Earlier, I wrote about the surreal experience of seeing someone who looked exactly like a girl I sort of knew from high school, who was most definitely seeing-eye-dog-blind in those days, and who had gone off to attend some school in Boston. This girl not only did not appear to have difficulty seeing, but she was also decidedly not situated in some Boston school, having enrolled in my neuroscience class and having attended it regularly. On top of this, I discovered soon after that she works in the same lab in which I signed up to work this semester (for the one requisite credit hour to graduate with a BA in psych). The resemblance was just so uncanny, I thought, that either I was misremembering what Shelly looked like, or this was the same person.

Now I guess any sane, normal person would have simply gone up and asked her who she was, instead of blogging about it and/or mulling over the problem in her head while trying to pay attention during neuroscience lectures. I definitely thought about it, but it seemed weird to me, especially since I didn’t know her all that well in her blind days. And, of course, there’s not really any way she would recognize me; so it would be like one of those awkward moments when you remember someone and say hi, and they have no idea who you are, but worse!

Today she was in the lab, and said hi, and I said hi back and finally asked her name. “Shelly Thompson,” she replied. Aha! It is her! I then proceeded to say something about how I thought we were in a psych class together, but I think she thought I was talking about the neuroscience class we’re both in now, as opposed to in high school, because immediately afterwards she asked me where I was from. Then the subject got changed somehow.

Doh. How do I backtrack now, and point out to her that I knew her from before, without sounding creepy for not having already mentioned it? I guess I could just never bring it up, but I really would like to know how she got herself un-blindified, and what became of her dog Comet (another mystery: almost every seeing-eye-dog I’ve met happens to be named Comet. Why is this?). Why is she here, and not Boston? What happened in these past five crazy years?

I guess I, like most people, have this idea that people stay exactly the same as you left them. Especially people whom I don’t know too well, and with whom I haven’t kept in touch. The blind girl stays blind, the cousin remains a chubby infant, the sullen bully still shoves people into lockers. I know I’ve changed a lot in the last five years, so why do I think it’s weird when others show they’re capable of the same? Human nature can be awfully provincial sometimes.

Just got back from Western Civ class. Our lecturer this time (we have a different one for each work) was a man from the biodiversity program, with a mop of gray hair that stood up like a troll doll, and a pleasant quirky science-guy voice - after hearing him talk, I hope someday he gets his own public-access-channel science-guy show. The lecture was actually entertaining this time, though it rarely touched on the material (Darwin), if at all. He talked about the divide between science and the humanities, ecology, the evolution debacle in Kansas, etc. The highlight of the class, however, was during the question and answer session.

In front of the boy and I sat a couple, a guy with poorly cut sandy blonde hair and a girl wearing a spaghetti strap shirt, revealing her rhinestone-studded bra straps. Classy. The guy asked some lame freshman philosophy major question I don’t remember, something like “why should humans preserve the earth for future generations? What’s the ultimate goal? Why don’t we just go out with a bang?” The boy (my boy) rolled his eyes, and the lecturer, after answering, called on the girl sitting next to Freshman Philosophy Major.

She started off with what seemed like would be an innocent question, which rapidly devolved into a vehement rant against the humanities. “Why should we fund humanities? Like, there aren’t any questions that humanities can answer. We can’t learn anything from the humanities, it’s not USEFUL, scientists can cure cancer and diseases, but we can’t do ANYTHING with the humanities, it’s all individual, subjective opinions, it’s NOTHING, why are we even bothering…” etc., for five minutes straight while the poor lecturer attempted to intervene to answer her original, overarching question. Meanwhile the rest of us in the room, presumably the humanities majors, gaped at her with looks of incredulous shock, annoyance, or both.

“Well,” said the lecturer, “does someone want to tackle her question?”

Immediately other people piped up with their answers. “Ethics, especially concerning scientific developments,” chimed one girl (an easy answer, given that he’d spent a third of the lecture about that topic, something the humanities hater had missed, I guess). Other people brought up psychology, peace and conflict studies, and so on (really, humanities is a really rather broad area to just dismiss single-handedly). The lecturer himself brought up an example from his talk - “one question we can ask is, why does ethnic pride turn so quickly into the desire for ethnic cleansing? Why did the Serbs kill Croats?”

Ms. Humanities Hater, in response, insisted that we can’t possibly answer that question, it’s all subjective opinion and whim and chance (!). And continued to scoff at things like “psychology…pfft!” and other such useless endeavors.

Now a lot of the people in the room laughed at her, and snickered behind and around her, and that cheered me up to some degree, but her general ignorance of the things she dismissed really saddened me. Especially considering she’s certainly not alone in this opinion, given the example the lecturer gave in his talk - $30 billion in government funds goes to the NIH and biomedical research, $6 billion to all other science, and a paltry $500 million to the humanities as a whole.

Simply put, without humanities, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, or any discussion for that matter! Disciplines such as philosophy and literature provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, out of which the impetus for scientific research grew - not to mention the logical framework for things such as the scientific method. As far as psychology goes, I’m sure the girl thinks it’s nothing more than Dr. Phil and self-help books at the store, but especially in the last few decades, the field of psychology as a whole has taken great strides into instituting rigorous, scientific frameworks for investigating the phenomena of human behavior.

Oh, but no, we wouldn’t learn anything useful from that. Nor history, which we should just completely forget about. Economics? Oh, political and economic theories have only completely shaped the world we live today, but there’s no use studying that either. Just burn down the Poli-Sci building, as it’s taking up so much space, and take out the Sociology department while you’re at it. Like, genocide is totally random and just happens spontaneously, and there’s no explanation for it at all, so don’t even bother thinking about it. Literature? Only the preservation of culture and a good indicator of the context of the times. Torch Wescoe too (if you can effectively burn concrete, that is). Art building? What art building? Eh, just throw the artists on the street, where they’ll end up sooner or later anyways.

I could go on, but I simply wouldn’t know where to end. She sounded like someone bitter at being forced to take English classes (and of course Western Civ, but we’re all bitter about that, humanities majors included). Though she railed against the humanities so much, she didn’t sound like a science major, at least one genuinely interested in the acquisition of knowledge - otherwise, at some level, she might be able to acknowledge the value in learning things. Maybe she’s an engineer or pre-med (oh god, someday she might operate on people. The horror). I just can’t see her studying theoretical physics, cause what good could that possibly do? (I jest, of course My cat is named Quark, after all).

It concerns me a little that college is becoming more like a trade school. People like her don’t see the point in wasting time learning about things that might stimulate extra thought; they want to “cut to the chase” and do something useful. They can’t see the greater context or value of an education that doesn’t have a direct input-output relationship. I guess a lot of people are like that - everyone complains about having to take some stupid class like Coms 101 that has nothing to do with their major - but occasionally, sometimes, people might discover something new by straying outside of concerns of ‘practicality’ and ‘immediate results.’ I would have never become interested in Nature (home of icky bugs and dirty), for instance, had I not taken an Environmental History course on a whim.

And I’ve always believed, coming out of a writing background, that more disciplines could benefit from instituting writing courses. Try reading any article published in journals for other scientists (not popular ones for the public), and see what I mean. What good are your results if you can’t communicate them? They’re as good as hidden, in awkward clause structures and jargonic verbiage.

I suppose her question is valid, at some level, though my opinion of her intelligence deteriorated as her ranting progressed. Why do we study what we do? What is our goal when we study things? Is it useful to study for the sake of studying? Are we learning something from these investigations? I definitely think humanities disciplines are oftentimes fraught with problems - like the aforementioned philosophy, for example, or maybe even literary criticism. Is the discipline as a whole moving somewhere, or is it stuck in a mire of endless self-referencing? (like, I quote X who quotes Y who cites Z who studies A; but no one directly studies A anymore). These are questions, no doubt, that certain disciplines should address.

Nonetheless, after class, I wanted to punch that girl in her rhinestone-studded bra wearing pipsqueak face. Maybe she might be convinced of the usefulness of studying what motivates us humans to commit violence against dumbasses.