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What, today, is the purpose of an education in the Humanities?
What does a student gain from an Arts programme?
Are those gains worth the time and the cost that they entail?
In recent years, these and similar questions have frequently been
answered by defenders and advocates of the Arts or Humanities in terms
of the skills and abilities that can be gained or enhanced through a
study of literature, history, philosophy, classical and modern
languages, and the visual arts–critical thinking and knowledge-building skills,
for example, and the ability to conduct research, organize information,
and communicate effectively. Such
skills and abilities, students and their parents have been assured, can
be readily transferred to a wide variety of professions and vocations
and are highly desired by employers in business, industry, and “high-tech.”
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” runs the favoured saying:
in an Arts or Humanities programme, students acquire or hone the “tools” that will make them not only desirable as
employees, but also continuously capable of adapting to the new
situations that they encounter as they move through the sequence of jobs
that is to be their lot in a world of accelerating change and
uncertainty. In short, a
degree in the Arts or Humanities is a superb qualification for the new “knowledge
economy.”
Of course, there is a great deal of truth to this argument and a
considerable body of testimony from employers and graduates alike that
the skills and abilities associated with an education in the Arts or
Humanities are indeed–and are likely to continue
to be–both valued and remunerative
in the “real” world beyond (and now quite often within) the
universities’ gates.
But is the acquisition or enhancement of transportable “know-how” the primary purpose and benefit of an Arts or
Humanities education? Or,
for that matter, is it a purpose or benefit that programmes in the Arts
or Humanities are uniquely, or even best, equipped to fulfil? Merely to ask these questions is to cast doubt on the
proposition that the goal and competency of Arts or Humanities
programmes and their instructors lies in the inculcation of so-called “employability” skills and abilities, for surely most professors
and students in, say, a department of Philosophy or Visual Arts are
primarily engaged in teaching and learning a discipline, and Philosophy
and Visual Arts are not necessarily better arenas for acquiring or
enhancing “employability”
skills and abilities than, say, a department of Political Science or a
Faculty of Engineering. To
be sure, departments of English, French, and Modern Languages frequently
(and often out of economic necessity) mount courses in written and oral
communication, but “communication skills” are (or should be) a component of all university
courses, and to centre them in a few departments in faculties of Arts or
Humanities is to risk transforming those departments in whole or in part
into service units. Nevertheless,
even as they train students in their particular disciplines Arts or
Humanities instructors are
engaged directly and/or indirectly in activities through which students do
acquire or enhance skills and abilities that are attractive to
employers. To the very
extent that “employability”
skills and abilities are among the benefits of Arts or Humanities
programmes they should not be ignored but, on the contrary, emphasized
and, if necessary, explained whenever and wherever those programmes need
to be defended against the charge that they are less worthwhile because
less obviously practical than programmes in business, the sciences, and
other areas that now enjoy political and, hence, financial favour.
And there can be no doubt that in the corridors of power in most capital
cities and on many university campuses less favour has been accorded in
recent years to sectors of the university whose primary focus is on
culture and mental cultivation than to those that are directly concerned
with human physical and social needs and those that are widely assumed
to be incubators of innovation and productivity.
As these trends have become more pronounced and apparent,
numerous efforts have been made to align the Arts or Humanities with the
financial beneficiaries of current assumptions and policies, for
example, by emphasizing the importance of culture to people’s overall sense of wellness and by calling for
greater recognition of such factors as artistic creativity, cultural
diversity, and disciplinary interaction in the fostering of innovation.2 These efforts, too, must continue and for much the same reason
as the arguments pertaining to “employability”
skills and abilities: they
have validity; they have met with success; and they are a means of at
least stemming the tide that has in many places and for some time been
flowing against the Arts or Humanities.
That both these lines of defense and attack might be joined by a third
that is entirely consonant with the foundational commitment of the Arts
or Humanities to culture and mental cultivation became vividly apparent
to me on September 12, 2002 when I listened to President George W. Bush
address the United Nations on the need to disarm or remove Saddam
Hussein. More specifically,
it became apparent in the closing moments of the speech when Mr. Bush
confronted his audience with a stark choice.
“Events can turn in one of two ways,” he argued,
If we fail to act in the face of danger, the people of Iraq will
continue to live in brutal submission.
The regime will have new power to bully, dominate and conquer its
neighbours.... The region
will remain unstable....
If we meet our responsibilities, if we overcome this danger, we can
arrive at a very different future....
Neither of these outcomes is certain. Both have been set before us.
We must choose between a world of fear and a world of progress.
We cannot stand by and do nothing while dangers gather.
We must stand up for our security, and for the permanent rights
and hopes of mankind.
By heritage and by choice,
the United States of America will make that stand. Delegates to the United Nations, you have the power to make
that stand as well.3
These were powerful and portentous words whose author was almost
certainly familiar with one of the great themes or topoi of
Western culture: the Choice of Hercules.
Beneath the surface of Mr. Bush’s
Churchillian rhetoric of gathering “dangers” to be “overcome” lies a pattern traceable to Xenophon’s Memorabilia Socratis (circa 380 BC),
elaborated by the Earl of Shaftesbury in his Characteristiks of Men,
Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), and deployed in different ways by
Raphael, William Hogarth, Susanna Moodie, Archibald Lampman, and
countless other artists and writers4–the pattern whereby the young Hercules is
confronted by a choice between, on the one hand, heroic virtue (virtus),
and, on the other, sensual pleasure (voluptas), chooses the
former, and thus embarks on a course of action that leads him to an
excruciating death and entry into heaven.
The recognition of this pattern was startling and illuminating,
it clarified, contextualized, and complicated the “choice” that Mr. Bush was placing before the United
Nations, and it was a result of studying art, literature, and the
scholarship surrounding them–the “heritage,” it
might be said, of the Arts or Humanities.
Mr. Straw [the British Foreign Minister] used part of his speech
[to the United Nations] to attack the French Foreign Minister’s
reasoning for giving Saddam more time in the face of less-than-full
co-operation.
“Dominique [de Villepin] . . . said the choice before us was
disarmament by peace or disarmament by war. That’s a false choice,”
he said. “The choice, the choice, Dominique, is not ours as to how
this disarmament takes place. The choice is Saddam Hussein’s. It’s
his choice.” (“Saddam” A18)
Less
than a week after Mr. Bush’s
speech to the United Nations, an article in The Financial Post
reinforced for me the value of the Arts or Humanities as a framework for
understanding and, by extension, making the sorts of choices that seem
to be the staple of these interesting times.
It was an article entitled “Weighing
the Cost of a Canadian MBA: What’s
It Really Worth?”
that concerned itself with what Michael Bloom, an Associate
Director at the Conference Board of Canada, described somewhat clumsily
as the “‘trends
devaluating the degrees’”
offered by Canada’s
numerous business schools (McNamara 10).
In it, Mr. Bloom expressed the view that, “‘[w]ith [the] emphasis now placed on corporate governance’”
in the business world, “‘it
is critical that managers have a broader understanding of issues around
management and not just technical skills’”
and intimated that such “‘understanding’”
is less common in MBAs than in the graduates of “‘other
disciplines’”
in which “‘[t]here is a much stronger tradition...of thinking critically and
reflecting on choices, on judgement.’”
Later in the article an unnamed spokeswoman for a “[h]igh-end
management consultancy”
firm confirmed that “‘fewer
MBAs and more lawyers, doctors, engineers, English lit grads...people
from a wide range of disciplines’”
are now being hired by Canadian businesses and a “recruiter
who asked not to be named”
observed that the desirable employee in today’s
corporate world is not “‘the
kid with a spreadsheet’”
but “‘someone
who can lead one of [a business’s]
divisions in 10 years. And
that includes putting your hand up when you see something wrong; [w]here
were those people at Anderson Consulting?’”
