Comment by shaki-dora
6 years ago
That’s sort of like a parody I would write to prove my point.
You’re clearly emotional about the topic, to a degree that cannot be explained purely by doing a few interpretations in school. I don’t see, for example, this sort of venom directed at sports, even though I have heard more anecdotes about the dread of PE classes.
I could also make the same sort of claim about science and math: namely that school did little to inspire any sense of wonder and appreciation for the subject; that it tended to dwell on the rote application of some learnt rules to slightly varying problems without capturing the essence of the subject.
I have an inkling that people here might agree that some amount of rote learning was necessary for sciences to later be able to appreciate them, and that some of us may not have been ready to appreciate those subjects fully as early teens anyway. To not extend this sort of benefit of the doubt to the humanities them seems baffling. It may be explained people never going further in those fields and therefore not evolving the understanding that lets them reinterpret their early experiences. Or it’s an almost active socialization, a choice to fully identify with one group of academia and to deny the other’s validity in an in-group/out-group dynamic.
It’s also somewhat indefensible to claim “pure bullshit”—one just needs a single counterexample to show this, and others in this thread have brought up law as a rather impressive example of the power of interpretation. Personally, I’d point to Hannah Arendt, but I’m sure there are other philosophers for everyone. Heck, even Ayn Rand is squarely in the humanities. Or Carl Schmid if you like Trump, or Hobbes if you hate everyone.
Oh, and I just noticed this, Frankfurt’s On Bullshit is itself very much in the humanities’ wheelhouse.
Were the interpretations you were taught mere bullshit? I bet if you were to go back in time, or pick up a textbook, you’d find that no, they tended to be, if anything, a bit too much on-the-nose. Of course it’s not just about a white whale, but about something in the human experience that we can see far more often than any hunt for large marine mammals. But as teenagers, that sort of introspection was liable to instill a certain amount of existential dread, and quite possible ruin the easy enjoyment of what is otherwise an engaging but rather superficial adventure story on the high sees.
> I don’t see, for example, this sort of venom directed at sports, even though I have heard more anecdotes about the dread of PE classes.
PE is hard for those who're not fit and/or don't particularly like sports. But PE classes don't carry the air of intellectual superiority and don't hold the banner of truth the way humanities classes do. Also, people like me who dislike all kinds of physical sports know enough about human society to keep their mouths shut on the topic.
> I could also make the same sort of claim about science and math: namely that school did little to inspire any sense of wonder and appreciation for the subject
Observe the general disdain for maths and STEM among the general population.
> To not extend this sort of benefit of the doubt to the humanities them seems baffling.
It's not about rote learning, it's about truthiness. Getting burned by a math class leaves you with a perception that math is hard and probably useless. Getting burned by a literary analysis class leaves you with perception that the field is arbitrary and bullshit.
Note that I wasn't bad at literature classes at school. As long as I at least skimmed the work we were talking about, I could think on my feet fast enough to bullshit my way to B whenever asked. But I was acutely aware that I was bullshitting, and that so was the interpretation the teacher was reciting. This wouldn't be a problem as long as we both acknowledged we were spinning up interpretations, but became a problem once an interpretation became "the truth" (and one we'd be tested on).
As for humanities in general - and I tend to classify most psychology and social sciences under it - I thought a lot about it, and traced my own mixed feelings to them being essentially a hatred for bullshit. I enjoy the works of art, I enjoy introspection, I enjoy spinning up countless theories and interpretations - but I hate when someone takes what is an arbitrary interpretation and tries to pass it as fact about the real world.
Because many of us recognise (even if learned later in life than the time we were doing PE) the benefits of physical activity in terms of increased health and capability, which is not true for the time spent on humanities in education?