I don’t remember much of college, but I probably did not take advantage of being forced to take humanities courses. Coming from a country with a different education system where we were “streamed” early on (I was placed in the sciences) and had little choice in the classes we took, it was bewildering to be offered a smorgasbord of choice at the liberal arts college I attended here in the U.S. The college was also known for its core rigorous Western civilization course required of all first-year students.
Due to the oddity of being the first person from my country to attend said college, it was unclear how exactly some of my prior coursework might “transfer” (many countries have more extensive secondary education compared to the U.S.) After talking to a chemistry faculty member, it was decided that instead of taking General Chemistry, I should be placed directly into Organic Chemistry. Now it turned out that first-year students hardly ever wanted to take or be in O-Chem and so consequently the main O-Chem lectures were scheduled at exactly the same time as the core Humanities course. I received special permission to delay that Humanities core requirement.
But then the next year, I was enrolled in P-Chem which was, you guessed it, scheduled at exactly the same time because no one ever tried to take O-Chem and P-Chem simultaneously (O-Chem being a pre-requisite) and thus delayed my Humanities experience another year. Having figured out I could graduate in three years with some course cramming, I was finally enrolled in the intro Hum course, the only senior taking the class with a cohort of first-years. (I was careful not to reveal I was a senior and tried to blend in.) I was also writing my senior thesis in Chemistry at the time, and due to some unexpected things come up in research (which they often do), let’s say I devoted much more time to chemistry and um, skipped a bunch of Hum classes. (I had privately discussed this with the instructor who agreed it was okay.)
I might have thought differently back then if I had read Alan Jacob’s new book Breaking Bread with the Dead. It’s a breezy enjoyable read, and I agree with much of what he writes. Of course I’ve had much more appreciation for the humanities since college, and I had read many of the ‘classics’ that he mentions ranging from the usual Greco-Roman antiquity stuff to more recent literature. Many, but not all, of his examples come from a standard Western civ canon, now no longer a given in such twenty-first century intro Hum core courses. Even my stalwart college has bowed to the pressure to include more diverse voices, not necessarily a bad thing.
Jacob values the classics, and he thinks we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss them even in this day and age. While he provides memorable vignettes and arguments, the thrust of his book that caught my attention was that reading what seems like a foreign dead past (and as an international student, it was all foreign to me) is valuable for combating what he calls presentism – the ever-accelerating information-deluge age we are in right this moment. My present students have grown up in it, and I try to empathize with the pressures they face in this deluge so focused on the now, even when I don’t quite comprehend it. (I guess I’m a ‘slow professor’.)
Jacob makes the argument (with relevance to the social polarization in the U.S. where folks seem only to tune into ‘what their itching ears want to hear’ to quote the Bible, and old classic of sorts) that the sense that the ‘other’ might pollute oneself and should be avoided, is due to experiencing information overload. Here’s what he says: “information overload [is] a sense that we are always receiving more sheer data than we know how to evaluate – and a more general feeling of social acceleration – the perception that the world is not only changing but changing faster and faster. What those closely related experiences tend to require from us is information triage.” And how do you triage? As efficiently and quickly as possible, usually from close-to-instantaneous judgments without significant forethought. We’re doing this all the time these days, trying our best to avoid pop-ups trying to gain our attention through the world wild web.
How can we avoid being “tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming”? (The Bible is very quotable!) Jacob suggests the idea of developing temporal bandwidth. The idea is that spending time living not just in the present, but infused by the past and future, increases your temporal bandwidth – and in doing so, gives you a heftier personal density. This density helps keeps you grounded when you are being buffeted by information overload, and you can do a better and more thoughtful job in your triage.
I find it amusing that bandwidth and density are terms most often used in science-technology settings. They may seem strange bedfellows – after all, if you literally increase your width without increasing your mass by a higher proportion (more than cubically!) your density will actually decrease. Jacob doesn’t address this because he uses these words to evoke an image of breadth, solidity, and firmness. To push his analogy a little further, I’d say he would advocate for significantly increasing your ‘mass’ of knowledge of the past, even if it is foreign to your ears. I think he’d say especially so. And he marshals vignettes throughout his book to support this argument.
Personal density isn’t something that bothers me, now that I’m old and stuck in my ways. I do see my students seeking and exploring who they are. Oh, the joys (and horrors) of youth! However, I think the idea of temporal bandwidth is interesting to consider. I happen to enjoy reading history. It’s what I read the most, outside of science. History of science is even better! Maybe that liberal arts education did help me gain an appreciation for the humanities and its intersection with the social and natural sciences. I do read very widely, and I read a lot. (If you follow my blog regularly you already know this since I regularly write about what I read.)
Have I developed temporal bandwidth? Maybe. I’m not sure how one measures one’s temporal bandwidth. Surely it can’t be just by counting the number of books I’ve read or coming up with some scale rating for the intellectual density of those books, as pretentious as that sounds. I’m much more comfortable thinking about complexity than I used to be; but maybe it’s because I study complex systems in chemistry so I happen to read a lot on the topic. The subtitle of Jacobs’ book is “A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind”. Am I more tranquil? Compared to my younger days, certainly, but I don’t know if that’s attributed to reading voraciously. I also have what I think is a stable job doing what I enjoy, and I know that’s a rare and fortunate position to be in, especially these days. I suspect there are multiple routes to the tranquil mind, and they may not all pass through widening one’s temporal bandwidth. Prayer, meditation, focusing on a being who transcends time and space, may also be other avenues that lead to similar states. I don’t know. And I’m not worrying about it!
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