The primacy of science

My childhood friend and classmate Vijay, who died three summers ago, was better than me by a whisker in the formal academic subjects in which we earned the marks and ranks.  It didn't show really in the scores because I couldn't care much about marks and ranks.  I had plenty of other things to worry about.

But, there was no comparison between Vijay and me when it came to the arts and humanities.

I couldn't draw even an egg, whereas Vijay could easily draw portraits and animals and .... He could act. He could orate. He knew books and authors. Thankfully, we didn't have tests and exams on those because I would have failed.  And failed miserably.

Vijay was admitted to a prestigious engineering institute, but withdrew from there after two years, and chose a career of journalism and poetry, in which he excelled.

I went to a podunk college for engineering. And then found a path for that really interested me, and which continues to interest me in my mediocre career.

As good as we were in math and science, in our own ways we opted to pursue intellectual and professional interests elsewhere.  Our lives are additions to the examples in a long list of people who try to straddle the divide between science and everything else.

This divide has worried intellectuals and plenty has been said and written on this topic.  I often refer to CP Snow's lecture, not because I want to promote STEM, which is the buzzword for dollars in the academic business.  Snow's lecture I use because I have always worried about the alarmingly low levels of scientific literacy among the public.

But, even more worrisome to me is STEM without the humanities and the social sciences, about which I have blogged a lot.  Here's one from 2018, for example, that was about racist algorithms.  Or, how about this one, also from 2018 in which an essential question was "How did digital technologies go from empowering citizens and toppling dictators to being used as tools of oppression and discord?"

It has been a century of a battle that has been rapidly losing to "science."  In this book-review, the author writes about the debate in the late 19th century between Thomas Huxley and Matthew Arnold:

[According] to Matthew Arnold, who objected that during the previous decade, the science-not-letters movement had progressed from the “morning sunshine of popular favor” to its “meridian radiance.” Arnold, with whom Huxley had picked a fight by invoking him as the personification of literary culture, rose to the defense of letters by arguing that theirs was the quintessentially human task of integration: relating separate forms of knowledge and interpretation—moral, scientific, aesthetic, social—to one another. Science and literature, he urged, must be integral parts of the same larger task of “knowing ourselves and the world.”

The human task of integration.  If only we truly understood and practiced an idea that "Shakespeare and the sciences might be jointly relevant to one project of understanding."

The global pandemic reminds us about the human task of integration:

Covid-19 has presented the world with a couple of powerful ultimatums that are also strikingly relevant to our subject here. The virus has said, essentially, Halt your economies, reconnect science to a whole understanding of yourselves and the world, or die.