A few years ago, articles like “Weighing
the Cost of an MBA”
offered defenders and advocates of the Arts or Humanities little comfort
beyond their welcoming gestures towards critical thinking and other “employability”
skills,5 but in the wake of
the scandals surrounding Enron and other American corporations, their
emphasis on choice, judgement, and moral discernment is bringing to the
fore capacities and qualities whose development and refinement was for
centuries one of the highest goals of the humanistic programme
in which lie the roots of today’s
study of the Arts or Humanities. On
the evidence of “Weighing
the Cost of a Canadian MBA”
and, indeed, Mr. Bush’s
address to the United Nations, the time may well be ripe to revitalize
those roots and draw more succour from them than has recently been the
case in many if not most universities.
Body
and mind in balance, a sound frame,
A solid intellect: the wit to seek,
Wisdom to choose, and courage wherewithal
To deal in whatsoever circumstance
Should minister to man, make life succeed.
·
·
·
Go!
Never again elude the choice of tints!
White shall not neutralize the black, nor good
Compensate bad in man, absolve him so:
Life’s
business being just the terrible choice.
(Browning, 557-564)
A week or two after hearing Mr. Bush’s
address and reading “Weighing the Cost of a
Canadian MBA,” these lessons were again
brought home to me in the September 2002 issue of my daughter’s Glamour magazine, where the question
advanced in the “glamour debate” was “Is
it ethical for a couple to choose to create a deaf baby?” (Bollinger).
The couple at the centre of the debate were deaf lesbians and the
four women chosen to represent the “pros” and “cons” of the question were the author of a book about
the deaf, a “fourth-generation deaf” graduate student, the vice president of a
company that manufactures hearing devices who had received a “cochlear implant”
after gradually losing her hearing, and a paralegal intern in a law firm
specializing in “cases for the deaf” who
was born deaf. The
responses of the four women were placed in two perfectly balanced
columns headed “Yes” and
“No,” but when read in sequence they told a story of
gradually dawning awareness, beginning with the first “Yes”
response (“I know that being deaf is
not a medical misfortune” from the author, who,
interestingly was not deaf herself) and ending with the second “No”
response (“If a baby is born deaf, OK,
but let’s not create deaf children” from the paralegal intern).
A sidebar recorded the responses of readers, 57% of whom agreed
with the statement that “in
light of increasing scientific advances...the government [should]
restrict a person’s right to genetically
engineer a child.” At the foot of the page readers were invited to participate
further in the debate by logging on to the magazine’s website and casting their vote.
In short, the article was a brief but concerted assault on the
shallow relativism whose stock reply to any awkward dilemma–“Whatever”–can be heard all-too-frequently on university
campuses. Not only did it
effectively position itself within the feminist tradition of choice to
confront its target audience with a complex moral and definitional issue
(deafness was variously called a “handicap” and a “challenge” as well as “not
a medical misfortune”), but it did so using
generic, spatial, and narrative elements in a quite subtle way that
demanded both analytical skill and cultural experience if its design(s)
and agenda were to be fully discerned and understood.
To be born is both to be born of the world and to be born into the world.
The world is already constituted; but also never completely constituted;
in the first case we are
acted upon, in the second we are open to an infinite number of
possibilities. But this analysis is still abstract, for we exist in both
ways at once. There is, therefore, never determinism and never
absolute choice, I am never a thing and never bare consciousness. In
fact, even our own pieces of initiative, even the situations which we
have chosen, bear us on, once they have been entered upon by virtue of a
state rather than an act. (Merleau-Ponty 527)
Different as they are in almost every respect, the “glamour debate” and
Mr. Bush’s address to the United
Nations both illustrate the way in which patterns and procedures made
available through studying the Arts or Humanities can enable and
encourage a sophisticated understanding of a wide variety of texts and
issues. They also make plain the fact that, whatever their nature and
whatever their context, choices involve a reflective process that
includes the dilemma (or problem) at hand, an analysis of its components
and implications, and a referral of these to as much pertinent knowledge
and cultural experience as possible.
