Humanities and sciences are one, just as life is one

In the days of the Grand Coalition, that bloated behemoth where even the principals could not fire corrupt, inefficient and grumpy juniors if they were hired by “the other side”, a curious debate crept into our national discourse.

There was the rush to convert polytechnics and technical institutes into universities, alongside the chorus that we needed to teach university students only ‘marketable’ courses.

In that heated moment, the so-called humanities were liberally defamed as useless. It reminded me of my university days, when a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree had been nicknamed ‘Bwana Asifiwe’, or Bachelor of ‘Being Around’.

Of course there is merit in the argument that our students should be taught courses that are relevant in an increasingly knowledge-based, solutions-oriented global economy.

The trouble with the argument, is that the ‘marketability’ of courses is cheapening in the sense that we want universities to teach ‘how to’ do only one thing, without imparting any deep knowledge of why it is being done.

Thus, we were urged to teach upcoming journalists how to file stories, without initiating them into the broad and deep understanding of the societies being covered. Or teach managers how to manage without equipping them with a deeper understanding of the dynamic nature of the modern global corporation.

I found the argument shallow for two main reasons. First, society operates like the muscles of the forearm. When the biceps stretch, the triceps pull in the opposite direction. While science may presuppose that the whole world is defined by logic, mathematical precision and natural order, humanities insist reason, ethics and empathy differentiate us from other animals.

This seemingly antagonistic nature is what makes society whole. Humanities identify the gaps in society and analyse dangers of not fixing them. Science, on its part, provides the innovation and the how of filling those gaps.

Put in another way, while engineering may provide means of production to enable the modern world to satisfy its needs, humanities raise the flag on the consequences of deploying technology unethically and cautions us on why we need more than concrete-and-steel development to lead better lives. If in doubt, just consider that banks are making profits, all econometric instruments show the economy is growing yet in our midst people still die of hunger, jigger infestation and water-borne diseases.

My second reason is based on lack of understanding what constitutes knowledge. In the beginning, knowledge was one. There was no divide between science and humanities, between mathematics and history and so on. Early civilisations – from River Nile to Mesopotamia – did not draw any line between science and the arts.

From Classical Greece, the same Pythagoras who gave us the Pythagoras theorem we use in Mathematics is the same guy who influenced his disciples to engage in religious rites that made him flee the city of Croton. The same Rene Descartes who gave us the Cartesian plane that we use to plot graphs in Mathematics and other sciences, taught me how to doubt the facts in a story unless it is well attributed and verifiable; a purely artistic skill that my teacher used to call the Cartesian theory of doubt. He summarised it thus: “I doubt, therefore I am.” We should therefore encourage our children to discover their talents and develop them to the furthest corners of the world by reading as widely as possible.

There was a time all teachers wanted their children to follow the chalk path. Then came the time when accountants, lawyers and such cadres were the best paid. Today, we have an outbreak of procurement professionals. The ground keeps shifting and today footballers are better paid than presidents.

And while earning a living is important, we must realise that the universe remains the same and we can only obtain knowledge of the world by reading widely beyond your area of specialisation.

We must stop living as if artists don’t get sick and therefore don’t need to understand their bodies, or as if a defect in your car that you could simply have rectified cannot make it roll and kill you; just because you are not an engineer. Life draws no line between disciplines and therefore we must read widely to understand it.