Science and the Humanities—A Political View

Professor Ken Strongman, PhD FRSNZ
Vice President, Royal Society of New Zealand
Assistant Vice Chancellor, University of Canterbury

In this opinion piece on Science and the Humanities, I would like to explore some of the relationships between the arts and sciences. In particular I will concentrate on the Humanities. My specific reason for doing this is to describe something of what some of us have been doing in New Zealand during the last two years in order to bring about a rapprochement between the Humanities and Science.

In NZ about two-thirds of University students study humanities, arts or social sciences. Disciplines in these areas make up about 50% of university budgets. Figures such as these are replicated in Australia, the UK and the USA. Yet, in NZ only about 5% of spending on research and development is directed towards the Humanities and a slightly larger amount to the Social Sciences. Of course, subjects within these areas are much cheaper to fund than those in the Pure and Applied Sciences and Engineering, but they are not that cheap.

Currently, in NZ, there is only one research fund external to the Universities available to Humanities researchers – the Marsden Fund. A few years ago this had some new money added to it for the Humanities. It is a fund for blue skies research that is very well and thoroughly administered for the Government by the RSNZ. When the Humanities were added to this fund, some commentators suggested that they had taken ‘science' money – a nonsense. Moreover, when results of funding rounds are discussed in the media such discussion is typically based on the outmoded idea of the two cultures, opposing the Humanities and the Sciences, as if they are mutually exclusive forms of knowledge. As well as regarding the Humanities and the Science as mutually exclusive, the general view is that modern society only has use for one of them, the sciences of course. I suspect that this is because the research areas which interest Humanities scholars sound useless and many of the areas that interest scientists contain words of which the layperson has never heard and which therefore sound as though they must be useful. What is the point for example of studying history or of critiquing a novel when one compares it with developing a plasma screen television? Eminent professor of law at Yale, Stanley Fish, in terms of their usefulness describes the Humanities as having “none whatsoever” but goes on to say that this comment “brings honour to its subject.”

A common phrase in recent use has been ‘the knowledge society'. This has no doubt been coined because of the incredible opportunities for communication that now exist. Enabled by digital technologies, knowledge societies transcend older boundaries of all kinds. As new knowledge develops (and it is doing so at an ever-increasing pace) at its heart there sits a constantly changing mix of skills and competencies, from science, technology and applied disciplines, and from the arts, the creative industries and from the new technologies themselves.

Two years ago, at a ‘Working Knowledge' congress of the Council for the Humanities, Prof Malcolm Gillies, then Chair of the Australian Council for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences argued that the humanities, arts and social sciences are at the heart of education, knowledge production and knowledge transfer.

Knowledge workers are transforming economies around the world and there are few industries that do not incorporate them as designers, IT specialists, marketers, advertisers, communication specialist6s and creative thinkers. There are of course differences in the ways in which the sciences and the humanities produce knowledge, and there are also differences in the bodies of knowledge on which they draw. But these differences point to interdependence rather than exclusivity, to connectedness rather than separation.

In December I paid a visit to Taiwan, hosted by the Taiwan National Science Council and representing the RSNZ and MoRST. Amongst other events, some of us were shown round some of their more advanced science-based facilities, such as their science parks. I had imagined some rolling grasslands, a sort of Capability Brown landscape with occasional building dotted about, containing some interesting bits of innovative technology. In fact, the science parks are small towns, lived in almost solely by researchers who are developing new technologies, new inventions and in general advancing both pure and applied science and engineering. And in their centre are units that contain a mixture of specialists, including historians, architects, philosophers and various types of social scientist. These multi-disciplinary teams are regarded as particularly important to their blue skies research.

As the knowledge wave crashes upon us, our ability to critique, interpret and contextualize what is happening is crucial to whether we catch the wave or fail to catch it. More than this, though, the essentially human skills and qualities of imagination, or historicizing and interpreting, of solving problems and recognising patterns and essentially making critical analyses, can produce new opportunities and help us understand and cope with our world. Every aspect of social living (even the scientific endeavor) requires us to use cultural and intellectual skills. These are the skills being acquired by the large numbers of students at all stages of education who continue to be attracted by and engaged with the Humanities disciplines.

If, as a society, we wish to enhance this vital learning, which as it names suggests, teaches us what it is to be human (perhaps our most essential survival skill), we have to value and assist those people who are using their intellectual energy, their imaginations and their creativity to push knowledge forwards, wherever that knowledge might be situated.

The knowledge society or the knowledge wave are simply metaphors for the quiet revolution that is taking place in the way we use, generate and transfer knowledge. It is within this context that I believe it to be important to ask questions such as: Why do we need the Humanities? Or What use are the Arts?

Towards the end of 2008, Kim Carr, the Minister of Innovation in the then new Australian labour government gave an interesting address to the National Press Club of Australia. By the way, to have Minister of Innovation is in itself an innovative idea. He suggested that the Humanities have four roles in the innovation process. They help to drive innovation; they critique the ethical, historical, cultural and social consequences of innovation; they assist in generating the skills that people need in dealing with innovation; and, perhaps most importantly, they, together with the Social Sciences, enable people to deal with change. Any innovation and most scientific endeavours, particularly of the applied kind, is a prelude to change and change is a prime generator of anxiety for many people. It is crucial to provide ways of coping with this.

Another and perhaps more pointed way of looking at this is to suggest that without the Humanities we have little chance of understanding science. What is the history and culture of science? How has the development of technology or the human genome project changed our life expectations and what does this mean for the social and cultural well-being of ageing societies? What are the social, cultural and personal implications of global warming or the absence of oil within the next 20 to 30 years? One could generate numerous questions of this sort. The Humanities enable us to begin to answer questions that would then allow us to imagine and interpret a dynamic world, a world that cannot be embraced by science alone.

Although Humanities scholars are by tradition individualists, their qualitative judgments form the basis of or context for our collective narratives of our being in the world. The objective, scientific approach is all very well in the establishment of facts (which might themselves be defined as the shared opinions of experts), but such facts can tell us little about the quality of human experience. In other words, any facts can only be properly understood if they are placed in a context. In scientific psychology, the measuring instrument may be said to be measuring itself. In the humanities, the researcher is the measuring instrument, but the data are personal experience and knowledge; the researcher is part of the knowledge.

Knowledge is knowledge, be it amassed with the methods of the natural, biological or social sciences or with the research methods of the Humanities. In the end, the crux of my argument is not that there are two cultures in the sense that they were characterized, compellingly, by CP Snow more than half a century ago. Rather, there is knowledge, knowledge that is gained by a variety of methods, all of which can inform one another. And the entire endeavor is public and should remain so.

Just to remind you, the origin of the word ‘science is from the Latin ‘scienta' which in turn comes from scire' ‘know'. In pointing this out I am not suggesting that we do away with either ‘the Arts' or ‘the Humanities' as descriptive words. Appropriate public education about the original meaning of the word science would be very difficult to achieve. However, for the Humanities to be part of the Royal Society of New Zealand, as it has been since January 2010, is a sufficient beginning.

Royal Society of New Zealand embraces the Humanities