In the New Scientific Age, the Non-Sciences Are More Important Than Ever

Over the past 40 years, Western education has emphasized math, engineering, and invention, while neglecting the disciplines that allow us to cope with their creations. We are more equipped than ever to disrupt entire economies and ways of life with technology and less equipped than ever to deal with the consequences. If we want to retain a life worth living, one where human beings control the tools that they create, and not vice versa, we need to return to the deep well of human wisdom: what we once called with pride “the humanities.” 

The most obvious factor in the disruption is the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence. We seem to have created machines better than us at most human endeavors: teaching, writing, analyzing, and yes, even programming machines. And we aren’t prepared to deal with it. 

Urgent warnings have sounded from multiple quarters: we better slow down because we don’t know what is inside this Pandora’s box. If the monster at the end of the story, so to speak, is the subjugation of what is most human to the machine, I’m afraid we’re in worse condition than ever to confront it. 

Most of us already yield our mental life to machines—like the tiny computer you’re probably reading this on. We are perennially distracted, so much so that scientific studies chronicled an alarming drop in the average attention span, from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds in 2012. I suspect it’s gotten even worse since. Gen Z purportedly spends half its waking hours on screens, watching an average of 7.2 hours of video a day.  

The youngest generations are lonelier, more mentally ill, and unhappier than their predecessors. 

What are we to do? We can hardly slow down the course of history, and we certainly can’t reverse it. But perhaps we can find a way to weather it without losing our souls. 

In this age of rapidly progressing technology and our increasing entanglement with it, the non-sciences—the humanities—are more important than ever.

The questions that we will have to confront in this new age are not questions the revered STEM fields can answer. They are questions of meaning and teleological hope. If history must march on, then what, exactly, is it marching toward? What is the purpose of human life? What can we give up and safely outsource to machines without losing our dignity? 

More than ever, these aren’t just abstract philosophical inquiries. They are pressing questions. 

The good news is, while our situation is new, the questions it provokes are not. Thousands of people, much smarter and more experienced than you and I, have dedicated their lives to such examinations. The bad news is we’ve willfully forgotten all that they have to teach us. 

The Lebanese philosopher and diplomat Charles Malik famously remarked: “What is fascinating about great literature—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Dostoyevsky—is not that ages and cultures differ, which of course they do, but how much behind its infinite variations, the human condition is always essentially the same.” 

The enemy at the gates may change, but human frailty and mortality remain the same. Whether it is the Vikings, or the plague, or the atom bomb, human beings have always had to confront novel threats to life and livelihood, many of our own invention.

Perhaps our next battle is, in the words of Malik, to “keep the machine, the instrument, in its subordinate place—always the slave, never the master.” If we are to do this, we will need to do it in good company—with Homer and Rembrandt and Wordsworth.

To remain fully human, we’ll need to tap into the cumulative human tradition. We will need good, time-tested art, and philosophy, and literature, and religion, and we will need it now.