Steven Pinker: “Dear Humanists, Science is Not Your Enemy”

Human­ists are feel­ing a bit belea­guered these days. And who can blame them? Enroll­ments in human­i­ties cours­es are in steady decline nation­wide, and every­one’s look­ing for a cause. Some blame the decline on the tough econ­o­my and the relent­less­ly voca­tion­al focus of stu­dents. Oth­ers attribute it to the “anti-intel­lec­tu­al moment” in which we’re now liv­ing. Still oth­ers place the blame right in the laps of human­ists who have “lost faith in their own enter­prise.” They’re com­mit­ting their own form of career sui­cide. And then some fault the ever-increas­ing encroach­ment of sci­ence. For nowa­days sci­ence tries to answer all ques­tions, includ­ing what’s good, beau­ti­ful and true.

But if you lis­ten to Steven Pinker, he’ll tell you that sci­ence is not the prob­lem. Ear­li­er today, the emi­nent Har­vard psy­chol­o­gist pub­lished a piece in The New Repub­lic called Sci­ence Is Not Your Ene­my: An impas­sioned plea to neglect­ed nov­el­ists, embat­tled pro­fes­sors, and tenure-less his­to­ri­ans. And he offered these assur­ances:

[Sci­ence does­n’t have] an impe­ri­al­is­tic dri­ve to occu­py the human­i­ties; the promise of sci­ence is to enrich and diver­si­fy the intel­lec­tu­al tools of human­is­tic schol­ar­ship, not to oblit­er­ate them. And it is not the dog­ma that phys­i­cal stuff is the only thing that exists. Sci­en­tists them­selves are immersed in the ethe­re­al medi­um of infor­ma­tion, includ­ing the truths of math­e­mat­ics, the log­ic of their the­o­ries, and the val­ues that guide their enter­prise. In this con­cep­tion, sci­ence is of a piece with phi­los­o­phy, rea­son, and Enlight­en­ment human­ism. It is dis­tin­guished by an explic­it com­mit­ment to two ideals, and it is these that sci­en­tism seeks to export to the rest of intel­lec­tu­al life.

If you’re a human­ist try­ing to fig­ure out whether you can take com­fort in Pinker’s argu­ment, you can read the rest of his piece here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Can Sci­ence Fic­tion Save the Lib­er­al Arts? (Asks The New Repub­lic)

Ser­i­al Entre­pre­neur Damon Horowitz Says “Quit Your Tech Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Human­i­ties”

Read The Har­vard Clas­sics: A Free DIY Edu­ca­tion in the Lib­er­al Arts