Since 2008 we’ve seen the rise of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and the decline of the humanities and social sciences. Students want to study engineering, programming, science and so on because that’s where the good jobs are, student debt levels are obscene and there has been a social movement towards the glorification of the sciences.
All the good, right? Science and engineering have given us TVs, running water, power and miniature pocket computers which can make phone calls and spy on us 24/7.
But the world has some problems: climate change and ecological collapse and war and plague and so on.
The solution to these problems includes technology and science, to be sure. But generally speaking we aren’t even using the tech we have to solve our problems. Air filtration in every classroom and public building would cut Covid massively, and it’s cheap, and we aren’t doing it. We have known about climate change for ages, and done essentially nothing, even though we have the ability to. Instead, we doubled-down on fracking and finding more oil and gas and we built massive numbers of private jets, whose emission add significantly to the problem.
We’re not using the tech we have to solve our problems, and in many cases we’re using it to make the problem worse.
In other words, are problems aren’t primarily technological: in fact it is our disuse and misuse of technology which is causing many of our worst problems. It’s a sorceror’s apprentice situation, we have power without the wisdom and control necessary to use it safely.
Our problems are social. That means that if academia can help, the help will have to come from the social sciences (not including economics) and from the humanities, which are the disciplines which deal with humanity in all our glorious disastrousness.
Massively emphasizing STEM, except perhaps biological and environmental related sciences, is putting the pedal to the metal until we can sort our social issues which make us use our technology in ways that are vastly self-destructive.
If we want to stop the onrushing disasters, currently epitomized by rivers drying up in Europe and China, that means fixing why we’re doing the wrong things, not the right ones. Technology and science are tools, they tell us how to do things; they can provide some guidance on what to do, but they don’t determine what we do. As climate scientists are well aware, guidance doesn’t work in society isn’t willing to follow it.
Increasing STEM while doing the wrong things with it isn’t a solution, it’s a problem. Perhaps the humanities and social sciences aren’t the solution, but they at least attempt to deal with it, with the fact that we keep doing the wrong things even when we know the right things and know how to do them.