Wieseltier on a Countercultural Love for the Humanities

Addressing the graduates as “fellow humanists,” Leon Wieseltier delivered this truly wonderful commencement speech at Brandeis University. Wieseltier offers an old-fashioned defense of the humanities as the data-defying, science-transcending study of mankind:

Our glittering age of technologism is also a glittering age of scientism. Scientism is not the same thing as science. Science is a blessing, but scientism is a curse. Science, I mean what practicing scientists actually do, is acutely and admirably aware of its limits, and humbly admits to the provisional character of its conclusions; but scientism is dogmatic, and peddles certainties. It is always at the ready with the solution to every problem, because it believes that the solution to every problem is a scientific one, and so it gives scientific answers to non-scientific questions. But even the question of the place of science in human existence is not a scientific question….

Owing to its preference for totalistic explanation, scientism transforms science into an ideology, which is of course a betrayal of the experimental and empirical spirit. There is no perplexity of human emotion or human behavior that these days is not accounted for genetically or in the cocksure terms of evolutionary biology. It is true that the selfish gene has lately been replaced by the altruistic gene, which is lovelier, but it is still the gene that tyrannically rules. Liberal scientism should be no more philosophically attractive to us than conservative scientism, insofar as it, too, arrogantly reduces all the realms that we inhabit to a single realm, and tempts us into the belief that the epistemological eschaton has finally arrived, and at last we know what we need to know to manipulate human affairs wisely. This belief is invariably false and occasionally disastrous. We are becoming ignorant of ignorance.

In other words, we have stopped acknowledging the outer bounds of our knowledge. And, in doing so, have lost our humility and ability to distinguish between seeker, knower, and god. As an aside, this sounds an awful lot like F.A. Hayek’s description of the “knowledge problem” in 20^th century economics.

Wieseltier criticizes today’s analytic philosopher who “prefers to tinker and to tweak” rather than contemplate the soul. When the task becomes tinkering, we become cogs in some dystopian machine world:

The machines to which we have become enslaved, all of them quite astonishing, represent the greatest assault on human attention ever devised: they are engines of mental and spiritual dispersal, which make us wider only by making us less deep. There are thinkers, reputable ones if you can believe it, who proclaim that the exponential growth in computational ability will soon take us beyond the finitude of our bodies and our minds so that, as one of them puts it, there will no longer be any difference between human and machine. La Mettrie lives in Silicon Valley. This, of course, is not an apotheosis of the human but an abolition of the human; but Google is very excited by it.

Initially, I intended to correlate Wieseltier’s critique of scientism with the rise of an administrative federal government in our higher education system, similar to this piece, “Get the Government Out of the Liberal Arts,” which I wrote for Swarthmore’s newspaper earlier this year.

But I fear that inserting a political, policy-driven argument about education into this discussion of Wieseltier’s beautiful prose and message makes me, in a way, guilty of the same mechanistic small-mindedness that Wieseltier encourages us to avoid. So instead, I’ll just pull another beautiful quotation from a speech:

Do not believe the rumors of the obsolescence of your path. If Proust was a neuroscientist, then you have no urgent need of neuroscience, because you have Proust. If Jane Austen was a game theorist, then you have no reason to defect to game theory, because you have Austen. There is no greater bulwark against the twittering acceleration of American consciousness than the encounter with a work of art, and the experience of a text or an image. You are the representatives, the saving remnants, of that encounter and that experience, and of the serious study of that encounter and that experience – which is to say, you are the counterculture. Perhaps culture is now the counterculture.

So keep your heads. Do not waver. Be very proud. Use the new technologies for the old purposes.

Hopefully posting a blog post about the humanistic vision counts as using technology for the older, truer purpose of education.