Let us try to envision an alternate reality in which the humanities are glorified as the pinnacle of intellectual achievement, while the sciences are maligned and distrusted, practitioners having to beg for the cultural table scraps that are too insignificant for humanists to bother with. This happy scenario (if it is a happy one) is no fantasy. As Rachel Laudan (Reference Laudan1993) shows in her review of histories of science to 1913, the genre of history of science arose in the seventeenth century through practitioners’ attempts to demonstrate the legitimacy of science and mathematics as species of knowledge, as a way of “pressing their claims against humanist dominance of the institutions of intellectual authority, particularly educational institutions” (Laudan Reference Laudan1993, 2). This largely successful campaign was achieved by writing narratives of progress – stories about scientific communities’ confrontation with and eventual victory over challenging intellectual puzzles whose importance was carefully explained to a scientifically uninformed readership. By describing and explaining the sciences’ history of progress, practitioners were able to impart to readers a sense of how, historically, difficult problems have been chipped away at and eventually solved to the satisfaction of communities of specialists. These causal histories of science would subsequently give rise to attempts to formulate abstract characterizations of how the sciences produce knowledge, because science’s demonstrated knack for solving extremely difficult problems naturally engendered a desire to know the secret to its success.
Although histories of progress per se are probably not the right model for how to articulate the value of the humanities, there is a lesson in these efforts to convince a public skeptical of the legitimacy of scientific knowledge. Ultimately, what impressed readers about the history of science was not merely that it had produced lots of important results, but that it produced lots of important results that were very difficult to obtain. The argument for increasing the representation of the sciences in curricula rested precisely on the fact that producing scientific knowledge required lots of training in the particular cognitive tools that have been successfully employed in its pursuit; no one would have been motivated to devote more instructional time to science if scientific knowledge was easy to generate. Perhaps more than any other theme, the history of science showed that there is something special about these tools, because they are causally responsible for science’s impressive history of solved problems. If we see value in that history of success, went the argument, we ought to embrace the value of learning the skills on which that history depends. And if we value learning those skills, we need to devote an appreciable amount of an individual’s education to them, because they do not come easy.
The lesson for us humanists is that, if we want to convince a general public that it is important to devote serious study to the humanities, it had better be the case that whatever is valuable about the humanities can only be obtained by devoting serious study to it. And if that’s correct, it ought not to be the case that the production of humanistic scholarship is utterly trivial – that, for example, someone with zero training in a given humanities discipline could win awards for their exemplary scholarship. As a general rule, when we see that people with no training in a discipline can simply cobble together some jargon that survives multiple rounds of expert scrutiny, we should question whether the production of knowledge in that discipline requires any training whatsoever. To put it another way, we should wonder whether there is any meaning to the notion of expertise in that discipline. After all, if expertise in that discipline is not required to produce knowledge, and if it’s not an effective tool for vetting knowledge claims, precisely what is it that distinguishes someone with expertise from someone who lacks it? And what exactly is the argument for why anyone ought to devote serious study to the body of work in that discipline? If even professional-grade scholarship can be generated not just by a novice, but by a novice who is trying to sound ridiculous, why should anyone waste her time immersing herself in that discipline’s literature?
Part of the reason the natural sciences continue to demand a major investment of students’ time, even at the undergraduate level, is because they are hard. Everyone knows that professional-grade scientific research cannot be generated by a novice, let alone by a novice who is trying to sound ridiculous. The things we find valuable about scientific inquiry are hard-won. Professional scientists know this. Aspiring scientists know this, and they are reminded of it several times a semester when they get their graded exams back. Because there is no shortcut, they invest thousands upon thousands of hours into acquiring and honing the tools that will allow them to contribute to scientific knowledge. No discipline whose professional research standards can be routinely met by people with no disciplinary training can expect to make similar demands on students’ time.
It is crucial to separate this point from the regrettable fact of contemporary life wherein students seek scientific training because they think scientific training will give them a better chance at getting a good job. Suppose the fortunes were reversed. Suppose that students thought that being a really capable humanist was the only way to get a good job. The point would still stand that, apparently, being a really capable humanist often requires no training. And if producing award-winning humanities scholarship requires no training, surely no training would be required merely to appreciate the humanities. Unlike in science, the range of shortcuts here is ostensibly limitless.
It could be that much of the reason why the humanities are currently undervalued is because, much of the time, they do not appear to pose genuine intellectual challenges. Rather, they pose pseudochallenges: they demand that aspirants adopt a certain manner of speech or use of certain en vogue terms. To be fair, the sciences also make demands on our language. As Michael Gordin (Reference Gordin2015) has recently shown, those demands have increasingly come to favor native English speakers; they used to favor those who knew Latin, and before that, Arabic. But they also make demands on capacities that are not dependent on language alone – demands on our analytical, logical, and computational capacities; demands on our capacity for abstraction; on our ability to creatively solve problems; on our ability to survey and weigh a large body of evidence – in sum: demands on our judgment. These are challenges that no change in language can solve. They are real, and they can only be confronted by strengthening the non-linguistic tools that their solutions require.
The weaknesses exposed by the hoaxes are not limited to the specific disciplines the authors targeted. Quite generally, we have not been sufficiently attentive to our duty to distinguish between important and unimportant research problems, and we are failing to impart a faculty of discernment to our students. We have been increasingly lax in our responsibility to bring clarity to complex and nebulous problems that fall within our purview as humanists. We have increasingly come to favor novelty over depth, because it is always easier to meet the loose, underdeveloped standards for good work on a new topic than it is to meet the well-developed standards for good work on a well-developed area of research. It is not always laudable to ask a question that no one has ever asked before. Some questions are just not worth asking; or, at least, they’re not worth asking in a research context. We need to return to the level of rigor and intellectual seriousness that has defined the humanities since antiquity. If our distinctive contribution to human culture is going to be valuable, we need to hold ourselves to an intellectual standard that can only be met by seasoned specialists. Being good at humanistic research has never been easy. Let us hope it never becomes so.
