Why science needs the humanities more than ever

It is May 7, 1959, and a tall, burly man with little hair on his head walks decisively into the Senate House, an 18th-century neoclassical building. This is Charles Percy Snow, a chemist, successful novelist, and advisor to the British government, recently named Baron of Leicester by the Queen for his services to the country. He is preparing to give the Rede Lecture, a prestigious conference held every year at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. He does not know it yet, but he is about to create a considerable stir that will awaken the wrath of many powerful people and generate a public debate that will last for years.

Snow's sin was to state an obvious fact in his lecture (later published in the famous bookThe Two Cultures): that the separation between science and the humanities was absurd and superficial, and did us more harm than good. Snow recalled that at the dawn of our civilization, the great scholars who laid the first stones of knowledge were both philosophers and scientists, and that the distinction between science and the arts, so embedded in the European educational system, had not been definitively established until the 20th century. He proposed that it made no sense to pit disciplines against each other that were, in fact, two sides of the same coin: human culture. Rather, it was about making them work together. This splash of reality did not go down very well among those who lived off the statu quo, hence the bitter controversy that was generated.

Almost seventy years have passed, and it does not seem that we have advanced much. One could even say that the gap is becoming increasingly unbridgeable. We are losing science hours during secondary education, and this is dramatic, but the leak in the humanities is even greater. And once they reach university, humanities subjects are anecdotal in scientific degrees (and those of science in the humanities, simply non-existent). It is a cross-cutting problem throughout the world, amidst a global trend to consider the humanities unnecessary. There are honorable exceptions, such as ShanghaiTech University, which, despite being a technological center, has had an institute of humanities since it was founded, which interacts with its scientific counterpart on equal terms.

Can anyone be a good scientist without first being a good person, without having read the classics, without knowing the main philosophical currents, without understanding how necessary art is, without having developed tools such as creativity and the capacity for critical and ethical judgment? Many think so. But science does not exist in a vacuum: it is part of our culture. As Bertrand Russell said: science is what we know, philosophy is what we do not. That is to say, science provides us with answers, but philosophy is what asks the questions, gives meaning to knowledge, and resolves ethical doubts. One cannot exist in the absence of the other, or we will find ourselves in a technological race toward an uncertain destination without understanding its implications. And that is exactly what is happening now.

A science devoid of a humanistic anchor ends up generating monsters like the tecnobros that are taking over the planet, characters who, with the excuse of not placing barriers to progress, have thrown ethics out the window. This has delivered technology into the claws of savage capitalism, and together they have formed a dangerous symbiosis based simply on the ability to produce money. As long as bank accounts continue to fatten, the populists who govern the great powers will allow science to work removed from humanism.

It has been said many times: scientific advances are not, in themselves, either good or bad; everything depends on how they are used. This maxim implies a certain regulation to protect us from the misuse of new technologies. On other occasions, it has been the scientists themselves who have imposed moratoriums on themselves when society had not yet had time to legislate in a new area that involved a certain danger. The best known, perhaps, is the one that arose from the Asilomar conference in 1975, organized by future Nobel laureate Paul Berg, among other luminaries, to assess how the recent technological discovery of recombinant DNA, which allowed for the first time to edit the genome, should be used.

What is happening now, instead? The main heads of AI companies warn that the dangers are real and are calling for legislation to limit them, but the difference is that, despite the obvious risks, no one wants to be the first to take their foot off the accelerator. In this game of chicken, the whole of humanity will lose out. And all because one day it was decided that science and the humanities should ignore each other instead of working hand in hand. The think tank British Chatham House believes that we may need an equivalent to Hiroshima (a catastrophe as devastating as an atomic explosion caused by AI) to realize once and for all that technology cannot be left without supervision. Hopefully we understand it before then.