Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Flourishing humanities; flourishing economy

By John Armstrong - posted Tuesday, 11 November 2008


The most important things in life - what you believe, how you act, what your motives are - can go well only if they are free.

You can terrify someone into agreement, but that's not what's needed. God wants the free, private assent of individuals to his love. That's the religious root of the project of freedom. The crucial determinants of life are what we freely do. It is logically and practically possible to force people to act in sensible and reasonable ways, but forcing undercuts the value. What matters is what we do when left to our own devices.

And that, of course, brings with it the possibility of making our own mistakes, of freely choosing things - relationships, careers, investments, friends or ways of amusing ourselves - that end up ruining our lives.

Advertisement

The present crisis has come about because the liberalised capitalist economy, which has been growing since about 1980 (despite recessions), has required more maturity than we collectively possess.

In the life of an individual, maturity indicates a group of virtues. It suggests the anticipation of danger and the capacity to cope with difficulties. Maturity is displayed in knowledge of one's weaknesses, and in the tailoring of behaviour in the light of this. It builds on education through one's own mistakes and the mistakes of others, and on the ability to hold long-term issues in view and to plan and act accordingly.

Maturity is shown in the capacity to face unwelcome news, to analyse one's convictions and discover their blind spots. Above all, maturity involves directing one's energies and efforts towards genuinely worthwhile ends: building a real, solid and good life for oneself and one's dependents. But these are only the most obviously practical aspects of maturity. More subtly, wisdom concerns what you esteem: to what degree are your values in touch with the real lessons of experience? How wisely do you accord admiration to others, how independent-minded are you, how resistant are you to cheap seduction, flattery and group thinking?

The general level of maturity or immaturity - of wisdom or lack of wisdom - has the greatest possible consequences for the economic health of a democratic, free-enterprise society. And the present economic crisis is a study in immaturity. This immaturity can be seen within the financial system and more broadly in consumer societies.

Turning to the humanities, they can be listed under a series of formalised, academic names: history, philosophy, literature, the history of art. But what are the projects that lie behind these academic facades? History is the attempt to understand the past for the sake of accumulating an understanding of the collective human condition. It is, ideally, a school of wisdom in which one becomes mature by learning from the experience of others. Philosophy is, ideally, the project of piecing together our ideas about life, testing them against experience, sorting through their internal tensions; carefully pondering why one thinks what one thinks and attempting to improve one's view of life and the world.

So it is too, ideally, a school of wisdom. The same holds for the study of art and literature: the project is to become mature, to speed up, enrich and greatly widen a process that we know occurs in individual lives. As we live, memory, thinking, enjoyment, worries and experiences accumulate. In making good sense of these, in digesting their lessons and putting those lessons into practice, we become wise. And we do so through discussion with and observation of those we know.

Advertisement

The humanities are - again, ideally - the more rigorous, better informed, more careful collective equivalents of this intimate process. Only now our range of acquaintances extends across time and space and the quality of conversation we can have, in principle, is vastly increased. We can learn from the Roman Empire, the French Revolution and Tolstoy; we can take up our worries with Freud and Goethe, we can ask Titian and Mozart about the meaning of life.

But I stress ideally. For this is not really what happens in practice. In principle, the humanities are the wellspring of collective maturity: they are the project of collective maturity carried in its purest and most concentrated form. But in practice, these have become academic specialisms: they have been trivialised and marginalised by their self-conceptions. And so the project of collective maturity, so crucial to a civilisation that is devoted to freedom, has been weakened.

When a society is in the grip of a powerful, repressive and traditional culture, there is much to be said for the role of the humanities as voices and agents of liberty. When even to question received opinion is dangerous, then critique is crucial. The first tasks are to create the liberal space of speculation, to tear down the idols, to encourage self-expression, to be sceptical of the rules, to see authority as inherently dangerous. It's entirely understandable that, in some societies in the past, these should have looked like the crucial tasks of the humanities.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. Page 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. All

First published in The Australian on November 5, 2008 as "Decline reflects poorly on the arts".



Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

3 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

John Armstrong is Senior Advisor, Office of the Vice-Chancellor, at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of several books on art, love and beauty, including most recently In Search of Civilisation (Penguin, 2009).

Other articles by this Author

All articles by John Armstrong

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Article Tools
Comment 3 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy