LOOKING AT THE HUMANITIES FROM THE OUTSIDE™

S. E. Luria
Department of Bioloay
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

Presented before the Fall Meeting of the New England College
English Association, Springfield, Massachusetts, October 28,

1972
I am glad to be here today and to be received so kindly by a
group of humanists. For a scientist a nice reception is rather
rare these days; most of the time, especially among some of the
more "advanced" of our young people, to be a scientist is to be
hardly human and in fact to be the antithesis of anything human.

The title of this lecture presents me with a difficult task,
because my life experiences, as a biologist by profession and a
political activist out of necessity, have only occasionally brought
me close to the field of the humanities. If something I say does not
make sense, please attribute it to ignorance rather than to i11 will.

A few weeks age I had the fortune to be at a meeting with the
German-French philosopher Eric Weil, and the essence of his talk,
shortly to appear in Daedalus. impressed me, especially because it
connected with the subject of today's tatk. Weil's point was that
the humanities are essentially a study of morals. I do not know
whether you would agree with that, but I was thrilled by the idea
that the humanities can be the source of ethical principles. It
seemed reasonable and exciting to think that, if the humanities have
a live human interest, if they are not to be just the New Criticism
or something of that kind, it is because they are an inquiry -- and
a normative inquiry -- into what people think and do in their own
life and in relation to one another. And not only now, but
throughout history, at any of the times that scholars, either as
students of literature,or as historians ,or as philosophers, have

cared to explore. It seemed to me that here was an exciting
central thought, and I started asking myself whether the idea that
the humanities are the study of morals can provide some sort of
criterion for moral life. It seemed possible at least to formulate
the hypothesis that a critical achievement, for a humanist specifi-
cally, for scholars in general, and for any human being is to fuse
his scholarship or his work with his entire life, so that his
professional integrity permeates his entire life. Could that be
formulated as a goal? Is that what Weil had in mind?

I came back from that meeting mulling over in my mind the thought
that a positive commitment to the exercise of values derived from
scholarship is a proper ideal for the intellectual. Scholarship may
be scholarship in the sciences or scholarship in the humanities; it
is certainly closer to ethical values in the humanities. So I asked
myself what my relevant experiences have been in the field of the
humanities. Had I met humanists who came close to the ideal of a
fusion between scholarship and practice? I could think of several,
but two examples came to mind as particularly relevant, two sets of
experiences almost fifty years apart in my life.

The first example was a man who had the greatest influence on my
intellectual and emotional development, my teacher of Italian and
Latin literature in senior high school. In Italy we had a somewhat
different type of high school education than ours in the United
States. I had the fortune to be in one of the best schools in the
country, with teachers who were almost all scholars or productive
mathematicians,or philosophers. Augusto Monti was the name of this

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man. He was the author of a number of books, including several
novels, but especially he was7a fearless man, a disciple of the
liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce, and a staunch enemy of fascism.
In 1926 / Mussolini clamped down on all civil liberties in Italy,
closed the opposition newspapers and the opposition parties, and had
a certain number of his political opponents beaten up and killed,
including Pietro Gobetti, the founder of the movement "Justice and
Liberty." This name derives from a poem by Giosué Carducci, from
the line "Dear to me always were the last surviving goddesses Justice
and Liberty." I remember (I was 14 years old then) that on the day
when even to mention the forbidden parties was to risk one's skin
and possibly one's life, this teacher walked into class, opened the
book at the page of that poem, and read it. As he arrived to that
crucial line tears streamed over his face. I was an ignorant and
naive child and was puzzled by all that, but I inquired at home and
found out. I think that none of us in that class was ever the same
person again for having witnessed that act of courage -- an act that
had the added impact of being tied not only to personal integrity
but to professional integrity as well. The teacher would teach
poetry and freedom, no matter what any government might say. The
two were bound together. We were taught, not so much by words as by
context, that once you had read the Greek tragedies, and Dante, and
the other great writers of the past, if you had read them with intellec-
tual integrity, you would never again be able to act without asking
yourself if your actions belonged within that canon of human standards.
The next case history concerns a more recent association, one

that is also closer to you. In the last several years I have had
the privilege of being associated a number of times with the great
American historian Henry Steele Commager. He is a man whose life

is part of his writing because it is part of American history. A

few years ago he was one of a small group of people, including my

wife, who went to the Department of Justice to present a petition

in support of Dr. Benjamin Spock and others who had been indicted

on some trumped-up conspiracy charges. When an Assistant Attorney
General asked: "What are you here for?" Commager simply replied:

"We are doing a bit of American history." It was more than touching;
it was a perfect example of the interpenetration of scholarship and
life.