Needless to say, this process is not restricted to the realms of
addresses and articles but occurs continually in the sphere of personal
decision-making, where the dual nature of a choice as something that we
make at a particular moment in time and something with which we must
thereafter live is, if anything, even more starkly clear: to opt for the
road less travelled is to exercise individual agency and to accept
irreversible consequences and responsibilities. Here, too, someone exposed to the Arts or Humanities will be
at an advantage by virtue of having, not merely a personal context of
desires, motives, goals, and capabilities upon which to base choices,
but also a culturally rich understanding of choices and their
consequences gleaned from art, history, literature, and philosophy.
CREON:
Did you know [my] order forbidding such an act?
ANTIGONE: I knew it, naturally.
It was plain enough.
CREON:
And yet you dared to contravene it?
ANTIGONE: Yes.
That order did not come from God. Justice
That dwells with the gods below, knows no such Law.
I did not think your edicts strong enough
To overrule the unwritten unalterable laws
Of God and heaven, you being only a man.
(Sophocles 138)
It is
probably unnecessary but nevertheless important to observe that what I
am advocating is not an ideologically driven approach to pedagogy thaét
uses the Arts or Humanities as the pretext for political suasion. As an
aid in the process of sharpening students' moral awareness and ethical
intelligence, an office door plastered with insights into current events
from one's favourite newspapers, magazines, and websites may be a
thought provoking as well as cathartic, but it should not be confused
with the real work of drawing out from the texts that students are
studying the issues that will help them come to their own moral,
ethical, and, yes, political conclusions. In fact, there may even be
sound reasons both pedagogical and perceptual for not advertising
one's political orientation so crassly. Alerted by the evidence of his
or her instructor's ideological position, a student may decide for
pragmatic reasons that are quite legitimate to refrain from offering
different, let alone opposing, opinions during class discussion, in a
piece of written work, or on a term test or final examination. Less
important but also worth consideration in these highly polarized and
culturally diverse times, an office door plastered with caricatures and
critiques of whatever political figures or positions the occupant of the
office finds reprehensible can scarcely appeal to all students or, on
open-house days, to all parents and other visitors. If doors must be
plastered, then in the interests of encouraging moral awareness and
ethical intelligence, the should record, not one, but several
ideological and political positions and arguments. It was in this spirit
that in the period that in the period leading up to the recent war the
office door of a colleague of mine at the University of Western Ontario
carried articles containing the views of Noam Chomsky, Jean Chrétien,
David Frum, Michael Ignatieff, and Jeffrey Simpson – by no means the full spectrum of
available views but enough bands of it to provide a good sense of the
various arguments that the imminent war was generating on an almost
daily basis.
“Buridan’s
ass,” an ass starving to death between two equidistant and tempting
piles of hay . . . may . . . [have] originated as a caricature of
Buridan’s theory of action, which attempts to find a middle ground
between Aristotelian intellectualism and Franciscan voluntarism by
arguing that the will’s freedom to act consists primarily in its
ability to defer choice in the absence of any compelling reason to act
one way or the other. (Zupco)
No very deep or detailed knowledge of the history of Western culture is
necessary to recognize that choices and their consequences tend to come
to artistic, historical, literary, and, indeed, linguistic prominence
during periods of turmoil and change such as those surrounding the
Copernican Revolution (which, of course, marked the transition from the
Middle Ages to the Renaissance) and the Kantian Revolution (which marked
the next stage in the emergence of modern, subjective individualism). The strong evidence that for some three decades Western
culture has been moving through another period of turbulence, one
characterized by the transference of many human capabilities to the
computer and other mechanisms (the Turing Revolution)6,
suggests that there may be merit to examining a couple of texts from the
Renaissance and post-Romantic periods that focus directly on choices,
their procedures, and their consequences to see what lessons they might
hold for a culture that is saturated in the rhetoric of choice but
nevertheless leaves many people with the sense that the political and
economic system for which the right to choose has become almost an
article of faith has also reduced choice to little more than a matter of
likes and dislikes within a seemingly diverse but actually very narrow
band of options (as in “I
like Gap jeans,” “I don’t
like Britney Spears,” and “He likes me”).
