Why I Am Not a Humanist

In most universities, academic departments are grouped into divisions, such as life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities. And philosophy is almost always placed in the humanities.¹ I’m a professor in a philosophy department, ergo, I’m a humanist. Moreover, I’m on record defending the value of “Great Books” courses, where we read writers like Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Kant. That’s about as humanistic as it gets. So what could I mean by the title of this post?!

Ultimately, I want to paint what I expect will be a familiar picture of a certain kind of identity or self-conception—that of a humanist—and to explain why it’s not mine, and why I think it can be a dangerous one to adopt. While there’s nothing per se wrong with being primarily interested in the humanities, it’s a near occasion of (epistemic) sin.

Some people are more excited about literature, foreign languages, and the arts, while others are more excited about math and science.² So far, no problem. But to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If your interests and skills are primarily humanistic, it can be tempting to see more questions as tractable via humanistic methods than really are. The characteristic temptation of the humanist is bringing exclusively humanistic tools to bear on questions that demand empirical evidence.

Many of the questions treated in great books fall within the domain of disciplines that, in the contemporary university, are not grouped with the humanities, and properly so. When Socrates and Plato ask whether and how it’s possible to knowingly do wrong—to choose A, even when you know you ought to choose B instead—they are asking questions we’d now classify as part of (moral) psychology. Likewise when Seneca writes about the nature of emotions like anger, and the extent to which they are under voluntary control. When Aristotle or Aquinas write about the function of money, and institutions like credit and interest, they’re doing what we’d now classify as economics.

I’ll give some examples later on where I think the humanistically inclined put too much weight on the authority of great books—rather than on evidence from contemporary empirical social science—in thinking about these sorts of questions. But first, I want to emphasize that worries in the ballpark of the ones I’m discussing are not new.

Two Cultures Redux

One of my favorite readings from college was CP Snow’s “The Two Cultures,” a lecture he delivered in 1959. He described and lamented a divide between a literary/humanistic culture, and a scientific culture. As both a physics PhD and a novelist,³ he had feet in both cultures, and saw both scientists ignorant of literature as well as humanists ignorant of science as missing out on some of the best that humanity has produced. After the more familiar criticism of philistine scientists, he turns to scolding the humanists:

But what about the other side? They are impoverished too—perhaps more seriously, because they are vainer about it. They still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of 'culture', as though the natural order didn't exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all. Even if they want to have it, they can't. It is rather as though, over an immense range of intellectual experience, a whole group was tone-deaf. Except that this tone-deafness doesn't come by nature, but by training, or rather the absence of training

As with the tone-deaf, they don't know what they miss. They give a pitying chuckle at the news of scientists who have never read a major work of English literature. They dismiss them as ignorant specialists. Yet their own ignorance and their own specialisation is just as startling. A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

CP Snow, bridging the two cultures

While Snow’s concerns were a bit different from mine—in particular, social science isn’t really on his radar—I do want to take from him the idea that there are pitfalls to adopting a self-conception that functions both as an excuse for ignorance and for devaluing that which one is ignorant of.

Ultimately, where I want to end up is with the idea that the boundaries between humanistic and social scientific treatments of big questions about humanity are porous, and that neither can legitimately ignore the other. So unlike Snow, I’m not trying to point to a sharp divide where people on one side go wrong by ignoring the valuable work on the other, but rather to a mushy divide that we make a mistake by treating as sharp. So it will help to have a different failure mode to use as an analogy—a case of people wrongly treating a disciplinary distinction as much sharper than it is—rather than the kinds of mistakes Snow skewers.

Noma? No Thanks

Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA) is a particularly clear example of the kind of mistake I want to discuss. Stephen Jay Gould’s main intellectual contribution in his home field of evolutionary biology was the theory of punctuated equilibrium—an attack on the Darwinian idea that evolutionary change is constant and gradual. Philosophers are perhaps most likely to have encountered his work with Richard Lewontin, critiquing adaptationism in evolutionary biology. But by the 1990s, much of his work was more public facing, and focused on cultural and political questions, and his idea of NOMA should be understood in that context.