Such examples are rather rare. They are rare, I believe, not
because people are fearful or do not have integrity, but because the
structure of our society, the fabric of our life is becoming disruptive,
is tearing us apart, so that the ability to make one's life coincide
with the content of one's professional scholarship and integrity
becomes increasingly difficult. It becomes difficult to integrate
one's scholarship into what I may call a pattern of connectivity
between one's work and one's social activities as well as between
different individuals and different groups in different areas of
work. As a result of this lack of connectivity there emerges
between society and the world of scholarship a situation resembling
what Herman Hesse portrayed in Magister Ludi: the intellectuals playing
a bead game in a castle named Castalia, while the rest of the world
goes on living in a way that Castalia never cares to deal with but

which determines the course of the real events. As long as this
separation exists, the greatest success that a magister ludi can
achieve -- in Castalia as in our world -- is to receive a Nobel Prize
or some other recognition with no relation to the life of society.
This is, therefore, an empty success.

I have tried in my own naive way to react against this state of
affairs within my own small bailiwick, to fight the trend of separation
between life and scholarship as well as the separation between branches
of scholarship. Apart from my involvement in politics, I did for
four years (although not in the last three) take a group of first-year
graduate students in biology -- brilliant students since our
department has the reputation of being one of the best in the
country -- and, realizing that they risked to have no time to read
anything but science, I set up a literature seminar. The group came
every Sunday night to my home. My wife, who is a psychologist, and
I,and each of the students had to read a certain assignment, not
casually chosen but part of a plan trying to trace through world
literature some line of thought that we believed was relevant to
the human condition, more specifically as seen by a biologist today.
One year, for example, we started to trace the existentialist
anguish from Sophocles through Lucretius and Saint Augustine, through
the Middle Ages from Dante to Pascal, to the 19th Century French
and Russian novels, and we finished with Joyce, using Albert Camus'
The Rebel as a guide throughout. This was a tremendously exciting
experience despite the handicap of my profound ignorance. Yet with
the arrogance of ignorance I did not worry too much whether what we

did was wise. What mattered was what the students were extracting
out of me and I was extracting out of them and what we were absorbing
from those books working together as biologists -- our common anguish,
our unity.

The main reason why this seminar has not continued in the last
few years is relevant to today's topic. I started finding that those
among our students who were interested in li¢terature seemed to be
infected with irrationalism. They were fascinated with the Bhagavad
Gita and other aspects of oriental thinking and religions. Now I
see nothing wrong with this literature as literature, but I find it
irrelevant to the "connecting" purpose of my seminars. I find it
fascinating, in fact, but completely irreftevant to my human experience
in our society. I enjoy reading it for education, but I did not feel
that I wanted to encourage these students to spend hours on it.

That was probably just my limitation, but that is how it ended.

Yet I still believe that the responsibility to create bridges,
to generate connectivity, to search for unity hidden in the variety
of our tasks and our function is a major responsibility and, if I
am not pursuing it in that way, I still try to pursue it in others.

But there are some powerful forces in our society that mititate
against connectivity, forces that make for fragmentation. The first
one is the complexity of our social organization. There is no
question that no one person can master this complexity, and
complexity can actually be used to prevent us from wanting to
master reality. For example, there is the claim of certain types
of natural or social scientists that what they are doing (often for

the government) is too complicated for others to understand. They
have the key and they alone. This is what we had to fight in the
late 50's in the battle to get an atom bomb test ban.

Next there is the fragmentation by specialization, which is
different and also dangerous. It takes the form that we just have to
concentrate more and more on our own tasks if we are to do our job
competently at all. If I have to know all that mass of biological
literature and to understand each of the experiments, I obviously

just have no time to read PMLA or the New York Review of Books or

 

the Monthly Review. Professionalism militates against culture and
political involvement. This fragmentation by specialization can be
fought. Our role as teachers can help.

Then there is another fragmentation, which I shall call frag-
mentation due to noise. By noise I mean the irrelevant input that
our society produces and sells and thrives on, the TV programs, the
radio in every car (I have to pay $15 when I buy a car in order to
have them remove the radio) -- and even the faculty meetings. I sus-
pect my criticism of mass input has an element of elitism, but that
is not what I mean. I believe that we can teach our students, we
can impress on them the importance of not accepting useless input,
irrelevance, distraction. Why should mass media be allowed to
distract us (except when we are very tired or depressed) when there
are so many books waiting to be read? Why should one read the funnies
when there is so much good writing available and even so much good
walking to do? I have the feeling that we can do something about

this problem. This is where the college comes in.
A few years ago, I authored together with my wife an article
entitled "The University: Ivory Tower, Service Station, or Frontier
Post?" You will guess, of course, that we were not campaigning for
the ivory tower; nor were we proposing that a college should be only
a service station (although I have nothing against service stations
when I need them). What we meant by frontier post was that the
college is and must be in the forefront of society's struggle for
progress. I do not imply that the college can be the place where the
battles of society are fought. That would be ridiculous: the battles
of society are fought in the social, political, economic arenas. But
colleges and universities can be the place in which people are made
aware of the struggles of society, of the forces within society.
Social inquiry studies can be a powerful force in the program of a
college. But these studies should not in my opinion be separate from
the traditional curriculum, they should be integrated closely with
the teaching of literature, of philosophy, of history, of the sciences,
and even of what they call political science -- whatever that may be.

