The humanities are under assault. University administrators eye falling enrollment and the lucrative funding streams of their engineering campuses, while parents shepherd their children towards high-paying technology jobs the press touts as today’s ticket to a stable career. Across nearly every humanities major, enrollment has been falling precipitously. Yet as students flock to STEM careers like computer science, they are losing the grounding that the humanities provide in helping them understand their role in society and the impact their creations have in shaping and being shaped by that society. Looking more closely, many of today’s most existential questions about the future of our digital world trace their roots to the decline of the humanities perspective in the technical disciplines.
It is a fascinating coincidence that the digital surveillance state has come to the forefront over a period of significant decline in humanities enrollment. Today’s computer science students are spending their formative college years in an increasingly isolative echo chamber that emphasizes capability over privacy, the notion of what “could” be done over what “should” be done. Data is the new oil, the pathway to riches paved with the personal information of others dehumanized to mere “data” and analyzed from afar, the harm done to them mere collateral damage in the pursuit of fame, fortune and glory.
To the engineering student of a century ago, such an isolated and single-minded focus on STEM would have been unthinkable. Engineering students at the nation’s top universities were given a rich humanities education to contextualize their newfound engineering knowledge. Like their non-STEM peers, engineers learned classical languages, immersed themselves in history, explored the world beyond their own doorsteps and culture beyond their own, learned how to communicate through oratory and literature, argued philosophy, experienced the arts, embraced anthropology, delved into archaeology and even touched upon law and politics. The curriculums of science and engineering students of the late 1800’s at major US research institutions might seem unfathomable to a student of today, but reflected the era’s deep understanding of the importance of the humanities to the functioning of a healthy society.
Engineers were not merely “builders” who created things in isolation. They were members of society building things in the service of that society and whose creations impacted that society. A humanities perspective was seen to help those engineers understand the society in which they existed and their own role in that society to help them both better serve their society and better communicate and engage with the rest of society.
Today such a holistic and cooperative understanding of the place of STEM in society has long since faded out of memory. Computer science students today are still required to take a small number of non-technical courses, but this brief fleeting field trip is a far cry from the forcible deep immersion into the world beyond equations, experiments and code that was once required.
Computer programmers today are taught that the world exists for them to shape in their own image, rather than a vibrant and diverse landscape they merely inhabit. Programming is no longer seen as something conducted in the service of society, it is viewed as something above society, an elite role bestowed the power to determine the outcomes of all others through algorithmic arbitration. Cultures, geographies, traditions and perspectives deemed “different” are to be algorithmically suppressed in a form of technology-based neocolonialism. Technological determinism reigns supreme. The idea that history, other cultures or even other disciplines of study might have something to offer is dismissed out of hand. The world outside of code holds little interest.
This divergence of STEM away from the humanities comes at great cost.
Computer science focuses on quantitative reduction, simplifying the chaotic cacophony that is human life into the purity of mathematical equations. The humanities emphasize qualitative exploration of that cacophony at its fullest, leveraging all of its rich detail to understand the “why” behind computer science’s focus on the “what.” A programmer builds deep learning models to combat misinformation. A humanist examines what it is that makes a society embrace falsehoods. The former merely patches up the symptoms. The latter seeks a cure for the disease itself.
In the end, computer science reduces the world to numbers. The humanities teach us how much those numbers fail to capture. Perhaps if computer scientists looked up from their screens of code they might see the vast vibrant diverse world around them and once again understand why the humanities are ever more important in a world increasingly defined by code.
