Prof. Liyanage Amarakeerthi
*Keynote speech delivered at the International Multidisciplinary Research Conference at University of Kelaniya, October 25th, 2024.
We all know that in Sri Lanka, students are separated to specialized subject areas a bit too early. This early specialization continues even at universities. Now, some students are admitted to universities directly from the University Grant Commission and they are not allowed to segue into any other stream of leaning. In some cases, they cannot even take classes in another subject. In addition, there are departments in our faculties looking to seize the first opportunity to break away and establish their own faculties isolating further in their own expertise.
This practice may have its own reasons and benefits but in terms of generating interdisciplinary understanding of life, society, and the world young students must be allowed to find their way after encountering a host of diverse subjects. While the academia in some other parts of the world is seeking ways to find meaningful interactions and integrations, we seek the unchallenged comforts of isolation. In other words, we value monologue over dialogue.
But some of us are already engaged in dialogues with other fields. I have been a proponent of a holistic approach to education for quite some time now. I have made a case for this in four of my books, Vishavavidyaa Yanu Kumakda?, Kalawa saha Minisa, Kalawa Kumakatada?, and Sithiwili Sithijya.
In this speech, I want to argue that there needs to be much more substantial interconnections between different branches of knowledge. Let me begin by referring to something close to my heart: storytelling. A certain neurological study has shown that ‘when we get to the end of a story, a short lyric poem, or a joke, the brain performs an instantaneous retro-assessment for efficiency. If, as I tell the one about the duck who walks into a bar, I interject a fifteen-minute digression about the duck’s childhood that turns out to have nothing to do with the punch line, your brain notes this as an inefficiency and, at the end, you laugh less.’ This is a wonderful example from George Saunders’s excellent book about how fictional narratives are constructed and read. ( A Swim in a Pond in the Rain 83-4). Numerous recent studies have focused on the workings of the human brain, biochemistry, and neurological systems when we create and enjoy narrative arts. In other words, natural sciences have paid some significant attention to human activities that are typically studied in the humanities, and that intellectual effort has led to some spectacular discoveries. For example, neurobiologists have discovered the left side of the human face is stronger in expressing feelings, and it has to do with the way human brain controls facial muscles. Much before this scientific discovery was made, European painters used the left side of human faces to depict feelings central to their paintings, especially portraits(Jerome Kagen. The Three Cultures. 246). There are numerous other instances of this kind where the paths of natural sciences and arts have crossed. And then, Kagen’s MIT colleague, Steven Pinker, who is also at Harvard University now, points out in his groundbreaking book, The Language Instinct(1994), that language and our ability to learn and use language is part of our biological hard wiring rather than a work of culture. There have been numerous studies on language conducted by biologists.
A Poet winning a Nobel Prize for chemistry
Yet our education system in Sri Lanka hardly encourages scholars to move beyond the confines of narrow specialties even at the level of postgraduate studies. For example, we never had scholars like Erwin Schrödinger, a physicist, who conducted university lectures on Greek philosophy or anyone like Roald Hoffmann, professor of Humane Letters at Cornell university, and a Nobel laurate in chemistry, who is also an excellent poet. Hoffmann was unhappy that scientific rationalities reduce “miracle of the living world to a set of cold, hard facts gained by the logic of dissection.” In Sri Lanka, we have very few natural scientists academically interested in the fields related to the humanities. Professors Nalin de Silva and Carlo Fonseka have shown some interest in the field, but their interventions are, on the one hand, not deep enough to have any significant impact either on natural sciences or on the humanities. In addition, they were rather journalistic interventions mostly implicated in the politics of the day. De Silva in his style appears to be a monologist idealogue seeking to dominate rather than a dialogist seeking to have respectful conversations.