The college can in many ways be the place where the disruptive
forces, the disconnective forces of society can be fought. But here
colleges must be careful, because they are subject to opposing
tendencies. On the one hand, the traditional departmentalization
in terms of subject matter tends to become a source of compartmentali-
zation in intellectual terms. When this happens, it plays into the
hands of the disruptive forces in society. This is the argument
commonly heard against the departmental structure. On the other hand,

we must remember that in the colleges and universities the departments
are the keepers of the professional quality, the watchdogs of
intellectual discipline. But this does not mean that they have to
function in isolation. They can and should function in integration.
For example -- and this is by no means a unique example at M.I.T. --
I am trying to organize, together with another biologist, a chemist,
and a humanist, a one-year integrated course in which the students
will study organic chemistry, biology, biochemistry and genetics in
a coordinate fashion tied in with relevant studies of literature,
philosophy of science, and sociology. If nothing else, students
might emerge from such a course capable of comprehending both the
scientific realities and the sociological distortion of current
arguments about race and I.Q.

The role of the college as a frontier post, in other words, can
be to help create a world in which the kind of morality of which I
spoke earlier, the morality that stems from the integrity of one's
scholarship and the fusion of one's scholarship with one's social
life, is more generally practiced.

In the struggle to bring about a greater fusion of intellectual
and social morality, one must fight a series of corruptions. I
mentioned earlier a series of forces in society that tend to disrupt
connectivity. But now I am talking about forces that tend to corrupt
and destroy the integrity of the individual. And these are forces
that can be fought from the university.

First, there is corruption by trivialization: trivialization of
life, that is, the structure in society that tries to make ourselves

and our children into consumers, people whose function is to keep an
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economy going by consuming things they don't want, don't need, and
cannot afford. This sort of trivialization goes deeper than just
the waste, in the sense that if you keep wanting things that do not
fulfill any function in your intellectual growth, in your intellectual
integrity, you become corrupted in the exercise of that integrity.
This is something that college must train students against, some-
thing whose degrading futility it must expose. And if it is not
done in the departments of economics, if it is not done in the
departments of sociology, it can be done by humanists in the depart-
ments of English, in the departments of philosophy, and even by
teachers of science.

The second one I could call the corruption by robotization. By
this I mean the instillation of ideas that are to be accepted
emotionally, without critical analysis, such as nationalism and
national superiority, racism and racial superiority -- that human
differences are somehow a source of social contempt rather than of
curiosity and excitement. This, of course, goes directly to what I
said of the integrity of the individual. The racist, for example,
is not a person who hates others. The racist is a person who,
because he has been taught to despise someone else, continuously
asks himself the question, am I contemptible to others? As soon as
one thinks of others as inferiors, one raises the question of one's
own inferiority. He who believes that Vietnamese are expendable
is asking the question, am I expendable? In fact, he is. If he goes
along with Lyndon Johnson, if he goes along with Richard Nixon, he is
expendable. Their actions put him on the level of those whom they

destroy.
1]

The third corruption is corruption by intimidation. Let me just
give you an example. In the last few weeks before the presidential
election I was involved in collecting names for a newspaper advertise-
ment denouncing the Nixon Administration. A distinguished physician
associated with a prominent medical school was rather enthusiastic
when asked to put his name on the advertisement. But then he called
and asked to have his name taken off, because he had submitted an
application for a large research grant from the government and feared
that the Administration, if they saw his name on the ad, might take
revenge. I consider this as an example of corruption by intimidation.
By many more or less covert acts, either purposefully or by lack of
wisdom, the Administration had spread the fear that revenge might be
taken on its critics.

Nothing scares me more than that. Nothing is more debilitating to
the integrity of individuals and to the morality of the commonwealth.

When I set the correction of carrupting influences as a task for
the colleges, and more specifically for the stewardship of the
humanists in the colleges, I am well aware that it is a hard task.

It is much harder than taking a group of students and helping them
over a hurdle in their intellectual development. It is to help them
also to become better men and women aad better citizens and wiser
creators of their future world. It is a hard job indeed and one
that requires a great deal of patience. But it is a patience of a
special kind, a patience made not of resignation but of confidence

of success.
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As.I was thinking about this lecture some days ago, I happened to
read the Nobel Prize address by Pablo Neruda. In that address he
cited the following line of a poem by Rimbaud that I had not read for
at least 20 years: "At dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall
enter the resplendent city." I think it is a marvellous line. The
vision of the poet is not a promise, of course, it is not a program.
It is like a motto on a flag. I believe it is a flag under which,

humanists and scientists, we all can march proudly.