Humanities policy

Humanities policy denotes the attempt to integrate ethical and philosophical concerns within the policy making process. It has developed in reaction to the perceived inadequacies within science policy, which has since Vannevar Bush assumed an automatic and linear relation between the discovery of scientific truth and societal progress, thereby eliminating the need for consideration of ends or values. Incipient humanities policy can thus be found throughout recent critiques of the scientism of standard science policy (e.g., Byerly, Sarewitz, Pielke, Jr). These criticisms, however, have seldom achieved the thoroughness of questioning basic assumptions that properly designates 'philosophy.'

Under other names there have been several institutional expressions of humanities policy: the ELSI (ethical, legal, and societal impacts) program within the Human Genome Project; the EVS (ethics and value studies) program within the National Science Foundation, and NSF's institution of the second criteria for proposal review in 1997; and recent ELSI-like programs within other parts of government: the office of environmental justice at the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and within the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The overwhelming part of these efforts, however, constitute a thin or shallow humanities policy, focused on ethical issues, without taking full measure of the metaphyiscal, theological, and aesthetic dimensions of science and technology today.

The President's Council on Bioethics (chaired by Leon Kass) is an outstanding example of (an especially wide or deep) humanities policy.

Humanities policy has three dimensions: as a research project, investigating the role of philosophy and the humanities within the wider world; as a pedagogical project, training undergraduate and graduate students to take better account of the humanistic dimensions of societal problems; and as a policy process, where humanists try to make a difference in the world.

Humanities for policy
It is time to integrate the humanities into policy formation. Without denigrating the important roles science and technology play in policy-makers' decisions, we contend that the humanities also have a significant role in the decision-making process. Many of the areas in which science and technology are so obviously important (e.g., healthcare, defense, homeland security, space exploration, and the environment) intersect with broader societal interests; many questions of policy are not only matters of science and technology, but also of ethics and values, of metaphysics and theology, of aesthetics and culture. By addressing these added dimensions of decision-making, a humanities oriented toward policy opens up new possibilities for decision-makers, broadening their horizons and increasing their available alternatives. Our vision of a policy-oriented humanities also requires that humanities scholars be open to moving in new directions: humanities for policy requires a new policy for the humanities.

Policy for the humanities
The idea of a policy-oriented humanities fights against the current trend in the humanities. Insofar as the humanities have tended more and more toward specialization and so-called 'pure' research, the humanities have become less and less relevant to society, to culture, and to life. We aim to redress the balance: the humanities ought to be meaningful to someone other than a few experts. Indeed, we suggest that a humanities oriented toward policy will not only enliven the debates of policy-makers, but also will reinvigorate the humanities themselves. This suggestion requires the humanities to move in a new direction: hence, it requires a new policy for the humanities. Rather than isolating the humanities from the rest of the world, our new policy for the humanities must realize the potential for the humanities to bridge the gaps between experts, policy-makers, and society as a whole.

Policy humanism
The term policy humanism refers to the encouragement of an improved tenor of public debate, including an emphasis on cultivating character traits such as open-mindedness and moral sympathy. Insights derived from humanistic reflection are often indirect, as much a matter of changing the atmosphere of a conversation as introducing a new propositional content. Policy humanism takes a long-term view of the engagement of the humanities with policy. It is an invitation for reflection on the deeper meanings that are often lost in the details of policy formation. Policy humanism allows us to see the machinery of policy formation within the wider whole of public culture. Works such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Ansel Adams’ photographs, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, and Jacques Cousteau’s television series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau contribute to the wider social context and have impacts that stretch across time. They serve an educational and consciousness transforming role. Individual policies do not operate in isolation from these wider cultural forces, although their contribution is often quite subterranean and indirect.

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