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Dear Mr. Kristof,
Your column, "The Hubris of the Humanities," shows us
Americans how our country's end will come with a whimper, or, perhaps, just a
whine.
Growing up in the early 1960s, I recall watching a very
popular Sunday evening TV quiz show, "G.E. College Bowl." I was only 10 years
old, but I remember wanting to be like those students as they answered
rapid-fire questions and won their points. Most of the proferred questions,
however, covered the humanities, not the sciences. I remember there being
a huge number of questions being asked on the fine arts. Yet, this was at a time
when the U.S. was engaged in a very public "technological war" with the Soviet
Union over which nation would dominate space, and these college students did not
appear to be either conscripts or volunteers in that war. Apparently, academia
prized the teakwood variety of knowledge over the armor-plated kind, and I
believe that preference continues to this day. The press even couched that
potentially deadly international game as the "Space Race," as if it could be
reasonably added to the American circuses of football or golf. Throughout the
20th century, and now into the 21st, the American people preferred to view
science as an ostentatious piece of jewelry instead of a precision tool
necessary for national progress or survival.
One issue that epitomizes the problem you outline in your
piece is the continued reluctance of the U.S. public to embrace the metric
system of measurement. Although it has been adopted as the official,
everyday mode of measurement in nearly every other country, metric
continues to meet with suspicion, disdain, and ridicule among Americans. People
here denounce it as "too foreign," "too scientific," or, even though it is
simpler than our current hobo stew of units, "too complicated." But it serves as
a convenient bookmark on your reading of the times. The longer we, as a
people, continue to isolate ourselves because we think certain ideas are
"beneath us," the deeper we will go into denial about being overtaken by
intellectually hungrier nations. Then, one morning, like the overconfident
hare in the fable, we will wake up to find world institutions no longer
based in America, and the tortoises of China and India far in the global
lead.
Sincerely,
Paul Trusten, R.Ph.
Midland TX |
