To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare
many occasions a yr, as if on a hidden schedule, some tech particular person, usually venture-capital-adjacent, varieties out a thought on social media like “The only thing liberal arts majors are good for is scrubbing floors while I punch them” and hits Send. Then the poetry folks reply—usually a little bit late, in want of haircuts—with earnest arguments in regards to the worth of artwork.
I’m an English main to loss of life. (You know us not by what we’ve learn however by what we’re ashamed to not have learn.) But I realized years in the past that there’s no profit in becoming a member of this debate. It by no means resolves. The scientist-novelist C. P. Snow went after the topic in 1959 in a lecture known as “The Two Cultures,” during which he criticized British society for favoring Shakespeare over Newton. Snow will get cited rather a lot. I’ve at all times discovered him unreadable, which, sure, embarrasses me but additionally makes me ponder whether maybe the humanities had a degree.
By the time I went to varsity, within the mixtape days, the Two Cultures debate had migrated to corkboards. In the liberal arts constructing, folks tacked up pro-humanities essays they’d snipped out of magazines. A sizzling Saturday night time for me was to go and skim them. Other folks had been making an attempt medicine. I discovered the essays perplexing. I received the gist, however why would one have to defend one thing as pressing and important because the humanities? Then once more, throughout the road within the engineering constructing, I bear in mind seeing rest room graffiti that learn “The value of a liberal arts degree,” with an arrow pointing to the bathroom paper. I used to be within the engineering constructing as a result of they’d Silicon Graphics workstations.
Wandering between these worlds, I started to comprehend I used to be that the majority horrifying of issues: interdisciplinary. At a time when computers had been nonetheless sequestered in labs, the concept an English main ought to study to code was seen as wasteful, bordering on abusive—like educating a monkey to smoke. How might one assemble packages when one was speculated to be deconstructing texts? Yet my coronary heart informed me: All disciplines are one! We ought to all be in the identical big constructing. Advisers endorsed me to maintain this exceptionally quiet. Choose a significant, they mentioned. Minor in one thing odd should you should. But why had been we even right here, then? Weren’t all of us—ceramic engineers and ladies’s research alike—rowing collectively into the noosphere? No, I used to be informed. We are usually not. Go to your work-study job calling alumni for donations.
So I received my diploma, and off I went to reside an interdisciplinary life on the intersection of liberal arts and know-how, and I’m nonetheless at it, simply because the folks trashing the humanities are at it too. But I’ve come to grasp my advisers. They had been proper to warn me off.
Because people are primates and disciplines are our territories. A programmer sneers on the white house in Python, a sociologist rolls their eyes at a geographer, a physicist stares on the ceiling whereas an undergraduate, excessive off web boards, explains that Buddhism anticipated quantum idea. They, we, are patrolling the borders, deciding what belongs inside, what doesn’t. And this identical battle of the disciplines, eternal, ongoing, everlasting, and exhausting, defines the web. Is running a blog journalism? Is fan fiction “real” writing? Can video video games be artwork? (The reply is at all times: Of course, however not at all times. No one cares for that reply.)