Finlay said when he came in that the heat for May was extraordinary; and
Advena reminded him that he was in a country where everything was
accomplished quickly, even summer.
“Except
perhaps civilization,”
she added. They were both young enough to be pleased with cleverness for
its specious self.
“Oh, that
is slow everywhere,”
he observed: “but
how you can say so, with every modern improvement staring you in the
face–”
“Electric cars and telephones! Oh, I didn’t say we hadn’t
the products,” and she laughed. “But the thing itself, the precious thing, that
never comes just by wishing, does it? The art of indifference, the art
of choice–”. (Duncan 105-06)
In Paradise Lost (1667), Milton gives first to Eve and then to
Adam a choice whose outcome–the future of all humanity–could not be greater or, as it turns out, more
grave. What makes them, in
God’s words (and, surely, the finest use of the comma
in English literature), “Sufficient to have stood,
though free to fall” (3:99) is a combination of
unblemished human reason and complete personal freedom, for, as Milton
explains in Areopagitica (1644), “[w]hen God gave [Adam]
reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing” (732). To
Milton, reason and choosing are aspects of a procedure whereby knowledge
and analysis are brought to bear on an issue or problem to achieve
clarity, come to a judgement, and make a decision. Of course, Milton’s “reason” is
not mere ratiocination, but “right reason” (ratio recta), a faculty that consists of
intellect informed by moral and spiritual values and thus capable of
referring a specific issue or problem to patterns found in the Bible and
in the Divinely authored Book of Nature.
With the Fall of Adam and Eve, right reason was compromised, but
it remains the best tool that human beings possess for making choices in
accordance with moral and spiritual values and, therefore, for the good
of both the individual and the community.
Moreover, in the fallen world, right reason can and should be
strengthened (re-righted) through intellectual discipline and the
acquisition of knowledge. If
he were to read “Weighing the Cost of a
Canadian MBA” Milton would doubtless
disapprove of that shy recruiter’s
decision to remain anonymous and thus to avoid responsibility for his
statements, but he would surely agree with the same recruiter’s point that accounting practices are no more
exempt from moral judgement than any other human activity.
He would also agree, I am fairly certain, that disciplined
exposure to the Arts and Humanities is a valuable means of providing
reason with the moral, spiritual, and cultural frameworks that are
essential for making right choices in complex situations.
“Lord
Jesus, pity your poor maid!
For in such wise they hem me in,
I cannot choose but sin and sin,
Whatever happens: yet I think
They could not make me eat or drink,
And so should I just reach my rest.”
(Morris 1: 126-27)
As Milton tells the story in Book 9 of Paradise Lost, Eve makes
the wrong choice because she is overwhelmed by the sensual appeal of the
forbidden fruit and by Satan’s specious argument that it
will make her god-like. In
contrast, Adam eats the forbidden fruit because he cannot bear the
thought of living without Eve. Although
her decision is the dramatic climax of the poem, Adam’s is
the theological culmination of the tragedy of the Fall and it dramatizes
a dilemma that few people will fail to face at least once in the course
of their lives: the choice of either doing what they know to be right
and, as a result, losing a person about whom they care deeply or doing
what they know to be wrong and retaining that person’s affection.
