William Paley claimed that the “university exists to form the minds and the moral sensibilities of the next generation of clergymen, magistrates, and legislators.”[1] The assumption at Cambridge in 1785 was that both “individual conduct and a social order pleasing to God can be known and taught.”[2] To know outside of divine revelation what is pleasing to God was typically considered to be presumptuous back then because human finite knowledge cannot claim to encompass all possible knowledge. This could not even be claimed of AI a couple decades into the twenty-first century. Although infinity itself is not necessarily a divine concept—think of infinite space possibly being in the universe—it cannot be said that humans have, or even are capable of having, infinite knowledge. Theists and humanists can agree on this point. So, when a professor decides that a political issue is so important that using a faculty position to advocate for one’s own ideology in the classroom, presumptuousness can be said to reek to high heaven. I assume that any ideology is partial, and thus partisan, rather than wholistic. Both the inherently limited nature of the human brain, and thus human knowledge, and the presumption of an instructor to use the liberal arts, or the humanities more specifically, to advocate for one’s own ideology were strikingly on display on a panel on what the humanities should contribute on climate change. The panel, which consisted mostly of scholars from other universities, took place at Yale University on Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, 2024. Perhaps on that day in which the two holidays aliened, both fear of our species going extinct—literally turning to dust—and love of our species and Earth could be felt. That we can scarcely imagine our planet without our species living on it does not mean that such a scenario could not happen; and yet I contend that the humanities should not sell its soul or be romanticized ideologically to be transacted away into vocational knowledge, as if the humanities would more fittingly ask how to do something rather than why something is so. Going deeper, rather than departing from the intellectual raison d’être in order to tread water at the surface, metastasizing into training and skills, is not only the basis of the humanities’ sustainable competitive advantage in a university, but also the best basis from which the humanities can make a contribution to solving the problem of climate change by getting at its underlying source. Neither a political ideology or skills in “knowledge-use” can get at that; rather, they are oriented to relieving symptoms, which although very harmful, could be more expeditiously redressed by discovering and understanding their root cause. So I’m not claiming that universities should do away with applied science and research on technology, such as to absorb carbon from the seas and atmosphere; rather, I contend that the liberal arts and sciences, especially the humanities, should not be turned into engines of application.
The full essay is at "Humanities on Climate Change."
