This is the critical point
Having written the Critical Point column in Physics World for 20 years, Robert P Crease still worries that physicists don’t realize why the humanities are so important
I live in New York City and a few years ago I woke up in the middle of the night to find myself in an emergency room. I was propped up in a hospital bed, surrounded by a nurse and three technicians. It dawned on me that this must have something to do with the head injury that I had sustained the day before. An EEG technician was attaching wires to my scalp that trailed back to equipment behind me.
I was in an immaculate, six-month-old, hi-tech observation unit of a big hospital. A wall-sized monitor faced my bed with soothing images of beaches and mountains, accompanied by the sounds of waves and chirping birds. The technician, in her early 20s, assured me that I was going to be all right. Making light conversation, she told me that she was also taking classes at a nearby college, and then she asked me what I did.
“I’m a philosophy professor,” I replied, still a bit woozy. She affixed another electrode. “I read something by a philosopher last week. My professor assigned a short thing about people in a cave.”
It was 3.00 a.m. but I snapped out of my grogginess. “Plato?”
“Yes, that’s him.”
I asked what the assignment was about.
“It was a short story about people in an underground cavern,” she said. “They are chained to their seats and can’t turn around. All they can look at is the wall in front of them. Behind them is a big fire that they can’t see, and a small group of people are using that fire to cast shadows on the wall. The people in the seats don’t realize this. They don’t realize that they are being manipulated. They think the shadows on the wall are real.”
“You’re taking a philosophy class?”
“No,” the technician replied. “It’s for criminal justice and security. I’m studying to be a Homeland Security agent.”
What on earth, I wondered, did a short story by a Greek philosopher from 2500 years ago have to do with training someone for a career devoted to protecting America’s internal welfare and security? The US Department of Homeland Security is, after all, like the Home Office in the UK, or the Department of Justice and Equality in Ireland. Not the kind of place that you’d expect to have anything to do with Plato.
“The professor said it’s about how people have a hard time figuring out what’s real. We focus on our everyday concerns, on what we see right in front of us and our immediate goals, and we know about the world only from pictures that we see. But other people we don’t see are manipulating us, promoting those pictures for their own individual good. The pictures aren’t real – or maybe just partly real. Reality is hard to know. We have to step back and turn around to see what’s really happening and find out.”
Now fully awake, I was astounded to hear that a professor of criminal justice thought that the best way for his students to make sense of contemporary American security issues was to study Plato’s cave story.
“Did the class get it?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” said the future Homeland Security agent. “The people in the cave are like us. We have to struggle to see the difference between what we think we’re doing and what’s really going on.”
A sense of security
Plato’s story, which is a mere 200 words long and embedded in his book The Republic, is the most influential, riveting and still relevant philosophical image in history. It concerns the difference between appearances, or what we think we are doing, and reality, or the full context of what is going on. This is, in my opinion, the most important distinction in human life.
Our world has more hi-tech ways than Plato’s to project pictures, but we are in a similar predicament. We have Facebook feeds, DNA tests, Amazon Prime algorithms, fake-news stories, online surveys, Twitter streams and IQ tests that tell us who we are and what to think. Charity workers, politicians, advertisers, diet gurus, religious leaders and marketers try to recruit us. We don’t have one big wall but billions of little ones.
Today, too, there are powerful forces that inhibit people from being able to do what Plato sought to get others to do – to step back and reflect on who they are and where they really stand. These obstructing forces are increasingly embedded into the educational systems. American universities are becoming vocational, a colleague of mine recently pointed out. He directed me to statistics showing an accelerating rate of students in science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM), and a declining number of enrolments in the humanities – the disciplines that have traditionally sought to cultivate tools for people to make sense of and to reflect critically on their own personal, political and social experience.
The scientist saw this development as positive. We urgently need better, faster and cheaper tools for the problems that we face, he argued – cures for epidemics, for instance. The role of STEM education, he reasoned, is to teach students to produce better science, and to build and operate better hi-tech tools to reach our goals. The humanities can provide valuable assistance for that effort, he said. Offering a few humanities courses on the side – throwing in an “A” for arts to make it STEAM – can make students more visionary producers of science, and more imaginative designers, and more moral operators of hi-tech tools.
I vehemently objected. The role of the humanities is not to assist in reaching our goals but to cultivate the curiosity and commitment needed to analyse and assess those goals in the first place. It is to nurture what one might call “educated judgement” about what goals to have and how best to achieve them, in full view of all that one knows about one’s community and about the surrounding world. Such an educated judgement can motivate, say, the will to seek out cures for epidemics in the first place – as well as the desire to develop a just way to distribute cures for epidemics and the resolve to prepare better for the next one.
Developing the humanities protects the strength and vitality of all aspects of the communities in which we live
Teaching the humanities will not enlighten everyone, any more than teaching the sciences will make every person a scientist or engineer – or even appreciate those subjects. There will still be people who will dismiss select scientific findings as hoaxes; every cave has its maniacs. But a community with so little educated judgement that it puts such people in charge of the cave is sick, dehumanized and endangering itself. That is why it is essential to the strength and vitality of a community to promote among all its members the robust ability to reflect on their personal, political and social experience – and not to do so just “on the side”.
Failing to take the humanities seriously also encourages the dangerous idea that scientific approaches are the only way to cultivate educated judgement and to analyse any issue. This idea has sometimes adversely affected the humanities themselves, for more and more of its teaching and research emulates the sciences with jargon-filled research on narrow topics.
Final thoughts
In the face of these obstacles, how is it possible in the 21st century to cultivate an appreciation for what the humanities do?
Plato sought to convey the importance of stepping back and reflecting on one’s experience via a story that is like a little performance. Its props and protagonists are not ideas but familiar things – fire, a cave, a community, chains, shadows on a wall. Plato makes these elements act together to deliver an unexpected jolt to readers. His story has insight but no jargon, for he wrote it about us and for us. It can be read and understood by divorce lawyers, commodity traders, investment bankers, civil engineers, Homeland Security trainees and, yes, physicists too. Plato’s little performance subversively leads readers to experience their world in a new and insightful way a full two-and-a-half millennia after its debut. It cultivates the ground on which human activity is meaningful and from which educated judgment is developed and appreciated. Plato’s story is a model for what the humanities can do.
But there are other ways to bring to light the centrality of the humanities and the issues that it analyses and assesses. One way is to reveal the presence and even dependence of human activities, including scientific ones, on educated judgement. This is what I have often tried to do in the past 20 years of Critical Point columns.
What is trust, I have asked, and why is it indispensable for the sciences? What is leadership and how do science administrators exert it? Why are metaphors essential to the sciences? How does peer review really work? What is expertise and under what circumstances can it be trusted?
These were the topics of some of my columns; others have been devoted to such things as interpreting quantum mechanics, the appeal of pseudoscience, and coping with conspiracy theories. While I have heard scientists claim that pursuing such questions is irrelevant to their work, I think that taking science seriously requires it.
As the technician who was attaching electrodes that night in the New York hospital was beginning to realize, developing the humanities protects the strength and vitality of all aspects of the communities in which we live. It’s exactly what I’d call Homeland Security.