To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare
many instances a 12 months, as if on a hidden schedule, some tech particular person, typically 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—typically slightly late, in want of haircuts—with earnest arguments concerning 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,” by which he criticized British society for favoring Shakespeare over Newton. Snow will get cited so much. I’ve all the time discovered him unreadable, which, sure, embarrasses me but additionally makes me wonder if 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 that they had snipped out of magazines. A sizzling Saturday night time for me was to go and browse them. Other folks have 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 keep in mind seeing lavatory 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 that they had 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 have been nonetheless sequestered in labs, the concept an English main ought to be taught to code was seen as wasteful, bordering on abusive—like educating a monkey to smoke. How might one assemble packages when one was imagined to be deconstructing texts? Yet my coronary heart instructed me: All disciplines are one! We ought to all be in the identical big constructing. Advisers recommended me to maintain this exceptionally quiet. Choose a significant, they mentioned. Minor in one thing odd should you should. But why have 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 instructed. 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 expertise, and I’m nonetheless at it, simply because the folks trashing the humanities are at it too. But I’ve come to know my advisers. They have been proper to warn me off.
Because people are primates and disciplines are our territories. A programmer sneers on the white area 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 concept. They, we, are patrolling the borders, deciding what belongs inside, what doesn’t. And this similar 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 all the time: Of course, however not all the time. No one cares for that reply.)
