In the next 15 minutes I shall argue that
humanities research is vital to address the challenges of environmental and
climate change; and that we need to develop a model for translational
humanities.
I
believe that the humanities produce findings like all other sciences. Findings
come in many forms. It is a humanities finding that children's reading
abilities are positively influenced by parents reading aloud to them. The
finding is a result of researchers comparing parents' practices and school children’s
linguistic abilities in several countries and combining statistical figures
with theories of learning.
There
is always an interpretation involved in a discovery, whether of a cultural
marker or a cell membrane. The archaeologist identifies changes in soil layer as
a Viking stronghold only when combining knowledge of building construction,
dating and typologies with theories about past societies.
It
is important to recognise that the humanities may produce findings because this
enables us not only to criticise the world but to help create a better one.
Some
colleagues argue that the role of the humanities is not to contribute to the
construction of the world, but rather that our role is to be a critical voice
against the established. They will leave it to natural and engineering sciences
to describe and construct the world, and will instead take the position as
critics: while the natural science's role is to lay brick upon brick of the scientific
building, it is the humanistic role to demolish the building. The postmodern
historian Ankersmit says squarely that the historian is not committed to the
truth, but solely to narrative power.
It's
a radical position, which I reject. We cannot renounce the reference to reality
and truth without giving up our academic position. But I do recognize that
post-modern thinkers have played a positive role by demolishing positivist
innocence and naivety. Not only that, postmodernist thinking is paradoxically
perhaps one of the most important discoveries of the humanities of the late
twentieth century. It's a thinking that creates a whole new dialogue between
classic humanistic study objects on one side and constructing sciences such as
computer science and engineering on the other side. For computer and film
industries postmodernist thinking has proven extremely useful. Just think of
the games industry and architecture. The movie The Matrix in 1999 with its
combination of Baudrillard's philosophy and animation technology marks a
breakthrough, and the last ten years of rapid development of narrative style
and experience universes would be unthinkable without post-modern thought and its
influence on everyday thinking.
In
the 21st century our thinking is characterized by design rather than
tradition, we are no longer so much preoccupied with how the world is, but with
how we can create something entirely new and unbound. The linguistic turn was therefore
one of the humanistic world's most important discoveries in the last
generation. The problem is that the humanities in the postmodernist
interpretation may turn entirely self-reflecting. When a researcher looks at
surroundings, the researcher looks really only at his own reflection. Research
may be a question only of how I choose to look at the world, how the world is
reflected in me, or how can I look deeper into myself.
Instead
of just being critical of this development of the humanities and harking back
to the positivist epistemology, we must recognize that there is no turning
back. We all acknowledged that we humans have no other tool than language to
comprehend the reality that is around us. The only thing we have as researchers
are sensations and perceptions, empirical data and models, whether we are
researching nanoparticle or dance. In this way both science and the humanities
have taken the linguistic turn.
So what about the humanities and
environmental change? The future of the planet is determined by our
actions, our behaviour as consumers and as citizens. All the individual
choices we make sum up to a behavioural aggregate, which is bad for the
planet and bad for ourselves. Global changes are known - we can
measure and discuss differences of degrees of warming, weather patterns and
water rise, but the big challenges are known. What we do not know is how
we may change direction. How can research help us survive as a
species? Enlightenment is not enough. It is extremely difficult for humans
to change behaviour, even though we know the negative consequences of
unchanged behaviour, just think of tobacco smoking, HIV, or CO2
load.
The challenge is without a doubt the
most complicated the human species has ever encountered in terms of human
cognition. We have successfully adapted as a species to environmental change in
the past when forces of nature were beyond our control. We have also
successfully survived the threat of nuclear warfare when we invented the means
of our own destruction. But will we be able to address the challenges of
repetitive behaviour when all our incentive structures go against such change?
Here is a vast agenda for the humanities as we are concerned with human
motivation, ideas, thought processes and human action.
