How did the humanities lose out to neuroscience in making culture seem interesting?
I’ve been listening to a lot of NPR and podcasts lately. I’ve given my historical favorites a little break (sorry, This American Life and Sound Opinions), and I’ve been listening more and more to Planet Money and Radiolab (as podcasts), and to the usual NPR fare that airs while I do dishes or cook dinner: All Things Considered, Marketplace, and of course: Fresh Air.
What I’ve noticed is how often scientists and economists show up on theses shows to talk about things I thought were the main interests of humanists and social scientists. Questions like the how restaurants work, whether or not race matters, why certain songs get stuck in our heads, how people calculate the value of things or make decisions they know are not in their best interests, and so on.
These are the questions to which I have long sought answers by looking at culture and its various expressions, and in which my field of American Studies has long been interested (albeit in different forms, over time).
Yet somehow, every time I turn on the radio, I find one or another neuroscientist (or, often enough, Jonah Lehrer) talking about precisely these same questions, and about how the pathways of neurons and synapses can answer questions art or love or whatever.
So here’s my question to my colleagues: how did we become so untouchable or so uninteresting to mainstream media? How come the good people at NPR (and, presumably, their listeners) find neuroscientists and economists more interesting and more capable of talking about these questions that we are? How did they become the go-to academics for understanding how and why people do what they do? Social scientists and humanists look at those phenomena, too, but somehow, we have become generally less interesting than our colleagues.
This is not the neuroscientists’ fault: they are good at what they do, and their creativity in asking profound questions that teeter on the line between culture and biology ought to be encouraged. Similarly, it’s not the fault of the radio programmers; they are looking for the most intelligent, engaging guests they can find. And they’re finding them in neuroscience and economics, not in the Humanities.
Why is everyone else talking about culture but us? Are we that boring? Have we grown so adept at gazing at our own navels that we can’t talk about other things? Does “the public” think that so-called “hard” science is really the only arbiter of actualities in the world?
How have we become so irrelevant even on topics that are ostensibly our areas of expertise and scholarly interest?
... and everyday life 
I love these programs too. I love humanist studies and social science, but I dislike the practitioners I’ve met. It’s probably because, like many people, I’ve wasted too many hours listening to humanist and social scientist condescendingly explain the latest pet garbage-nonsense trend theory with no basis in reality or logic, and treat me as though I’m a moron for not “getting” it.
Matthew. Thanks for your comment — indeed, I kind of agree. It’s just ironic that people say “It’s not brain surgery” to indicate that something is not difficult, implying that brain surgery (obviously related to neuroscience) has become better at explaining culture than the culturalists. Thanks for your explanation as to why, which troubles me even more……
“Questions like the how restaurants work, whether or not race matters, why certain songs get stuck in our heads”
just how much of the average student’s tuition goes to researching this?
In response to your question about hard science, I feel that the public definitely sees social sciences and humanities as less important. Granted they are better for proving correlation, and without that, there would be nothing for hard science to go off of. The real issue is that not being able to prove causality is starting to catch up with humanities and social sciences.
I think most social scientists and humanities scholars are just plain-old bad at expressing themselves to general audiences. As a former journalist and current anthropologist, I often think about my style and my audience when writing or speaking. So much of academic writing is overly obscure and poorly written. I’ve overheard academics who are clunky writers railing at those who publish cross-over books as if “popular” somehow meant “less-than rigorous” scholarship. Ugh. The truth is, the folks at NPR need someone who can deliver good sound bites as much as they need someone who knows his subject well. Until we learn to do that well, we’re not going to get on those shows.
I agree, and thanks for the comment. I’m less worried about getting on those shows, and more concerned that the conversation about culture keeps on being continually misconstrued as one about neuroscience, as if that’s the only field (or one of a few fields) with the potential for rendering accurate accounts of complicated human life.
Excellent post, Ari, and I’ve been thinking this for awhile. I agree with the first comment (Matthew Royal) that they have evidence and double-blind studies and Americans think humanists are just giving their opinions. I agree with Mac that humanists have lost something and I wonder if they (we) often come across as academic and elitist rather than populist and engaged. (Historians are an exception.) No doubt Fox News (and etc.) has had an effect with representing all humanists as a Leftist cultural elite but that only continues the critique of the university from the ’80s, which has had a devastating effect…and no effective counterattack has ever been mounted.