The humanities and human nature: what does psycholinguistics have to do with poetics, or fiction with mental computation? Nothing, according to the academic humanities as currently practiced. So much the worse for them

My starting point is the widespread perception that the arts and humanities are in trouble. I have a collection of despondent articles with titles such as "The Decline and Fall of Literature," "Have the Humanities Collapsed?" "The Humanities at Twilight," "The Humanities Plight," "What Happened to the Humanities?" and so on.

Indeed, some of the signs of the health of the humanities are not good. There has been a decline in enrollment, faculty, and resources, and, most ominously, in interest among high school students. In recent polls only 9 percent of high school students express a desire to major in the humanities. There is also a widely acknowledged sense of malaise, a resignation about a lack of progress in the humanities.

One solution to this problem was tried out by Indiana University a number of years back when it hired an advertising agency to recruit more students into its humanities programs. They had a campaign called "Think for Living" with slogans such as:

"Do What You Want When You Graduate or Wait Twenty Years for Your Mid-Life Crisis"

"Insurance for When the Robots Take Over All The Boring Jobs"

"Okay Then, Follow Your Dreams in Your Next Life"

"Yeah, Like Your Parents Are So Happy"

I think this shows a certain desperation, which is a regrettable state of affairs, because the humanities are indispensable to being an educated person in a democracy. First of all, our lives are shaped by ideas. Our system of law, government, our economy, our assumptions about education, childrearing, and the relation between the sexes all have a rationale that was first worked out by thinkers in what we call the humanities. Second, the arts are touchstones for our private and public discourse. Even within the sciences, for example, one can't talk about biotechnology or genetic engineering without alluding to the novel Brave New World. Third, our lives are affected by contingencies of our culture, and part of being a capable citizen of a democracy is having a cosmopolitan appreciation of other times, places, and peoples.

So, given, on the one hand, the fact that the humanities are indispensable to an informed citizenry, and on the other, the fact that they seem to be in trouble, what's going wrong?

One diagnosis is that the malaise of the humanities comes in part from the separation from the sciences--the famous "two cultures" of C. P. Snow--which has led to an insularity of the academic humanities from new ideas and discoveries coming from our most exciting sciences. The sciences, for the last several centuries, have been characterized by a phenomenon that was given the lovely word consilience by E.O. Wilson, although I think the ideas were best expressed earlier by the founders of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. The history of modern science has been a history of unification of supposedly incommensurable metaphysical realms. Perhaps Newton's greatest accomplishment was to subvert the ancient doctrine that there was a fundamental division in the universe between the supralunary sphere of the moon--supposedly governed by pristine eternal laws--and the grubby, chaotic Earth below. Newton, of course, showed that the same force that brings the apple down to the earth also keeps the moon in orbit around it.

It used to be believed that there is a fundamental division between the formative past, when the planet was shaped and created, and the static present, until Charles Lyle showed that forces that we see around us such as erosion, climate, volcanoes, and earthquakes, if operating over a sufficient length of time, would have been sufficient to sculpt the landscape as we find it today.

It used to be believed that living and nonliving matter occupied separate realms; that living things were constituted out of some quivering gel called protoplasm, which is utterly unlike nonliving matter. Then Friedrich Wohler showed that one could synthesize urea out of chemical compounds, and, therefore, that the stuff of life was ordinary chemicals obeying the laws of chemistry.

The integration of the nonliving and living worlds was further advanced by Darwin, who showed that the ubiquitous presence of adaptation in the living world could be explained by the natural selection of replicators. Later, Mendel and Watson and Crick would show that replication itself can be understood as a physical process.

The last remaining chasm in our ontology is between the biological and the cultural, with the sciences on the one hand and the humanities and social sciences on the other. The ground for optimism about the humanities is that the process of consilience will continue. We're beginning to see the glimmerings of the unifications of the natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities. There are two realms in which this is being carried out.

One is the study of deep history--the use of genetics, linguistics, and archaeology to bridge the end of human biological evolution and the beginning of history, civilization, and culture. Those familiar with Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, for example, have some exposure to this new science, which bridges biological evolution with the beginning of recorded history. But the approach I'd like to address lies in the sciences of human nature, the bridging of the biological and the cultural not in terms of time but in terms of causation. Cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral genetics can play a role, illuminate our culture and society.