"Skills" No. "Activities," Maybe
also: our sciences are arts. sorry
A couple of recent pieces: I wrote another installment in my Christian Century column and reviewed Paul Elie’s new book on the “crypto-religious” art of the 1980s.
Several months ago, my friend Sorbie and I were talking, and she was elaborating her critique of manualized therapies. I didn’t know what those were exactly, though I could kind of guess from the name. She said that they’re styles of therapy where you simply go through a manual together, and I thought about the pros and cons of that — what if the manual is pretty good vs. pretty bad, etc. (She assures me that she has a magnificently, in her words, “unhinged” post coming about that, which will definitely be worth paying for her newsletter to get.)
We kept talking. “You’re saying, basically, that therapy is less of what we think of as a ‘science’ and more of an art?” I guessed. “Literally! Period!” she said, as I recollect it, and since then I’ve been thinking about other things that we think are sciences but are arts, and I have basically turned into this classic tweet:
I’m just pointing at sciences, saying “That’s better understood as an art.” Friends and family beg me to stop. They’re like, “You can’t just say everything is an art,” and I’m like “[points at math textbook] art.” Every way of gathering knowledge that we think can be reduced to an unvarying procedure is better understood as something that can … often or sometimes be reduced to an unvarying procedure. Just often enough to fool us. But we’re living things in a universe so charged with intention — in several senses of the word, none of which are the simple creationist “God-fashioned-every-species” or the hyper-Calvinist “God actively wills every event” that the word “intention” might make you think of — that we might as well regard even dead things as living. Baconian science, meanwhile, imagines itself as the study of dead things following unvarying procedures. The more Baconian the science, the further it gets from reality.
What happens when we think of humanities education as more art than science? Well, the first thing that happens is that we become, as I have, intensely Annie Abrams-pilled. We hate the idea that reading and writing can be reduced to smaller and smaller mechanized gestures and procedures that teachers and students are forced to exhaustively and exhaustingly repeat by an external test-imposed curriculum, all at the expense of actual book reading. We get mad at the College Board, and ask ourselves how a world that tolerates the modern form of the College Board was ever supposed to end in anything but widespread AI cheating and “writing” — the dead algorithmic repetition of what already exists, AKA the thing your kids were already doing on those damned tests, but more effortfully before the machine existed.
What do we do instead?