The Forum Shows Why We Need Humanities Majors

HEIDI LIANG/DEERFIELD SCROLL

Of course, as always, this year’s Deerfield Forum speakers all excelled in their fields. Of course, more than any past Forum, they eagerly debated and examined each other. Of course, their ideas kept students discussing the whole week, an unfathomable length for our attention span. Yet, the debate’s circling around definitions and predictions made the arguments slip by each other, missing the underlying assumptions where disagreement really sprang from. 

One might protest that debates are just, by nature, quick and shallow. Flashy interruptions can amuse audiences—certainly us—more than thorough elaborations. After all, six-minute openings and four-minute rebuttals simply cannot fit treatises after all. The clock, the crowd, and the cortisol blend into a nervous antagonism, which, with a sprinkle of ego, makes it easier to assume the other side did not fully understand the nuances of our own super cool and original argument. It is, then, only human to either dismiss the opponent with “you’re irrelevant” or merely repeat definitions against the opponent, hoping they finally see our brilliance and agree. You thus might excuse our speakers for not satiating the pedants’ interest in ethics and systemic thinking.

But it need not have been so. Fundamentally, the debate’s superficiality reflects the importance of the humanities education and its depth of thinking.

Among the debate’s tangents, the “this is about better, not healthier” quip that students groaned at the most was really a misdelivered structural critique. While it may seem like the Con side tried to make the Pro side defend aesthetic gene edits beyond just health edits, underlying this redefinition is the observation that any editing likely trends towards (often Western-skewed) homogeneity. This homogeneity originates from consumerist culture creating a hierarchy of aesthetics that pushes individuals to all desire the same thing, which, because of media power, is often European. This critique can be traced to the 20th-century philosophy of Critical Theory, which broke down the values of art and ethics that 19th century ideologies had believed to be objective truths, pointing out instead that such values were arbitrarily defined by those in power. 

However, as the Cons hardly engaged with these sociological underpinnings, the audience and the Pros dismissed “better not healthier” as a definition quibble rather than an inevitable corollary of the existing debate. The discussion thus devolved into a duel of comebacks. Missing this layer of normative, humanities-style thinking, each side merely clutched their own definitions rather than debating the more fundamental and meaningful question of whether individuals can be aesthetically free and diverse despite the social values engulfing them.

The Cons did later allude to this reasoning by questioning whether Wall Street is likelier to hire a tall white man or a short person of color. The Pros did try answering the question with examples of technology creating diversity or humans embracing imperfections. Despite this real albeit indirect engagement with the underlying question, since the debaters presented these rebuttals as anecdotal quips, their opponents simply plastered over them with their own anecdotes. Their arguments thus flew over each other rather than moving towards an answer because the conversation did not dive into humanities-style inquiry: whether Philosophy’s dissection of underlying axioms, History’s extrapolation of conflicting stories, or English’s investigation of living psyches. 

One could even stretch to say that this overemphasis of anecdotes and data in the Forum reflects the negation-based empiricism of STEM thinking. While rigorous when pursued faithfully, this focus on merely reviewing and cross-verifying clinical trials risks stymying the creativity to extrapolate towards the greater implications of technological change for society and the human condition.

It was no accident that the speakers frequently referenced literature. Brave New World and its shelves of peers are not only pop culture references to appeal to the crowd, albeit sadly unsuccessful with us, but also explorations of how human nature might use and abuse technology. Referencing them makes drawing upon the thinking of the humanities easier compared to steadily directing and pushing the conversation.

That even at this highest level of intellectual expertise, a debate falls short simply reflects the importance of a strong foundation and continual practice of the humanities. Undeniably, the sciences pave the path towards the junctures of progress. However, if we do not wish to merely be swept by the material current of technology and its invisible hand, but to discern what we ought to become, then we require the humanities’ investigation of lemmas and motivations, axioms and aspirations.