It's a wonder tall trees ain't layin' down....

Sorry, no picture.posting from my ☎(!), just trying to get this out of the nest.


I have to pick this up because it's a defense of the humanities, albeit a transactional one, since the purpose of studying the humanities is not merely to be able to distinguish the bullshit of Donald Trump or Roy Moore from truth:

Realistically, many if not most visitors to the museum won’t have a strong background in biblical history, theology, or related fields, making it difficult to discern where history ends and ideology begins. If they don’t already know, for example, that there is little historical evidence for the Egyptian exile, they may be convinced by the museum’s convenient placement of accurate historical information about ancient Egypt alongside the biblical account of Moses. They might come away thinking that the museum proves that Moses’s exodus happened just like it’s written in the Bible.

If they do so, it is because they have been failed — not just by the Museum of the Bible — but by educational institutions that have not equipped them with the tools with which to assess it. In the public imagination, the humanities have been so routinely undervalued. We have a vague cultural respect for “hard” science, for “STEM subjects,” but not for the humanities, which teach us to ask crucial questions like, Who is making this assertion? Who made this item? Why? or even, Why did someone decide to group all the objects in this museum exhibition together? These questions all fundamentally boil down to one bigger question: How can I tell when something someone is telling me is bullshit?

Without these questions, you end up with a population without the tools to process information about the intersection of faith, religion, history, identity, culture, and practice. You end up with people throughout the political and faith spectrums who, when it comes to anything to do with even the cultural or historical aspects religion, cannot tell valid questions and facts and historical truths from, well, bullshit.

I don't disagree that the humanities are valuable; all of my studies have been in the field known as "humanities."  But the simplest response to the Exodus story is to point out there is no "Red Sea" in Egypt today, and no evidence there ever was one.  There was an argument once, that what was meant was a "Reed Sea," but that entire argument turns too much on the Hebrew (or Greek, in the Septuagint) providing words as similar in those tongues as "Reed" and "Red" are in English.  And Exodus wasn't translated into English until the 16th century, so that doesn't make any sense at all.  Back to beginnings, then:  there is no "Red Sea" in the desert landscape of Egypt and there never was, else Egyptians would have built by it rather than along the Nile.  It doesn't take the careful study of the humanities and learning how to tell valid questions and fact from bullshit, to understand that.

But we have been failed by educational institutions that haven't equipped us with the tools with which to assess the Bible, or anything else.  Except who runs those institutions?  The people; the citizenry.  Few and far between are the secular universities that are truly private; the majority in this country, and some of the wealthiest (UT-Austin, hem-hem) are public.  Schools are largely public, too; the curricula set by professionals overseen and answerable to public officials elected by the public to do just that.  You want people to have the tools for assessment of things not measured by scales and meters?  Make the schools focus on something that isn't STEM, or think they have by adding an "A" to that acronym (what still predominates, is still in the majority?).  And by the way:  good luck with that.

Thinking is hard.  I'm more convinced by that every day.  I read the work of scientists who wander from their STEM fields into the humanities, and think because they are good at science they are good at anything (I still remember the lawyer who took a year off to be the general contractor on his home improvement project.  His fellow lawyers laughed behind his back, recognizing the hubris of someone who, expert in one field, thought he was expert in all.  I used to think that was a hubris peculiar to lawyers, whose work puts them in touch with so many fields of modern society.  Now I know it's just the hubris of education, usually a non-humanitarian education.  Outside of eleemosynary institutions, nothing teaches humility like the rigorous studies of art, philosophy, literature, and history.  You want to know how much you don't know, spend your time in those fields.).  Those wandering scientists think their knowledge is complete, is leading them to a grand unified theory that is only a few puzzle pieces away from being complete.  They know nothing of Godel or Wittgenstein, who look upon their efforts and chuckle and probably would echo Wonder Woman's words after the battle in "Justice League:"  "Children.  I work with children."  She means it kindly and bemusedly; I mean it seriously.  And it isn't hubris that leads me to observe it.

Thinking is hard, and it is not widely supported as a general activity.  Universities became cradles of humanistic thought because they were originally supported by churches, were in fact outgrowths of church efforts at what became known as scholarship.  But rigorous critical thinking is a challenge to the status quo; as long as the church sanctioned it, such practices were the church's problem.  Just to jump to the present day, who are critics of academia talking about when they complain that colleges are hotbeds of "politically correct" thought and dangerous and radical ideas?  The Chemistry Department?  Engineering?  Anything remotely related to STEM?  If you can't figure it out, maybe you need a background in humanities more than you thought you did; except then you'd be exposing yourself to all those "dangerous ideas," and we can't have that, can we?

ADDING:  the discussion turned into a discourse on the Museum of the Bible which is the topic of the article I took the quote from.  William Saletan has been there, and where before I might never have been interested to visit it, now I am.  It sounds like it might be worth the time spent in it.