Ok I'm pissed.

I'm sick of people in the science professions and their superiority complexes. As a science person until my college years (placing at state science fairs at MIT, doing research at Harvard's biolabs, being generally hardcore), I have a tremendous and continuing appreciation for the sciences. I have also been humbled by the immensely valuable and very different critical thinking skills acquired in the humanities at a liberal arts college, and further humbled by the intricacies of human motivations through work with actors and the study of film. So, when science types say they listen to NPR and watch CNN, and don't need a political science degree to know what's going on in the world, I want to facepalm. Or when they mock someone who wants to study ethnomusicology, or when they say they can know just as much as a liberal arts major by reading a few books, they sound incredibly demeaning to not just an entire body of knowledge they realistically will not care to access, but to the people who develop and refine systems of thought that shape and define large-scale human experience - systems of thought that that their minds will never experience because it is a taught skill set that neither their upbringing nor their science education has given them. It is a skill set that enables people to deconstruct books and news and draw their greater implications in the context of socioeconomic / historical patterns.  It is acquiring the knowledge of how to learn.  Science types, because their field offers financial security and social prestige, confuse their status for knowledge.  And because the humanities gets very personal - it deconstructs a person and how one thinks to reshape how they should think - it's hard to correct a grown adult fixed in their worldview.

This isn't to say there are some science types that know how to learn.  They exist and they're wonderful, and they're not the kind of people to undermine the humanities because they know its value.  I'm upset about the types that are judgmental and have superiority complexes, people who don't know what they don't know.  Specifically, they take the piecemeal information and doses of speculation that comes from their social life, whether it's dinner parties or water cooler chats, and consider that an enriched understanding of the matters discussed when it is in essence just entertainment.