More on humanities

This looks like a good place for some C. Wright Mills:

http://www.camden.rutgers.edu/~wood/207socimagination.htm

I couldn't have said it better. I'm a Ph.D. student in the humanities with B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemistry and I've been trying to get this point across for a long time now. Bravo to Ph.D. Comics.

Glad to see this one, and I think graduate programs are far from the only subject of interest here. Few things piss me off more than the suggestion that a humanities BA isn't useful. Most of the people I know who got BAs in fields like English, history, or communications have gone on to get very good jobs. Quite a few of them have wound up in managerial positions within a few years of graduation.

Nobody that I know disagrees with the idea that social and cultural forces are important in modern society. So are history, English, and music.

The problem comes when you look at how these things are studied and how they're taught. Aye, there's the rub.

I think a lot of the accusations about how the humanities are taught and studied are overblown. Yes, some wackaloon stuff comes out from time to time, but by and large my experience in departments of both English and communication studies has not come anywhere close to the common myth of humanities departments as havens of radical relativism, etc. Possibly the most misunderstood example is Sandra Harding's characterization of Newton's Principia as a "rape manual": To quote Life of Brian, "it's not meant to be taken literally, of course." It refers to the extremely (and negatively) gendered nature of the Enlightenment's conception of science. You can legitimately criticize Harding for her choice of words, but her point stands.

i couldn't have said it more obfuscatorially: what we do is completely irrelevant. but give us money to keep doing it.

djlactin:

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. It's not saying at all that pop-culture studies or humanities in general are irrelevant, and I don't think they are. One could argue, in fact, that if our elected leaders had a bit better understanding of the humanities and social sciences we might have avoided our current overseas fiasco in the first place.

Addendum:

I think the point about current events was made elsewhere in this discussion previously, perhaps by Dr. Wilkins, but I don't remember exactly where just now.

Possibly the most misunderstood example is Sandra Harding's characterization of Newton's Principia as a "rape manual": To quote Life of Brian, "it's not meant to be taken literally, of course." It refers to the extremely (and negatively) gendered nature of the Enlightenment's conception of science. You can legitimately criticize Harding for her choice of words, but her point stands.

Posted by: cfcasper | July 29, 2008 1:28 PM

Harding can be criticized for more than just her choice of words. Her "rape manual" comment is indeed ridiculous (and, yes, I do understand that she wasn't claiming it was literally a rape manual). Her concept of "strong objectivity" is positively absurd. Her tendency to see sexism anywhere she can find something that can be somehow construed as being something vaguely like a penis-like thingamabob is a case of extreme apophenia. She gullibly falls for preposterous pseudoscience (such as Afro-centrism and acupuncture) again and again. And, most importantly, she does not understand the science which she "critiques".

I could go on and on. For every legitimate point she makes, she makes a dozen blunders.

Wes-

We'll have to agree to disagree, although you've probably read more of her than I have. I didn't mean to imply that everyone who disagrees with her simply misunderstands her. Frankly, I don't know enough of her work to defend her comprehensively (and I don't know that I'd necessarily be inclined to), but I stand by my original evaluation that the "rape manual" metaphor is unfairly maligned, outrageous as it may be.