Five years ago, when I began a PhD in applied economics, I decided to jump aboard the rival caravan of the “technicians.” After my studies and early research projects in the field of communication, I felt I could no longer tolerate what I considered the negative sides of the humanists: an inclination toward generalizations, difficulty in seeing details, heads in the clouds…
Leaving behind a cradle of humanism, Italy, I began gravitating toward the more “empirical” lands of the Netherlands and the United States.
I felt that my “qualitative” training, grounded in narrative, needed to be complemented by a “quantitative” one, grounded in the observation of facts. Enough with talking about points of view—better to speak of assumptions. No more aesthetics and refinement in language; instead, precision and univocity of meaning. No more dealing with “the relationship between the use of mobile technologies and environmental sustainability”; rather, the PhD topic became “measuring the impact of mobile phone and laptop use on human mobility behavior.” I was learning exactly what I was looking for, with satisfaction.
My colleagues excelled in the development of technology. Through them, I discovered that one ultimate aim of the engineer and the technician is to make things happen—as they say in the U.S., “make things happen.” What matters most is the “workflow,” built on linear and incremental reasoning: from A I move to B, from B I move to C, from C I arrive at the result.
There is no need to ask questions, if this is how things work: the “why” is embedded in the chain of events. At times I have the impression that if I asked a technician, “why does all this happen?” he might answer, “because that’s how it is.”
If A is as necessary as B and C to reach the result, if everything is equally important, then there is no essential and superfluous—and it may be difficult to set priorities. Paradoxically, it might matter more to arrive somewhere the right way than to reach the right place with the wrong method. The method is more important than the end.
The implications of this conclusion—though necessarily partial and simplistic—could be vast for how today’s industrialized world functions.
What I feel many technicians lack, compared to humanists, is the habit of asking why one does what one does, and where one really wants to arrive—sometimes failing to distinguish essence from detail, or even good from evil. If humanists ask, “what kind of society do we want to build?”, technicians embrace the same philosophy proposed to us by Nike: “Just do it!” (simply, build it!). For many technocrats and economists who govern the world, that is always fine. Probably, instead of asking themselves whether what they were doing was right or wrong, many financiers behind the recent speculative bubble were basking in their increasingly sophisticated methods of financial engineering. The money that kept coming in only confirmed their validity, rather than raising moral doubts.
In any case, what I believe is certain is that the world needs both humanists and technicians.
Without the right ends, we take the wrong path, but without the right method, we make very few steps. One more reason to consider interdisciplinarity essential—though it should first and foremost be personal interdisciplinarity, relating to the training of a single person. It may not be enough to simply bring together people from different disciplines, because of the risk that humanists will side with humanists and technicians with technicians.
Let us hope that in the future, alongside humanists and technicians, there will also be those who can make them communicate.