On the myth of the machine
I've recently been reading a bit about science vs humanities, having worked my way through Neil Postman's Technopoly (1993), Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason (1976), Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine (1967, 1970) and finally something of a rant about the alleged STEM crisis from Hal Berghel in the March 2013 issue of IEEE Computer (p. 70-73). Each complain about what they see as a "mechanisation" (as suggested by Mumford's title) of society, driven by a narrow pursuit of economic efficiency and technological progress at the expense of real human interests.
I've never quite understood some of the antagonism that seemed to exist between disciples of the sciences and the humanities around the middle of the twentieth century, and arguments over the merits of quantitative vs qualitative research. Maybe everyone was over it by the time I began studying for my undergraduate degree in the 1990s, having finally accepted that there are many interesting fields of endeavour and many valid approaches to research with their own strengths and weaknesses.
I, like a lot of other scientists and engineers, have a lot of affinity for hierarchical reductionism, in which any particular system is studied and explained in terms of its immediate sub-components. So biology is explained in terms of biochemistry, which is explained in terms of chemistry, which is explained in terms of physics, for example. As far as any credible science can tell, humans are indeed made up of sub-atomic particles and the forces that act on them, but hardly anyone supposes that sub-atomic physics is an effective tool for describing or understanding, say, art or politics. At the same time, to claim that humans somehow transcend or defy the laws of physics is a likely recipe for bullshit.
The real problem for humanists, perhaps, is that few people feel the need to hire out historians, philosophers and art critics in the way that they hire out accountants, physicians and engineers. Yet almost everyone is interested in art and history to some degree, and meaningful participation in society surely requires some knowledge of that society's culture, history, philosophy and much else besides. In a sense, we're all amateur humanists, but we leave science and engineering to the professionals. Consequently, the humanities become invisible to narrow economic analyses that track only the transfer of material wealth from one person to another.
The real enemy here is narrowness, whether it be an economist's pre-occupation with material wealth, an engineer's pre-occupation with machines, or a humanist's pre-occupation with soul. If you want to achieve some narrow task, a machine is indeed likely to be an excellent tool for performing it efficiently and well. But who wants to be a machine?
