Maybe you've seen the recent Wells Fargo ad depicting beaming millennials performing STEM field tasks with captions like "A ballerina yesterday. An engineer today." It's obvious that the head honchos at Wells Fargo don't seem to think that a career in the arts is worthwhile. Often associated with the fine arts, the humanities also receive scorn from STEM elitists (though probably not near as much as the arts do, since humanities are typically considered academia even by the biggest philistine). I can't tell you how many people I've run into from my high school days who seem genuinely shocked that I chose to be an English major instead of a Biology or Chemistry major. I even had a former teacher joke about how I would "see the error of my ways" and turn back towards the natural sciences. It's been three years, gang; I'm not changing my major from what I love to what everyone expected out of me.
All my life, I was in the shadow of my family's STEM-related careers. My great-grandparents worked as analytical chemists for the FDA, my maternal grandfather and my step-grandma taught math/engineering at the University of Arizona, my dad's stepdad was an IT guy, my uncle is an engineer, and both my parents are optometrists. It was pretty much assumed that I was bound for the medical field like my parents, and maybe I would even take over their practice. I remember kindly adults around our Podunk town asking me, "Now, will you take over the family business one day and be the third Dr. Wesley?" I always told them I wanted to be a veterinarian or a zoologist, which was true for the time. To this day I have a profound love for animals, forged from spending countless hours mulling over the books on zoology that littered my room. As a kindergartener, I could sketch the food chains and lines of evolutionary progress that I saw in my books. But I also read fiction and became enraptured with the idea of creating worlds within a text. I would write and draw my own little books and hand them out to my parents' employees when I was six or seven. My dad encouraged me all the time, telling me to write him a story about this or that, but often I'd be furious at him (in the way children get angry with their parents over trivial matters) for trying to "control" my creativity. So I was a child who was inclined towards art and science.
If my love for humanities and science were about the same, how did I choose the one over the other? I simply saw that one field fit my personal beliefs better than the other. STEM is so focused on absolute, objective truth, which I, personally, don't think exists. Everything we can ever know is mediated through our subjective experiences, so how can we say we know anything outside of it? The results you get in an experiment run in a sterile room might be factual, but you are controlling the events in a way that allows you to prove or disprove anything, really. They are hardly objective truths. The best way to observe a phenomena, in my opinion, is to observe it as it occurs naturally. That's the closest you'll get to the truth of an organism, if any truth can be got at.
The way scientists treat other living things caused me to feel put off. There's a biology class offered at my college that requires the student to kill a turtle by breaking its spine, just so you can dissect it. It is cruel to end a being's life without its consent. I am a devout pacifist and eat a largely vegetarian diet (I still eat the occasional chicken and fish). I heard STEM students talk about the abhorrent experiments they ran on rats, and I always spoke up about how I found these experiments (such as injecting a chemical into them that caused them to age rapidly) to be unethical. Their responses were always that at least it wasn't done on humans. These lab animals are viewed as disposable in the cold paradigm of the scientist. Scientists do not consider that the animals they experiment on have a CNS which allows them to feel pain. The capacity to feel pain should warrant the animals the luxury of being considered beings with unalienable rights to life. Yet those who worship numbers and charts do not feel the same way.
There is an arrogance to the sciences that greatly rubs me the wrong way. Yes, it is true that STEM jobs are in demand, and one can make a killing in these jobs (at least in comparison to jobs in the humanities field). We all know this. You guys don't have to constantly deride other majors in order to stroke your ego. You think you are infallible simply because you are not concerned with the subjective, the anecdotal, the sentimental. You do not consider that you could be wrong. Science, as I was brought up to believe, was all about questioning. The doors to inquiry should never be closed. To assume you are unmistakably correct is folly, pure and simple.
That is why I chose the humanities, because it preaches that truth changes. Everything is in flux. There is no certainty to anything. In order to survive and function, we agree that certain facts are true, but we can never really know. We must be humble in our ignorance, something many scientists refuse to do. We must consider other perspectives rather than establish one as the "Ultimate."