Back then, there were various political battles in the United States over whether and how evolution should be taught in public schools, and how any potential conflicts with religion should be addressed. There were (and are) plenty of people in the United States who professed to believe that humans were created by God in their present form within the last 10,000 years, and who didn’t like the idea of high school biology teaching otherwise. NOMA was a kind of peace offering:

The text of Humani Generis [a papal encyclical] focuses on the magisterium (or teaching authority) of the Church—a word derived not from any concept of majesty or awe but from the different notion of teaching, for magister is Latin for "teacher." We may, I think, adopt this word and concept to express the central point of this essay and the principled resolution of supposed "conflict" or "warfare" between science and religion. No such conflict should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap (the principle that I would like to designate as NOMA, or "nonoverlapping magisteria").

The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the arch cliches, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.

To my ears, it’s hard not to hear Gould’s principle as an expression of wishful thinking. If only religion would stay in its lane! In fact, almost all world religions offer not only moral teachings, but also distinctive factual claims. Christians don’t just think that Jesus preached some nice sermons, but also that he was bodily resurrected. Moreover, it’s because they think he was the son of God that they take his moral teachings so seriously. In general, the moral teachings of religions are often closely bound up with their factual claims—about the soul, the afterlife, or the divine provenance of this or that text. The idea that religion gets exclusive rights to talk about value and science gets exclusive rights to talk about fact is better understood as an ambitious—presumptuous!—proposal about how to divvy up territory, with religion ceding a lot of ground, rather than a description of some already accepted norm.

By the way, it’s not just religion that would be getting a raw deal if Gould’s terms were accepted. Consider Derek Parfit’s remarks at the end of Reasons and Persons:

Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moral reasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.

“Not so fast Derek!” says Gould. “Ethics is within the magisterium of religion; ‘non-religious ethics’ is an oxymoron!” Gould’s treaty is not a happy one for secular ethicists. Oh well, perhaps they’ll agree it’s a price worth paying to save high school science from the Southern Baptists.

Of course I’m being a bit tongue in cheek. My point is that Gould’s attempt to carve up intellectual life into non-overlapping magisteria was a pretty dismal failure, however noble its motivations may have been. To be clear, none of this is to say that the “conflict” or “warfare” between science and religion which Gould lamented is inevitable. Rather, it’s just to say that any successful reconciliations won’t be along the lines of NOMA. Where scientific and religious claims apparently conflict, and how those conflicts can or cannot be resolved, are big questions that I don’t hope to even touch on in this post.⁴

Great Books, Lousy Evidence

I don’t know of anybody who explicitly defends the idea that the humanities and the (social) sciences represent non-overlapping magisteria a la Gould; it’s a hard idea to defend! Still, I often see humanists arguing for claims that—when stated baldly and clearly—are manifestly empirical, causal claims, but supporting them by appeal to the authority of the mighty dead. While I never see principled arguments to the effect that empirical evidence would be irrelevant to such claims, I do see puzzling absences—arguments stated with less humility than would be called for if their empirical limitations were frankly acknowledged. As I think this is a tendency that pops up all over the political spectrum, I’ll give examples from both the right and the left.

One of the best known right-wing thinkers who gets on my nerves—epistemically speaking—is Jordan Peterson. Maybe a weird example for me to pick for this post, as he’s not technically a humanist; his PhD is in psychology. But while he’s done plenty of traditional empirical work, I get the sense that, at least in the last couple of decades, that’s not where his heart is; his intellectual style is much more literary/humanistic than (social) scientific. He’s apt to make big, sweeping claims about human nature that are supported primarily by situating them in the interpretive framework of Jungian archetypes, rather than by appeal to research in which those claims are operationalized and tested.

One of the central explanatory claims Peterson makes using this Jungian framework concerns the psychological effects of uncertainty, and the role that hierarchy and tradition play in managing it. The thought is that exposure to uncertainty reliably produces fear, and that this is why human beings seek refuge in tradition, hierarchy, and stable social roles.⁵ This is presented as a claim about human psychology with evolutionary roots: the unknown is dangerous; we have both biologically and culturally adapted to treat it as such; myths and rituals function to domesticate it.

It’s a cool idea! And not an implausible one. There’s nothing wrong with treating writers like Jung as a rich source of hypotheses. But hypotheses are supposed to be probed with evidence. And maybe I’ve missed it—Peterson has written and said quite a lot—but I’ve never heard him tell that part of the story. What would it take to operationalize a claim like this? Under what conditions does uncertainty produce fear rather than curiosity or excitement? Doesn’t that sometimes happen too? To the extent that you do see people embracing tradition or hierarchy, how could you tell if it was best explained as an attempt to mitigate psychologically painful uncertainty?

