When did studying the arts become a joke? Telling arts majors that they have no future is a long, clichéd Internet tradition. Indeed, belittling the arts has become something of a common narrative in our culture, such as when Florida governor Rick Scott denounced non-STEM fields and proposed giving tuition discounts to those who major in STEM fields; or when Mills College announced this month that it is considering slashing its arts programs in order to grow its science and business divisions.
Though STEM and the arts aren’t really a polar binary, it sometimes seems that way — especially given how many NPOs are devoted to pushing more STEM curricula into primary and secondary schools. The arts don’t have a foundational counterweight in that respect. Likewise, Silicon Valley companies want to build a public image that shows how awesome STEM is so that they can have more competitive employees in the future. Often, as the Mills case exemplifies, arts funding loses in turn.
In a subtle way, the valorization of STEM practitioners and dwindling funding for the arts have made making fun of arts majors a sort of sport. Yet the cultural derision for those who study art is also a consequence of rising tuition. As education is increasingly privatized and debt funded, students come to see college not as a social good but as a purchase; hence, the more expensive and debt funded tuition becomes, the more popular STEM and business majors become, to the detriment of fields like the arts and humanities. “Debt teaches career choices,” writes Jeffrey J. Williams in Dissent magazine:
It teaches that it would be a poor choice to wait on tables while writing a novel or become an elementary school teacher at $24,000 or join the Peace Corps. It rules out culture industries such as publishing or theater or art galleries that pay notoriously little or nonprofits like community radio or a women’s shelter. The more rational choice is to work for a big corporation or go to law school.
I confess that I, myself, have a STEM degree, in physics. And yet despite all the points made above, I do not recommend that you get a STEM degree. I recommend that you study the arts. (Better yet, study both if you can.)
Why would I recommend studying the underdog disciplines? My reasons are more personal and can be summed up by considering the types of minds that these fields produce — specifically, what I call the “STEM mind” versus the “arts mind,” and the way those minds see the world.
Let’s start with the STEM mind. In both science and applied-science fields like engineering, students are taught that there are universal laws — generally, equations or principles that govern the field. And the purpose of a STEM education is to pick out and understand those laws. They are not to be questioned, not too much at least; if you do question them, you get a chain of questions that always ends with “Because that’s the way the constants were set in our universe when the Big Bang happened.”
The arts are not like this. The arts mind, like the humanities mind, teaches that truth is gray, that there is not one way of seeing the world but rather a multitude of ways. In STEM, students are often given problem sets, questions with only one right answer. Yet in the arts and humanities, we are tasked with identifying problems that have never been identified before.
A lot of people who have the STEM mind never learn how to use the arts mind. And here’s where a problem arises: if you learn only the STEM mind, it’s hard to understand how the world works clearly.
If you don’t study the arts much while you’re young (at least enough to understand how one’s mind works in a creative mode), you run the risk of accepting the STEM mind as the only mind — the idea that there is some inherent way that the universe runs, some sole principle that you, as a scientist or technologist, are entitled to uncover. And then you’ll apply that to fields where it makes no sense, fields like education and government, thinking that because you understand STEM, you understand how the universe works — and in the process, piss a lot of people off and feel entitled to do so.
The STEM mind is also the reason why Silicon Valley has such a diversity problem, since the STEM mind, unwisely, turns to science to explain gender and racial gaps in STEM fields. This news item reappears constantly, such as when former Harvard president Lawrence Summers claimed that “men outperform[ed] women in maths and sciences because of biological difference”; or when Nobel Prize–winning biologist James Watson, a discoverer of DNA and a brilliant STEM mind, made racist remarks; or when privileged start-up bro Peter Shih penned a sexist rant about why women in SF are not all that, thinking his rampant misogyny would go unchecked.
The STEM mind assumes that it understands the world in its entirety because it understands its physical laws, whereas the arts minds doesn’t assume the world is even understandable.
Because there’s an inherent empathy at the core of the arts, it’s a much more penetrable position from which one might understand a complex social issue like a lack of gender diversity or oppression.
I am not saying that you should not study STEM fields at all — merely, that there is a way of thinking that comes from studying the arts and the humanities that, generally, you don’t get from studying STEM fields. Moreover, those who don’t study the arts enough to understand its M.O. may never learn this way of thinking.
I come from a family of many scientists. When our dinner-table discussions stray from science topics, the conversation becomes dominated by people who are utterly certain that, because they are scientists, they have a total and thorough understanding of politics, culture, society and religion, and that their view is precisely right. They apply an imagined set of universal laws to fields that don’t have universal laws.
This is also why scientists can be so hubristic. Physics is perhaps the most conceited science; Ernest Rutherford famously said, “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” Many physicists still believe this and pooh-pooh all other fields. One of the ultimate reasons why I left the sciences was because I felt this attitude emanate from my fellow physics majors; they scoffed at any attempt to dissect politics or social issues, resolute in their belief that they understood politics and economy and culture perfectly. After all, those fields were merely stamp collecting.
This attitude, which many STEM folks have, epitomizes a lot of recent public arguments over social issues. The hubris of Uber and other “sharing economy” companies, with their insistence that there is something inherently just about their business model, is characterized by a deep-seated belief that technology is inherently good — as if this were a universal law.
Likewise, many technorati with no education or teaching experience have recently decided that “education” is a “problem” to be “solved” or “hacked.” The absurdity of this idea should be apparent to anyone who’s even taken one arts or humanities class: there is no inherent truth or singular “right way” to approach education. As a social good, education is a pluralistic product, its execution dependent on local communities and their own sets of values. It’s no wonder why Mark Zuckerberg’s obnoxious attempt to remake public education in Newark failed disastrously. This is the same man who aspired to find a “fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about,” which sounds like something a pickup artist might say.
This is also why the most successful people tend to be those who understand both fields. Four hundred years ago, when Galileo was trying to prove that the Earth orbited the sun, he wrote a play. This seamless, intuitive merger of drama and science is not a common skill among scientists today (although I think most of us would be thrilled if a group of NASA scientists got together and wrote a space opera about water on Mars.)
Rather than posit some deterministic, base truth that is waiting to be “discovered,” arts minds acknowledge that truth is gray. This, indeed, is why it is so powerful, arguably more powerful than STEM has ever been. The world is remade by technological achievement, but the cultural narrative that supports those achievements is, for better or worse, driven by art. The filmmakers behind superhero movies bang the war drum and perpetuate our collective beliefs in American exceptionalism; alternately, artists have played a crucial role in drawing attention to unjust wars (see Picasso, Joan Baez, etc.). Our collective beliefs about ourselves and our society emerge out of what we watch on the screen, read in books and see on paper. That’s the arts mind at work.