The above quotation was taken from Jerome Kagen’s excellent book, The Three Cultures (2012: 223), which is primarily about the intersections among natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. For me the Kagen book is a kind of manifesto for us to think about a greater interaction among the three branches of knowledge. Kagen demonstrates that three branches of academic study differ from each other at three levels: ‘primary concerns’, ‘sources of evidence,’ and ‘concepts.’ And he also argues that natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities differ on six(6) additional dimensions bringing the number of points at which they differ to nine(9). In this short speech, I do not have time to elaborate on all those points. But let me cite the most revealing points: One of the points these fields differ is the ‘the influence of historical conditions’ on what is being studied. In natural sciences, it is minimal, in social sciences it is modest, while in the humanities it is serious(4). For example, in studying why a human being acts the way she does, natural scientific explanation does not consider that the historical condition in which a given human being operates has much relevance. In social science, the impact of historical conditions is moderate while in the humanities it is quite significant. While the naturalist scientific hypothesis about the human behavior in question can be quite exact and rational, the humanist explanation can be significantly explanatory, and even metaphorical.
19th Century Europe seen from three vantage points
Professor Jerome Kegan ends his book by claiming that the dominance of a single branch of knowledge is dangerous as much as a government without a stronger opposition runs the risk of becoming despotic. Now, the domination of natural sciences, caused by both very good and bad reasons, has created an imbalance in human discourses. What he suggests is that we develop a culture of enriching mutuality among these streams of knowledge. Collaborations both in and out of the academy, Kegan thinks, can lead to much more holistic inclusion of the insights garnered from all knowledge forms. He cites an undergraduate course Harvard University offers where three scholars co-teach. The title of the course is “Nineteenth-century Europe.” A natural scientist teaches the discoveries of Ludvig Boltzmann, Greger Mendel, and Luis Pasteur. A social scientist explains the socio-cultural settings in which those discoveries have been made. A history professor would contextualize those discoveries in the background of industrialization of wealthy European democracies(Kegan 2009:266). We can easily imagine how the course might have enriched the students’ understanding of the Europe of that time. It is sad that we do not have a course of this kind in Sri Lankan universities. Maybe it never occurred to us to look at higher education this way. I hope very much that this conference will lead to greater understanding among us. We, natural scientist, social scientists, and the scholars in the humanities, can come together to offer a course on the nineteenth century Colombo.
Much before Kagan wrote his book, the debate about a much more integrated approach to understanding human condition has been taking place. In fact, Kagen’s book itself was inspired by such a book: C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures(1959) – a book extremely optimistic about natural sciences. And the book is about key differences between natural sciences and the humanities. Like Kagen, another Harvard professor was instrumental in leading the argument for much closer connections among various branches of knowledge. He was Edward O. Wilson, and in On Human Nature, originally published in 1978, and republished numerous times, he pointed out that natural science alone cannot fully explain human nature. Wilson’s contribution to this debate attains its most eloquent expression in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. In there, Professor Wilson argues that ‘communal mind of literate societies’, which is ‘world culture’ is an ‘immensely large loom.’ Wilsons states further that,
“Through science it has gained the power to map external reality far beyond the reach of a single mind, and through the arts the means to construct narratives, images, and rhythms immeasurably more diverse than the products of any solitary genius”(Wilson 1998: 13).
For him, natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities are integral parts of what he calls, ‘the communal mind’, which is our collective understanding of the phenomena around us, and, of course, around us. The intellectual agility and fluidity that allow us to move from one field to another is what Wilson is after in his explanation of consilience. The liberal arts tradition of education in the US, where a wide spectrum of subjects is included in an undergraduate curriculum, Wilson argues, needs to be revitalized. I have been making this argument here in Sri Lanka for many years, Vishava Vdiyalaya Yanu Kumakda is a key manifestation of that argument. Our university system never had holistic liberal arts programs. Wilson’s consilience argument seems a much richer version of liberal arts vision: “Every college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare?(13).”
Biology of ethics
Given the time restrictions of this speech, let me indicate some insights we can gain from a deeper mutuality between natural sciences and social sciences, and also between natural sciences and the humanities. Robert Sapolsky’s excellent book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017) is a captivating demonstration of why we need a much more holistic causality to explain human behavior. Human feelings, thoughts, and bodily actions have their roots in biochemistry, neurological systems as much as they are caused by sociobiological factors such as upbringing, parental care, peer culture and so on. In short, both biological causes and socio-cultural causes lie behind our actions. Thus, we need a much more integrated approach to understanding human affairs.
