Julia Bainbridge, in Friday’s issue, lamented the decline of literary preoccupation, the apocryphal Golden Age when undergrads kept themselves up until all hours with ruminations on Plato, Cervantes and other work of similar ponderous weight and worth (‘The decline of literature,’ Sept. 19, pg. 7). It is telling that she points to Myron Magnet’s rhetorical riposte from the City Journal to illustrate the feeling that something valuable is absent in our society characterized more and more by the buzz and click of technology: ‘Can anyone think that there is more understanding to be gained about the human heart from Freud than from Shakespeare? Can anyone think that the studies of Margaret Mead or Alfred Kinsey tell us anything nearly as true as Ovid or Turgenev?’
Truth be told, we have been departed from Freud for some time. He was self-indulgently reliant on armchair speculation; that a great portion of his work focuses on dreams is ironically telling. Mead, for all her undeniable accomplishment and insight, was a long-time dupe of Samoan pranksters pulling a fast one on the white woman. And Kinsey’s researches were somewhat undermined by volunteer participants’ pools comprised of sexual beings fond of over-reporting for self-compliment. The moral: Those empiricists who some advocates of the humanities might deride for overwhelming their more cultured predecessors are not typically worthy of the worry.
But that former intellectual giants have been diminished somewhat by the contradictions of later scholarship is a side-note to this point of greater importance: no single field of inquiry should be given precedence over another. Rather, the increasingly frenzied expansion of human knowledge via science, streamlined and powerful information technology and the advancements made possible through recent discovery has underscored the achievements of a certain manner of thinking. It is not the particular subject that one studies the manner in which one attacks the problems of intellect, emotion, truth and life is what really counts. By far, the most productive trend in intellectual history is empiricism, and it is this tactic that must be a challenge and a goal for all people concerned with knowing anything about the world.
Ms. Bainbridge asked a provocative question: ‘Is literature not functional enough for modern-day students because it lacks empirical facts?’ I will return hers with another: can literature be functional without empirical facts? Literature can benefit as well as can engineering or neurology, from the influence of empirical analysis. The abject failure of post-modernism and its disciples to do anything but obfuscate meaning in literary theory is a prime example of how the absence of rigor, logic, ration and facts can be a bit of a problem.
Undeniably, literature helps to illuminate human nature and humanity’s role in the universe. But is this any greater benefit than can be gotten from a proper understanding of contemporary physics? Pope passed the buck on ultimate explanations to mysterious deity ‘All are but parts of one stupendous Whole / Whose body Nature is, and God the soul’ but modern scientists are just as poetic in their data-spun stories of particulate matter and its constituent bits: Quarks! Mesons! Baryons! and so on.
Twenty-first century biology, and particularly evolutionary theory, is another fruitful example of cold science sponsoring revelation. Though the varied members of our species are the end-result of several million years’ accumulated copying errors in a chemical code composed of sugars, phosphates and charming base pairs, though we are literal cousins to chimpanzees and are confined within the influence of nature and nurture both, we nonetheless have the capacity for art, poetry, love! Isn’t there something inspiring in this knowledge of our origins through paleontology, genetics and molecular mapping, something that is at least equivalently profound to John Donne’s ‘Little world made cunningly / Of elements and an angelic sprite?’
Consider this classic example: at a party among sophisticated cocktail sippers, you might join in the fun by laughing at some rube who is not familiar with the most common of the great books, who has not seen any of the recent and reputable films and not ever been to see a play. How then would you feel if you turned to find a group of party-goes giggling at your expense, prompted by your indignant comment that ‘humans didn’t come from monkeys’ or ‘my horoscope today was spooky dead-on’ or ‘these holistic magnetic insoles sure helped in the ultimate Frisbee tournament!’ Don’t be that one-sided guy.
Courses in zoology, psychology and the other shining -ologies help students see relevance and beauty in the world around them. Their own minds are clarified, as are their origins and their potentials. Let us continue, then, in promoting the Romantic poets and Renaissance writers, novelists and essayists and authors of all sorts. But do not stop there. Let us advance to the canon of necessary knowledge the empirical wisdom gleaned from observation and experimentation by countless scientists. We cannot hope to move forward into a better future if we allow the fabricated divide between the humanities and the sciences to force false loyalties from young scholars.
Science is not a mere instrument and literature is not the only song.
Zachary Bos Senior Administrative Secretary, Core Curriculum College of Arts and Sciences
The writer is a former editorial page editor of The Daily Free Press.