From: Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi
Date: 4.11.02

John, I do share with you the almost petulant impatience concerning what passes for scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences. The isolation from the rest of the world, the navel-gazing, the faddish swings and inbred coteries are not a pretty sight.

But is this situation due to the perversity of humanists, or is it a temporary disease that just now happens to afflict the humanities? You seem to blame mostly the individuals involved, whereas I would hope that the problem resides with the way the humanities have been practiced in the past few generations.

The mandate of the sciences is to explore, discover, and create new ways of looking at the world, and new ways of controlling physical processes. Some of this will be useful to humankind; some—such as nuclear waste, hothouse gasses, genetic changes—might yet be our bane. But because every culture (first, second, third...) tends towards hegemony and values dogma, we must pretend that science is an unmitigated blessing. And in the meantime, it is true, as you say, that the pursuit of science and its sexy daughter, technology, are a lot of fun for those involved in the chase.

What we expect from the humanities is something different. It is not the production of novelty, but the selection among them, the evaluation of what is important, meaningful (dare I say "good"?)—and then the transmission of the selected human achievements to the next generation. And the next. Thus the role of the humanities is conservative, bridging the present with the future with a view to the past. As you know, there cannot be evolution without a well-working mechanism for screening novelties that improve life from inferior ones: producing novelty alone does not lead to adaptive change. To help in this process should be the role of the humanities.

Of course, by and large the humanities have abandoned that task. Why? There are surely many reasons, but one of the major ones is that the same criteria that make sense in science have been applied to the humanities. Assistant professors in philosophy or English are hired and promoted on the basis of the "originality" of their contributions—which forces them to come up with ever cuter novelties rather than reflect on what is valuable and permanent. Young scholars are not rewarded for being good humanists, but for applying the "explore, discover, create" approach to texts, in a superficial imitation of the sciences. If there is blame to assign, it is the recent success of the sciences that has helped erode the uniqueness of the humanities.

So it is true, in my opinion, that the domains of the humanities are in trouble. But it is less of a distinction between "scientists" and "humanists" than between the institutional structures and the social reward systems within which the two groups operate. As you say at the end of the article, there are humanists who think like scientists, and vice versa. In fact, it is probably true that the frequency of scientists who are provincial in their outlook, who ignore the long-term implications of their work, who disdain anyone outside their circle, is at least as large as that of benighted humanists. The difference is that they are doing a job appreciated by the majority, while the humanists are not.

Therefore my solution to this problem is in some ways the opposite of your—the humanities need to rediscover their true calling, and stick by it. Of course, this does mean that in order to evaluate, select, and transmit valuable knowledge the individual humanists has to be acquainted with the novelty produced by scientists, and understand its implications. It may no longer be possible for an artist to be at the forefront of science, like Leonardo was, but the insularity of both camps ought to decrease. With a common fund of knowledge, the two endeavors can then proceed towards their respective goals.

MIHALYI CSIKSZENTMIHALYI is the Davidson Professor of Management at the Claremont Graduate University, and author of Finding Flow. [more....]

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