That Adam does not call upon God for help in making his decision
(as he most certainly could have) merely serves to reinforce the sense
that he was facing a dilemma as lonely as it is profoundly human, a
dilemma also faced by Huck Finn when he has to decide whether to obey
the laws of the land in which he finds himself or remain loyal to his
friend Jim. Students and
teachers of Paradise
Lost, Huckleberry Finn, and other works are doing much more
than analysing texts and acquiring or enhancing “employability” skills. They
are also, among many other things, strengthening and refining their
ability to appreciate how difficult and complex a matter choosing can
be, to identify the components and ramifications of choices, and to
understand that it is in the nature of human life that some decisions
are both right and wrong.
[A]nd
then I [Huck] happened to look around, and see that paper [the letter he
had written revealing Jim’s
whereabouts].... I took it
up, and held it in my hand. I
was a trembling, because I’d
got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.
I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to
myself:
“All right, then, I’ll
go to hell–and tore it up.” (Clemens 167-68)
“Close thy Byron; open
thy Goethe” (Carlyle 192).
Delivered several decades after the Kantian Revolution had
prepared the way for Romantic individualism and the strutting egotism to
which it perhaps inevitably gave rise, Thomas Carlyle’s imperious injunction that in “The Everlasting Yea” section of Sartor Resartus (1833) was a
timely rejection of self-indulgence (voluptas) in favour of duty
to God and community (virtus).
Like Milton and numerous subsequent writers and thinkers (not
least the Swift of A Modest Proposal [1729]), Carlyle recognized
that reason decoupled from moral and spiritual values can become the
destructive madness for which the twentieth century will forever live in
infamy. (Eerily, the
projector of A Modest Proposal suggests that human skin would
make “admirable Gloves for Ladies, and Summer Boots for
Fine Gentlemen” [112].)
Like Goethe and numerous other Romantic and Victorian writers
(not least the Dickens of Bleak House [1853]), Carlyle
believed that duty and responsibility must begin with family and
friends but must also radiate outwards like ripples in a pond to
encompass at its furthest limits the rest of humanity and the earth
itself. “The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal
was never yet occupied” by a human being, he
asserts later in “The Everlasting Yea”: “[y]es,
here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, dispicable Actual, wherein thou
even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom,
and working, believe, live, be free” (196).
To analyse a “Situation,” to establish an “Ideal,” to recognize and act upon a “Duty”:
these were, are, and never will be simple or easy undertakings, which is
exactly why the Arts or Humanities will remain essential components of
human existence.
[A] lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed
on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the
dry volumes of ethics and divinity that were written. (Jefferson 1:77)
In
the distant background of Carlyle and the more immediate background of
Milton lies the extraordinary work from which I would like to draw by
way of conclusion, Pico della Mirandola’s Dignita’
dell’uomo or De
hominis dignitate–the Oration on the Dignity of Man that he delivered
at Rome in 1486, when he was only twenty-four years old.
Envisaging the moment when God created Man and “set him in the middle of the world”
beneath the angels and above the animals, Pico imagines God explaining
to Adam that by virtue of his “intermediary”
(3) position he has unique abilities:
“...whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts
you may, with premeditation, select,
these same you may have and possess through your own judgement
and decision.... We
have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal
nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of
your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.
It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms
of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to
the superior orders whose life is divine.” (7-8)
Surely one of the highest purposes and goals of the Arts or Humanities
today is to assist in the process of “premeditation,” “select[ion],” “judgement,” and “decision” through which people “fashion”
their higher and better selves–selves capable of properly
responding to the moral, social, political, and personal choices of
today’s and tomorrow’s
world. During the Renaissance and in the classical tradition from which
it drew so much of its inspiration, one of the ideals of the educational
activity known as philosophia was
to enable the student to live a good life. As the twenty-first century
dawns, the cultivation of an ethical sensibility alongside cultural and
other forms of competency is surely no less important than it ever was;
indeed, there may never have been a greater need for the Arts or
Humanities to reclaim and proclaim their high calling as schools for the
moral arts upon which society and humanity depend.
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