Embrace The Future. Read More Shakespeare
“All things are ready, if our mind be so.” ~Willliam Shakespeare, Henry V
Oftentimes, as if on a hidden schedule, some tech person, often venture-capital-adjacent, types out a thought on social media like “The only thing liberal arts majors are good for is scrubbing floors ”and hits send. Then the poetry people respond with earnest arguments about the value of prose.
I was an English major and will be until the day I die. You know us NOT by what we’ve read but rather by what we have NOT read. However, I learned throughout the years that there’s no benefit in joining this debate. It never resolves itself. The scientist-novelist C. P. Snow went after the subject in 1959 in a lecture called “The Two Cultures,” in which he criticized British society for favoring Shakespeare over Newton. I have always found him difficult to read and follow, which, yes, embarrasses me, but also makes me wonder whether perhaps the humanities had a point.
I attended college during the mixtape days. In the campus liberal arts building, students tacked up pro-humanities essays snipped out of magazines. A hopping Saturday night for me was to read them while other students were at frat parties. I found the essays perplexing. I got the gist, but why would one need to defend something as urgent and essential as the humanities? Then again, across the street in the engineering building, I remember seeing bathroom graffiti that read “The value of a liberal arts degree,” with an arrow pointing to the toilet paper. I was in the engineering building because that’s where they housed our computer labs. Perplexing, yet not surprising.
Toggling between these two worlds, I realized that I was interdisciplinary. Not a popular trait in the Liberal Arts department. The humanities were meant to be inclusive, not to be altered, texts were the bible, and only meant to be analyzed by students and educators dedicated to classical and pseudo-modern works of literature. Computers were still sequestered in labs, and the idea that an English major should learn to code was considered absurd. How could one construct programs when one was supposed to be deconstructing texts? Yet my heart told me: All disciplines are one! We should all be in the same giant building. Advisers counseled me to keep this exceptionally quiet. Choose a major, they said. Minor in something odd if you must (mine was Philosophy). But why were we even here, then? Weren’t we all engineers and women’s studies alike rowing together towards a post-graduate modern society and discipline? I was told, NO.
So I forged on and received my BA in English with a “not so popular” minor in Philosophy. I then went on to live an interdisciplinary life at the intersection of liberal arts and technology, and I’m still at it, just as the people bashing the humanities are at it too. But I have come to a place where I now understand my advisers.
Emilie Wapnick should have been my advisor back in 1991, during my existential crisis, when I was trying to determine what I wanted to be when I grew up. However, it’s never too late! I was introduced to her recently (fast-forward to 2021) in graduate school in a “Writing for Change” course. She does a fantastic job of inspiring people and students today, to embrace interdisciplinarism. Finally. There’s hope for Academia!
Still today, humans are innate disciples of our own territories, programmers sneer at the white space in Python, a sociologist rolls their eyes at geographers, a physicist stares at the ceiling while an undergraduate, high off internet forums, explains that Buddhism anticipated quantum theory. They, we, are patrolling the borders, deciding what belongs inside, and what does not. And this same battle of the disciplines, everlasting, ongoing, eternal, and exhausting, defines the internet. Is blogging journalism? Is fan fiction “real” writing? Can video games be art? The answer is always “Of course, but not always.” No one cares for that answer.
When things get out of hand, universities don’t consider opening disciplinary borders. We craft new disciplines: digital humanities, human geography, and yes, computer science (note that “science” is glued to the end, to differentiate it from “engineering”). In time, these great new territories get their own boundaries and their own defenders. The interdisciplinarian is essentially an exile. Someone who respects no borders enjoys no citizenship.
One could argue that for all the conversation around the university serving as an “intellectual commons,” it is actually an institution intended to preserve a kind of permanent détente between the disciplines, a place where you can bring French literature professors together with metallurgists and bind them with salaries so that they might not kill each other. The quad is an intellectual DMZ. But those bonds are breaking down. Universities are casting disciplines to the wind. Whole departments are shuttering, while snazzy football stadiums stay open and French literature goes away. And then the VC types get on Twitter or X, to tell us that poetry is useless. The losses are real.
So I pose a simple question, “So what? “ I mourn not a particular program at a college I never visited but the sense of institutions being in balance. I’ve spent most of my life wanting desperately for institutions to be disrupted, and now I find myself entering the second half of my existence craving that stability. The delicate détente is vanishing, that sense of having options. A shorter course catalog is an absolute sign of a society in decline.
However, we’re cutting off the very future that the tech industry promises. If the current narrative holds, if AI is victorious, well, liberal arts types will be ascendant. Rather than having to learn abstruse, ancient systems of rules and syntaxes (mathematical notation, C++, Perl) to think higher thoughts, we will be engaged with our infinitely patient AI tutors/servants like Greek princelings, prompting them to write code for us, make spreadsheets for us, perform first-order analysis of rigid structures for us, craft Horn clauses for us.
I see what technologists have done with AI image-creation software so far. Look at Midjourney’s “Best Of” page. If you don’t know a lot about art but you know what you like, and what you like is Vincent van Gogh and pianos, you are entering the best possible future. You might think, Hey, that’s what the market demands. But humans get bored with everything.
The winners here will be the ones who can get the computer to move things along the most quickly, generate new fashions and fads, turn that into money, and go to the next thing. If computers are capable of understanding us and will do our bidding, and enable us to be more creative, then the people in our fields — yes, maybe even the poets — will have an edge. Don’t blame us. You made the bots.