Divide

Thursday, 23 October 2003

As you'll have gathered by now, one of my favourite passtimes is finding neat little frameworks with which to interpret the world around me. This evening, the binary opposition that springs to mind is the Sciences/Humanities divide.

Now, I am not a scientist. I have never been a scientist. I've no doubt that I could be a scientist if I put my mind to it (although almost certainly not a good one), but I would have to change an awful lot about the way that I think.

My family has its share of doctors, physicists and chemists, but my parents are students of language and literature, and I followed in their footsteps with hobnailed boots. All my life, it seems to me, I've derived the most satisfying understanding, the most convincing truth, not from facts or the investigation of the material world, but from stories, from ideas, from the many ways in which humans use symbols (chiefly language) to portray, control and create their experience.

For me, story (in the broadest sense) is the starting-point. A text - be it poem, play, novel, critical or historical work - anything that treats of human experience - is for me a real object, with real weight and consequences in the world. This assumption spills over into my appreciation of all kinds of things: books, of course, but also film and TV, anecdotes told in passing, politics, history, philosophy, friendship, law... People are the centre of my sphere of interest: characters, webs of motivation, patterns of behaviour - these are things that concern me.

Many of my friends - more than you might think, in fact - have a background (and hence a mindset) that is rooted in the sciences. From my perspective, it appears that their source of burning interest lies in things external to the human mind. Not necessarily detached from humanity - research into the replication processes of cancer cells, say, is clearly of immediate relevance to real people - but very different from the kind of nebulous, unanswerable questions about humans and their concerns that are meat and drink to those in the humanities.

At its simplest, the difference boils down to a general assumption about what is worth investigating in depth. The humanities-mind will delight in exposing the mechanics of a good film plot or in unpacking the symbolism in a medieval sculpture. The sciences-mind will derive equivalent pleasure from synthesising a complex molecule or from measuring the effects of an invasive species on an ecosystem. Neither side, as far as I can see, quite understands what motivates the other.

It's a spectrum, of course (perhaps, indeed, one that is bent into a circle: music and maths, for instance, are so far from each other on the Science/Humanities line that they meet up around the back and have lunch). Many fields of study blow the dichotomy I'm trying to delineate here out of the water. Disciplines such as economics and psychology deal with human concerns but use broadly scientific methods. (As such, they are viewed with suspicion by both ends of the spectrum!)

I am interested in the history and philosophy of science - and more so in the politics of science. Books that tell me about the human dimension from which even the most apparently objective research cannot ever escape, books that acknowledge how unstable the commonly understood notion of "fact" is, how elusive a beast is "truth", even in the scientific realm, - these I lap up. These feed my conviction that however laudable the scientific method is (and I have the utmost respect for it as an approach), it is not the whole story. There are other valid approaches to the problem of how we go about understanding the world and our experience (and furthermore, however hard we try, it is not possible to separate what we are doing from that attempt to understand).

I have no tolerance for the dismissiveness that often arises in the debate. I try not to contribute to it. As a person with a humanities background, I'm particularly touchy when confronted with the assumption shared by a regrettable number of people that only the observable, the measurable, the replicable, is worthy of consideration. This is nonsense, I say, loudly and clearly: it discounts possibly the bulk of personal experience. And why should one model account for everything, anyway? That's uncomfortably close to monotheism, if you ask me.

From where I sit, people are fascinating, and the life of the mind is paramount (I suppose that's why I aspire to writing novels: you can't really get much further away from scientific discourse than that). But I hope I recognise that mine is not a universally applicable perspective.

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