealed to in many different ways. We are even developing technologies—prominently our abilities to manipulate large data sets digitally—that promise new and more revealing and more accurate glimpses into the elements of human communication and interaction.
Accordingly, I would suggest that the “gap”, is not between an understanding of human interactions that has progressed little (if at all) since ancient Greece and a science that has vastly outstripped ancient knowledge but between today’s science of the material world and today’s study (or “science”?) of the humanities, which are at a stage that might be compared to the situation of the physical/natural sciences during the early era of the Enlightenment “scientific revolution”. The humanities are engaged in a lot of data creation and collecting, a lot of discrete and even brilliant projects but lack the breakthrough theorizing that brings it all together (lots of Tycho Brahes but no immediately outstanding Keplers or Newtons). The “humanities revolution” has yet to gather speed but it is, I believe, in the offing, driven, perhaps, by the “evolutionary” pressure of the Basic Problem.
There are obstacles that must be overcome: On the one hand, many humanities scholars are appalled by the notion of “applied humanities” and shun even indirect responsibility for practical suggestions that have consequences in the non-academic world. On the other hand, social sciences scholars who do make suggestions about what should be done often do not want to think about cultural products such as poems and music and art and movies and religious expression and the ways these are interpreted by the “other” humanities. Nonetheless, it appears to me that barriers are breaking down all around us. The demonstrated failures of overwhelming military superiority to control non-military social conflicts are inclining many influential people toward solutions involving communication and persuasion. Social scientists are beginning to take “literary” topics and methods into account. Increasingly, literature and art scholars are talking about “data” and rejecting “impressionistic” approaches. The popular theoretical bent of the humanities, although widely deplored in some circles, seems to represent a movement toward a perspective that breaks down artificial disciplinary boundaries and builds a more unified and powerful vision of human thought and interactions.
So…if we aregoing to talk about “what is to be done?” then, I believe, we must include “the other humanities” in the conversation. It will not be easy because it will be unusual or even unprecedented. Not many humanities scholars will be interested—they are busy with other concerns involving their own work (just as is the case with most “hard” scientists). Even the terms and language of such conversations will need to be worked out… But this is a problem (or the problem) of the “what is to be done?” project as a whole. Any agreement about responses to global issues must be negotiated in a real world that is fragmented by multiple languages and cultures each of which brings with it fundamental (and fundamentally different) assumptions about almost everything. And it is at this interface that “the other humanities” have important work to do.