Why Are Sciences At The Top And Humanities At The Bottom Of Academic Hierarchy?

In every country, everywhere, math is held in awe. If you are good at it, then people think you are smart. Physics comes in as a close second. And the two together congeal in that pinnacle of all disciplines, astrophysics. Anything else is not that hard – it is simply not rocket-science. 

Then there is tech and coding. Those who can do it are seen as a superior race, if a somewhat geeky populace, with weird-shaped heads. You must have seen them in Hollywood movies and Netflix crime shows. They avoid eye-contact, drink lots of soda, are partial to comic con, and type random words into screens at superfast speeds. They are bad at following puns, do not understand jokes, but are fantastic at locating super-villains by inputting their tailor’s name into a self-developed, yet-to-be-released AI software. 

These three streams occupy the top of the global caste-system of sciences. Below them come the less glamourous disciplines of chemistry and biology. They are the also-rans, looked down upon by the high-thinking mathematicians, physicists, and techies. It is cool to wear Schrödinger’s Cat on a T-shirt. Not so cool to talk about dissecting rats. 

But all of these subjects stand above the outcastes of the academic system – humanities. If you choose to read sociology, history, politics, philosophy, or God forbid, literature, in college, then the world treats you as a wastrel. Especially if your family is paying for your studies. Even more so, if you have actually done well in high-school. What will you do with it, the Elders of your clan ask? How will you earn a living? 

That is the crux of the problem. Science teaches us how to build and rebuild material things — including our physical bodies. Humanities teaches us how to build better, more fulfilling, happier societies. Violence, hate, isolation, depression, which have become endemic to contemporary society can only be addressed by understanding how human societies work, how human beings relate to each other. By devaluing humanities, we have created pathologies in the social body, even in those nations which have mastered all material needs. 

Material needs are produced using the technologies of STEM. They can be commoditised and bought and sold for a price. The disciplines that come under the umbrella of humanities produce social welfare, which cannot be priced — neither bought nor sold. There is only one exception – economics, which comprehends and organises the very process of exchange. 

So, it is not surprising, that other than those who study economics, students of humanities find it difficult to get well-paying jobs. And in the consumerist societies that we live in, it is understandable that the best talents would be attracted towards the most lucrative disciplines. 

If the humanities are about welfare, then it is for the state to ensure that its practitioners get paid well. That is an essential condition for attracting the best minds to study these disciplines in high-school and university. But for that to happen, welfare itself has to be valued by those who decide government policies. Societies that are organised around free-markets tend to privilege consumerism and material-production, at the expense of happiness, social connections, and human welfare. That is one key reason why such societies —most of the world today— find no real value in studying about what makes us human. The market is quantitative — it exchanges specific quantities of commodities for specific amounts of money. The market’s ethos is to convert everything into quantities, to value everything as so many multiples of a unit of a good. This ethos lends itself easily to STEM disciplines, which work with quantities and statistical-probability. 

Even Humanities have been taken over by this quantitative spirit – you can see it in every discipline, from political science to psychology. Qualitative studies and theory have been replaced by surveys and empirical typologies. 

This has shorn humanities of its complexities and have made it banal. High social theory is as, if not more, complex than the pure sciences. It requires an analytical mind, which can comprehend complex connections and understand counter-intuitive conceptual structures. Advanced social-theory —the backbone of the humanities— requires one to abjure obviousness, and lay bare that which is not available to experience. The quantification of humanities militates against the very core of the social sciences. No wonder then, the disciplines of humanities are considered to be easy, pursuits that do not require deep thought, while STEM subjects are seen to need higher cognitive abilities. 

This fetishization of STEM has even led to claims that women are incapable of doing it. Some biologists have argued that women have ‘empathetic’ brains, while men have ‘systematic’ brains. This, we are told, makes women less likely to do well in STEM subjects. One big study is often quoted to back this ‘scientific’ hypothesis. It shows that even in gender-equal Scandinavian countries, fewer women study STEM in college. Feminists see this as a major cause for concern, while male critics of feminism, point to it as an example of the fundamental differences between male and female brains. 

What they leave out is that the same study also shows that girls in Scandinavian countries do better than boys in STEM subjects in high school. They just happen to do even better in the social-sciences. It is understandable that they would choose to study what they are best at — in this case, humanities. It is also possible that Scandinavian ‘socialism’ values the social sciences more than other ‘advanced capitalist’ countries do. So, studying non-STEM subjects does not mark you out as a loser. 

Perhaps, the women of Scandinavia know something that the rest of the world does not. That when we say something is not rocket-science, we ought to mean that it is much more complex and difficult than rocket science can ever be.

(Views expressed are personal.)