But
have the humanities ever changed anything? Yes, I would maintain that the
humanities have been central to articulating and determining long-term human
behaviour certainly since Socrates. Consider this one example of the role of
the humanities during the Cold War. The world of the 1950s and 1960s was dominated
by a belief in social engineering both in democratic and communist systems. Look
at this n-gram of the frequency of the concepts of ‘social planning’ versus ‘human
development’. The Cold War period was convinced of the possibilities of social
planning as a result of the cognitive breakthrough for the quantitative social
sciences such as sociology and economics. Still, it was beyond comparison a
humanities thought product that helped to define and defend the western world
during this time, the philosopher Karl Popper's 1945 study of the Open Society
and his uncompromising defence of democracy at a time when totalitarian thinking
was in sharp focus. Popper's philosophy had a take-up the extent of which we
can hardly fathom today because it so radically came to define Western thought
and behaviour during the Cold War. In a sense it is still with us today,
perhaps most clearly evidenced by the United Nations COP-17 on Climate Change
in Durban, South Africa, last year. The clash between the liberal thinking of
western countries and the perspective of the newly affluent BRIC countries was
evidence that we need a new kind of thinking, which I would call Anthropocene
Humanities, to overcome the differences and create a new consensus for living
with environmental change.
Anthropocene Humanities must help us
understand how and why we choose to act like we do. Research in
environmental history is obviously relevant in this regard, but many other
humanities disciplines can make important contributions. There is a need
for research on narratives and language, a need to rethink philosophical
and ethical questions about the commitment of living generations to future
generations, there is a need for studies of climate representations, etc. My
suggestion is not to make all humanities a servant of one particular agenda but
rather to encourage humanities researchers to grasp the real need for a better
understanding of the human in the age of the Anthropocene.
An agenda for Anthropocene Humanities
must be to enhance and intensify work on how social and cultural directionality
could be articulated, democratically anchored, and implemented in the search
for new technologies, medical knowledge, economic paradigms, and forms of
social organization. The agenda must also embrace the fact that traditions
of Western thought are repeatedly confronted with their internal limits and
intellectual tipping points while non-Western traditions remain embedded and
constrained within national or cultural confines that do not offer
universalistic responses to environmental action. It is a big agenda, the
humanities are central to it, and we need to draw on all the diversity of the
human experience to meet the challenge.
Humanities Centres and Institutes such
as An Foras Feasa and the Trinity Long Room Hub may contribute uniquely and
decisively. At the upcoming meeting of the world-wide Consortium of Humanities
Institutes and Centres in Canberra, a group of us will propose an agenda to
sponsor humanities think tanks to work on these questions. We shall also
propose to develop a website to communicate case studies, images, artwork, and
produce a text book for undergraduate teaching of environmental humanities,
sponsor events to highten awareness of Anthropocene questions amongst our
colleagues, etc.
The
challenge for us on the one hand is to defend disciplinary diversity, so we
avoid being one-dimensional in our concept of the human - biologists have been
good at defending biodiversity, we must be better to speak on behalf of the
diversity of human existence. On the other hand, we must become better at
articulating our findings, and we must bring our findings into play. We must
come up with answers on how we can bring heritage with us into the future, how
our research may benefit social cohesion, how can we share knowledge with
companies and institutions, and how it helps us live with the challenges of
climate and globalization.
I
would argue that it is time to develop an idea of a translational humanities.
Translational medicine is the term for the important transformation of health
research that occurred around 2000 by an emphasis on shortening the turnover
time and reduce transaction costs in the research value chain. There are delays
and obstacles at every level from laboratory to hospital bed, from biomedicine
and psychology to the patient. This is why translational medicine is about
ensuring that basic research and knowledge at each specialized level is
translated to the next, and about developing relationships from research labs to
hospitals, GPs and ultimately to the patients.
Such
a translation dimension is not typical in the humanities. We do not have the
financial overheads that can pay the transaction costs. As a humanities scholar
you must be both basic scientist and entrepreneur, translator and communicator,
activist and lobbyist. If you are not able to play all parts, it is unlikely
that your research will have impact.
Research
councils therefore need to think in ways of enhancing both the ability of the
humanities to research the Anthropocene and to translate our findings. We need
funding for basic research in human behaviour, management, motivation,
intention and desire. And we need funding to be able to put this knowledge at
stake in society.