Granted, these are hard questions. I don’t know how I’d go about testing the Jungian picture. But that’s part of the value of the (social) scientific method. When you force yourself to specify how a claim could be tested, even in the happy case where it’s true, you come to better understand its scope and its limits. After all, there are many ways in principle to reduce uncertainty—the “dark room problem” is just one illustration—so why, if at all, should we expect the particular, socially conservative responses that Peterson emphasizes, rather than others, to be the dominant or characteristic way people handle uncertainty, even granting the hypothesis that uncertainty-reduction is as fundamental a drive as he supposes?⁶

Along the same lines, I enthusiastically recommend a recent essay by Oliver Traldi that raises a similar criticism against a different target. He’s discussing a politically conservative strand of Straussianism, an approach to interpretation named for the 20th century German-American philosopher Leo Strauss. The basic idea is that many great thinkers, writing under conditions of persecution or censorship, concealed their true views beneath the surface of their texts. Careful readers are therefore encouraged to attend to puzzles, contradictions, and apparent missteps as clues to hidden, “esoteric” teachings. Economist, blogger, and polymath extraordinaire Tyler Cowen frequently offers Straussian interpretations of various cultural products: e.g., the hidden message of Star Wars is that the Jedi are not to be trusted.

To put my cards on the table, I have nothing against the idea that a Straussian approach is sometimes the best way to understand an author’s message. And even when it’s not—come on, George Lucas is not that subtle—it can still be fun.

So what’s the problem? Traldi argues that Straussians can become so focused on questions of interpretation—on their methods for reading between the lines to identify a great author’s secret teachings—that they fail to notice the substantial gap between establishing that someone held some view, and establishing that the view is true. Here’s how he describes the Straussian approach to reading Great texts:

under the assumption that the writer is a capital-g Great, capital-g Genius, the philosophy student is to apply this method to elicit that writer’s true beliefs, then adopt them.

That is, all of the Straussian’s argumentative energy is expended in showing that this or that Genius believed something, and little if any work is done showing that the Genius was right to believe what they did (which would generally require very different, usually less humanistic methods). I’m not familiar with enough Straussians to know how representative this picture is, but my hunch is that Traldi has identified an important failure mode.

On the left, I see analogous slippage in many critiques of capitalism. Elizabeth Bruenig’s case for socialism is a paradigm example. She draws on Great books—Plato, Aristotle, St. John Chrysostom—in characterizing a healthy, well-ordered soul, in which reason is properly in control of the passions. You might think I’d already object here, but I’m happy to follow her this far. While contemporary psychologists tend to use different vocabulary, I think there’s plenty of continuity between ancient and contemporary discussions of the soul/mind that can support the ideals Bruenig is identifying.⁷ Where my hackles are raised is when she moves from there to discussion of the deleterious psychological effects of living under capitalism. She makes explicit causal claims, but supports them by quotation rather than reference to empirical evidence:

Wherever the bourgeoisie has got the upperhand, Marx and Engels observed, “it has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” Capitalism demanded rationalization: the weighing and measuring and ordering and specifying of everything, not least because capitalism simply isn’t possible without rigorous and extensive bookkeeping.⁸ The objective of capitalism is the generation of profit, and to maximize that end it helps to be thoroughly, coldly calculating about things. It wasn’t as though no one in the Western world had ever thought or behaved this way before: “Rather,” the late Christian socialist scholar John Hughes wrote, “it is that this practice came to be differently evaluated, and this novel interpretation of capitalism as moral came to a new dominance.”

Any time you want to make claims about the causal effects of living under capitalism, you face some serious challenges; good evidence for causal claims requires controls, and it’s hard to find collections of societies that are otherwise similar but vary in how capitalistic they are. At the very least, absent this sort of evidence, one might hope for some humility about the strength of the causal claims you’d be in a position to make.

