many times a year, as if by hidden agenda, some tech guy, often associated with venture capital, writes a thought on social media like “The only thing liberal arts majors are good for is scrubbing floors while I hit them” and hits “Send “. Then the people of poetry respond – often a bit late, in need of a haircut – with strong arguments for the value of art.
I’m an English major to death. (You know us not by what we’ve read, but by what we’re ashamed we haven’t read.) But I learned years ago that there’s no use joining this debate. It is never resolved. The scholar-novelist K. P. Snow took up the subject in 1959. in a lecture called “The Two Cultures” in which he criticized British society for favoring Shakespeare over Newton. Snow is quoted a lot. I’ve always found it unreadable, which, yes, bothers me, but also makes me wonder if maybe the humanities have a point.
By the time I went to college, in the days of the mixtape, the bicultural debate had migrated to corkboards. In the liberal arts building, people were arranging pro-human essays they had cut out of magazines. It was a hot Saturday night for me to go read them. Other people tried drugs. I found the essays confusing. I get the point, but why defend something as urgent and important as the humanities? Then again, across the street in the engineering building, I remember seeing graffiti in the bathroom that read “The Value of a Liberal Arts Degree,” with an arrow pointing to the toilet paper. I was in the engineering building because they had Silicon Graphics workstations.
Wandering between these worlds, I began to realize that I was this most terrifying thing: interdisciplinary. At a time when computers were still isolated in labs, the idea that an English major should learn to code was considered wasteful, bordering on insulting—like teaching a monkey to smoke. How can a person construct programs when it should have been deconstructing texts? But my heart said: All disciplines are one! We must all be in the same giant building. Counselors advised me to keep this extremely quiet. Choose a major, they said. Minor in something weird, if you must. But then why were we even here? Were we not all—ceramic engineers and research women alike—rowing together in the noosphere? no They told me. We are not. Go to your work and studies, call alumni for donations.
So, I got my degree and went to live an interdisciplinary life at the intersection of liberal arts and technology, and I’m still at it, just as the people who crack the humanities do. But I understood my advisors. They had a right to warn me.
Because humans are primates and disciplines are our territories. A programmer scoffs at white space in Python, a sociologist rolls his eyes at a geographer, a physicist stares at the ceiling, while a student trolling Internet forums explains that Buddhism anticipated quantum theory. They, we, patrol the borders, decide what’s in and what’s not. And this same battle of the disciplines, eternal, ongoing, eternal and exhausting, defines the Internet. Is blogging journalism? Is it “real” fan fiction writing? Can video games be art? (The answer is always: Of course, but not always. Nobody cares about this answer.)
