The word absurd, like many words in the English language, can mean different things. In Jonah’s blog post,”The Shared Experience of Absurdity”, absurd is the language of humor that connects cultures and disciplines and fosters fun events like Improv Everywhere, bridging the divide between disciplines that is discussed in Moran’s Interdisciplinarity. In Marlo’s blog post, “The Fun Theory”, absurdity was about breaking the monotony of everyday life and changing our behavior for the better. Yet, when I think of “absurd”, I think of the Absurdist novel The Stranger and the Absurdist philosophies of its author, Albert Camus.
History and Literature: A Love Story
As discussed in Chapter 4 of Moran’s Interdisciplinarity, history and literature have an intricately woven past that makes the two fields especially receptive to interdisciplinary practices. It is clearly visible in Western societies how much literature has impacted the practice and education of history. The Greeks and the Romans have their histories studied and dissected because the written works they left behind were comprehensible by Western scholars. A primary reason behind the Western world’s fascination with Egypt was the discovery of the Rosetta Stone which enabled historians and scholars to understand written hieroglyphs. Moran writes that “history needs to exist alongside the close reading skills learned in subjects such as literary studies” so that we may hope to understand the cultures of the past. Yet having scholars focus solely on the written remnants of history does have some disadvantages.
The Tips and Tricks of Standardized Testing
When discussing the formation of sociology in Interdisciplinarity, Moran references the work of Auguste Comte who proposed that “all real knowledge was gained through empirical methods and that the procedures of the natural sciences could thus be transferred to the social sciences”.
Could that really be true? Could the mechanical, predictable and empirical methods that worked in math and science really be transferred over to apply to the more liberal and creative social sciences? Immediately, I thought of the SATs, the pinnacle of mechanical, unpersonalized application of empirical methods in the standardized testing age and how the test had attempted to take out the complexity in its essay portion.
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A Human Study
Biologists want to claim the human body as a mass of tissue and organs to dissect and categorize. Psychologists want to unspool the mangled mess of the human mind and see what makes it tick. English students want to riddle through symbols hidden in novels that define character’s humanity and exemplify the human condition. In Interdisciplinarity, Moran details the trajectory of homosexuality through the gauntlet of contesting disciplines.
Unlike other subjects which can be easily grouped into disciplines, sexuality sits in the cross section of biology, psychology and the humanities in general. When Moran states that “the notion of sexuality as a cultural concept…rather than a natural given…is what makes queer theory interdisciplinary”, he is already pulling together the disciplines of biology and sociology in just one sentence.
In Defense of a Liberal Education
A running joke on campus is that as we walk up the hills to class we look at our friends and say, “I’m seriously paying 20,000 dollars just for great calf muscles?” Like all good jokes, it’s funny because sometimes it seems as though it’s completely true. The debate about whether or not a college degree (or worse- a college degree in English) is worth it is constantly raging around every college student. For everyone who has taken the leap and is already walking up the hills to class every morning, it’s easier to laugh about the uncertainty facing graduates than to seriously consider it.
In Interdisciplinarity, Moran makes an argument not only for a more inclusive and less compartmentalized education but also for education itself. Moran quotes Aristotle saying that liberal educations are “something good in itself” and that the value of these educations are held not in necessarily in “usefulness” but in the idea that a person armed with a well-rounded education is inherently of value.
Additionally, if the only way people can get a quality higher education is by shoveling thousands of dollars out the door, shouldn’t the students get the best education possible? Doesn’t it make sense that along with overwhelming debt, college graduates leave school knowing not only their major but also the disciplines outside of it? Moran quotes an Italian “thinker” Giambattista Vico who claims that focusing only on some disciplines has “led to the neglect of a broad education in favour of specialist knowledge”, leaving some students who perhaps took only Psych classes realizing that maybe taking entry level calculus wasn’t such a bad idea after all. People don’t go to college because they want to master a single math equation or keep rereading the same novel every semester; people go to college so that when they graduate and head into the workforce they have a degree in their back pocket. Of course they will have a major, but with a liberal education they’ve also been exposed to dozens of other disciplines along the way.
The introduction of Interdisciplinarity advocated not just for the derided English majors, but for the embattled liberal education as a whole. So the next time anyone complains about walking up these beloved Geneseo hills, just remind them they are investing in their futures and not just great legs.
Moran, Joe. Interdisciplinarity. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. Print
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