But as it turns out, there is an empirical literature in the ballpark, and it’s not all that favorable to the picture Bruenig paints. The quote below is from the conclusion of a survey article on the relationship between markets and morals:

Many people – both scholars and non-scholars alike – think markets transform us into the worst versions of our moral selves. While the evidence does not uniformly nor definitively tip the scale to a side of the debate, as our survey of the literature in Section 4 hinted, the bulk of the evidence suggests that they may not be correct. Most regression-based studies and experimental studies on prosocial behavior in economics suggests that markets encourage and promote prosocial behavior, attitudes and orientations. There was, indeed, some empirical support for markets being associated with socially harmful behaviors, attitudes and orientations. However, the weight of the quantitative studies seem to support the position that the market generally encourages and promotes prosocial behavior, attitudes and orientations.⁹

While the piece itself is from after Bruenig’s—and so she can’t be blamed for failure to find it—it surveys a large literature, which includes work from long before she wrote. I don’t bring it up to suggest the case is closed in favor of the salutary psychological effects of markets and/or capitalism. Rather, my point is just that this is the sort of work that one ought to be inclined to look for, if one is going to make the sorts of claims she does. While I can’t be sure that it’s an excessively humanistic orientation that explains Bruenig’s failure to do so—that’s a causal claim, and I don’t want to be hoist by my own petard—that is my suspicion. And suspicion is enough, I think, to be on guard against that possibility in myself. I don’t want to identify as a humanist, because I don’t want to be the kind of person for whom it feels natural to let quotation substitute for evidence when empirical questions are at stake.

In a future post, I plan to discuss how concerns like the ones I’ve raised here bear on questions of disciplinary gatekeeping—especially in light of recent criticisms of philosophers for being too quick to ask questions like “how is this paper philosophy?” As a preview: while I admit the question can be used badly, I think it can also reflect a healthy caution about the dangers of what others have called “epistemic trespassing.” Stay tuned!

1. Not always! At the Australian National University (ANU), the department of philosophy is housed in the RSSS (Research School of Social Sciences) rather than the RSHA (Research School of Humanities and arts). The London School of Economics doesn’t have traditional humanities disciplines as such—no English literature, no classics—but it does have a department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method. UC Irvine has a department of Logic & Philosophy of Science housed in the school of social sciences. All of these departments are world class.

2. This is obvious, but given the context I still feel obliged to provide some evidence. Academic subjects that students study don’t look random, but clustered; if you study English, you’re more likely to also study History than Physics. See, e.g., here for some relevant data on UK secondary school students (especially p. 24).

3. When I say he was a physics PhD and a novelist, you might be imagining a novelist in the vein of Andy Weir (a hard science fiction writer who I love but isn’t exactly a literary/humanistic type). Nope. The guy wrote a biography of Anthony Trollope, for goodness’ sake!

4. See, e.g., this post by Tim Pawl for an example of a non-Gouldian attempt at managing apparent conflicts between Christianity and evolutionary biology.

5. Really I ought to substantiate this attribution with a direct quote. But if I did that, it would probably be one where he was talking about the "dragon of chaos", which would then require backing up to explain what he's talking about, and why he's talking that way. And then I'd have to spend more of this post on Peterson exegesis than I care to (and more than I expect you’d enjoy). So I hope you'll trust the paraphrase is fair.

6. Neuroscientists in the predictive processing paradigm also think of uncertainty-reduction as the fundamental function of the brain. But, to my ears at least, they don’t sound remotely like Jungians. I suppose you could take that as a piece of evidence in favor of the Jungian framework: how nice that it dovetails with an approach to neuroscience motivated on totally different grounds! My take is more pessimistic; it just suggests that the Jungian idea is vague and unconstrained enough that what is actually an orthogonal theory about how the brain works can seem, if you squint, to have a lot in common with it.

7. My colleague Tamar Gendler famously taught a course on “Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature” that she jokingly referred to as “cog sci and dead guys.”

8. It’s a bit beside the point but I have to gripe here. It’s not just capitalism that demands rigorous and extensive bookkeeping. Any kind of systematic coordination on a larger-than-village scale will require rigorous and extensive bookkeeping. You want a state that redistributes wealth? Well they’re probably going to have to collect taxes, and that means a lot of bookkeeping. It’s no accident that James Scott—the great chronicler of the hazards of bookkeeping—was an anarchist.

9. Hat tip to Tibor Rutar, whose post on the topic pointed me to the article, and the quote.