C.P. Snow's The Two
Cultures reflected upon the great divide between science and the
humanities, and criticized educational systems for rewarding the study of the
humanities at the expense of science.
This was the late 1950's and in the Sputnik era it widely
resonated. Fast forward to today. Could Snow have imagined cars that drive themselves, and tiny, powerful computers that also serve as phones, cameras, GPS
systems, radar enhanced weather reports, and Facebook, Twitter and email on the
go?
More significant than this amazing hardware and software,
is we've become a culture of scientism and algorithms, sliding down the
slippery slope of relinquishing our actions and moral judgments. Two recent articles address these issues,
well worth reading, and pondering. The first by Leon Wieseltier, "Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture" A Defense of the Humanities, is actually the
commencement address to Brandeis University graduates. Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic and he addressed the
graduates as "fellow humanists." He makes so many interesting points;
here are just some of the salient ones:
The machines to which we have become
enslaved, all of them quite astonishing, represent the greatest assault on
human attention ever devised: they are engines of mental and spiritual
dispersal, which make us wider only by making us less deep
And the devices that we carry like addicts
in our hands are disfiguring our mental lives also in other ways: for example,
they generate a hitherto unimaginable number of numbers, numbers about
everything under the sun, and so they are transforming us into a culture of
data, into a cult of data, in which no human activity and no human expression
is immune to quantification, in which happiness is a fit subject for economists,
in which the ordeals of the human heart
are inappropriately translated into mathematical expressions, leaving us with
new illusions of clarity and new illusions of control.
Our glittering age of technologism is also
a glittering age of scientism. Scientism is not the same thing as science.
Science is a blessing, but scientism is a curse. Science, I mean what
practicing scientists actually do, is acutely and admirably aware of its
limits, and humbly admits to the provisional character of its conclusions; but
scientism is dogmatic, and peddles
certainties. It is always at the ready with the solution to every
problem, because it believes that the solution to every problem is a scientific
one, and so it gives scientific answers to non-scientific questions. But even
the question of the place of science in human existence is not a scientific
question. It is a philosophical, which is to say, a humanistic
Steven Poole's Slaves to the Algorithm in Aeon Magazine addresses the question of whether there is still a place
for human judgment as computers make choices on our behalf. He paints a dystopian picture of where things
are going, culture itself being impacted as "we erect algorithms as our
ultimate judges and arbiters."
What lies behind
our current rush to automate everything we can imagine? Perhaps it is an idea
that has leaked out into the general culture from cognitive science and
psychology over the past half-century — that our brains are imperfect
computers. If so, surely replacing them with actual computers can have nothing
but benefits. Yet even in fields where the algorithm’s job is a relatively pure
exercise in number- crunching, things can go alarmingly wrong.