Sapolsky’s book is full of scientific detail that explain how our neurobiology intersects with ethics, fear, shame, violence, racism and so on. Based on the research and experiments of numerous scientists, Sapolsky explains the workings of ‘amygdala’ located in the frontal cortex of our brain. Nureo-chemical reactions take place in amygdala are related to feelings like anxiety, fear and aggression, and, even, violence. We in the humanities talk about ethics, sympathy, compassion and so on. We believe that a considerable grounding in ethical rationality, acquired by studying philosophy, and, the imaginative skills, sharpened by studying literature, help students to live an ethical and humane lives. As a scholar in literary studies, I still want to hold on to this belief. But yet, I also believe that rich interactions with natural sciences can help us make our teachings in the humanities much more realistic, less idealist or wishful, and substantial. Those who are in the natural sciences can hopefully benefit by developing meaningful interactions with us in the humanities. Of course, we in the humanities must be prepared and equipped for such interactions.
Let’s look at a revealing example. When we accidentally chew on some rotten food amygdala gets chemically activated leading us to throw up that food even when our conscious thought process begins. Conscious thought process is too slow to save us from the danger of swallowing toxic food. The workings of amygdala do not stop there. When we see something morally disgusting too, it gets activated and leads us to act in certain ways. In other words, our brains chemically react to culturally ‘toxic’ phenomena as well. But we must not rush to believe that amygdala is a wonderful organ that guides us only in the right ethical directions. Amygdala does not know ethics. Sapolsky explains further that these reactions of amygdala can be culturally mediated. For example, amygdala’s reaction to disgusting food is an activation of biological safety network within us to protect us from harm. The same reactions can take place when we see a person who is considered an enemy, an Other, or an outsider within our culture. Otherness is something discursively created and mediated by socio-cultural ideologies. This means, our biology is not entirely free from our culture. In addition, our ethical rationality is not just guided by our rational mind. Even biochemical reactions that begin their workings before any invention of the rational mind can be trained in a certain way by the dominant notions in a culture. Arguably, if in a certain culture no one is considered ‘a disgusting Other,’ our amygdala would not react to them in a way it would react to disgusting things such as rotten food.
As Antonio Damasio(Descartes’ Error 1994) has brilliantly shown Descartes made an error, and the Cartesian separation of mind and body, i.e. reason and feeling was a fundamental mistake creating a gap between sciences and the humanities. Luckily, in the recent past numerous scholars have come out from natural sciences attempting bridge the gap. Once looked unbridgeable, the divide is now bridged with delightful insights appearing from both sides. This conference is a hopeful sign that we in Sri Lanka have begun to see abys that separate us from each other. And I am happy to say that this is my third time speaking on topics related to our intellectual compartmentalization.
The interconnections between natural sciences and other branches of knowledge did not take place peacefully. Thus, we cannot be overly romantic about beautiful love affairs between those fields. After all, in Sri Lanka, we consciously maintain a kind of academic caste system among us. Some of us consciously reproduce such hierarchical relationships among the fields of knowledge. Perhaps, the amygdala of our scientists recognizes us in the humanities as disgusting untouchables.
And we in the humanities have not been always kind to natural scientists. As Sapolsky mentions there have been intense debates between social scientists and sociobiologists. The latter have been accused of using biology to justify the existing sociopolitical status quo. hat criticism has a point. Many natural scientists are not interested in socio-political critique, and many of them are not trained in critical thinking. One can also refer to history to argue that natural sciences have been used a tool of domination during the early phase of European colonialism. Such unethical uses of science has been meticulously documented. But all those limitations, here we are together in a single forum – something to celebrate. Let me celebrate this union with two sentences from Edward O. Wilson’s classic book On Human Nature:
“The only way forward is to study human nature as part of the natural sciences, in an attempt to integrate the natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities. I can conceive of no ideological or formalistic short cut.”
