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Flourishing humanities; flourishing economy

By John Armstrong - posted Tuesday, 11 November 2008


But we do not live in such a society. Free expression is everywhere; for us the urgent questions are those around quality, depth of meaning, lasting value. Self-determination is the basic mode of modern life; we don't need to argue for that very much. In other words, we are due an epochal change. We should accept that the project of liberty is intellectually complete.

A second self-image in the humanities derives from the vision of neutral scholarship. This has been extremely important. The humanities in this guise were the fact checkers, the record keepers, the impartial line judges of culture. That may have been a sufficient role once. But it depends on having a high level of acceptance in your society.

Line judges hold sway only when others are playing the game. If the population at large is playing another game entirely, then this role is of little importance.

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Maturity certainly involves care about the facts, caution and rigour in interpretation. But it is only when these qualities of mind find their home in experience that we become mature or wise. The studied neutrality of scholarship often has become cold distance, reluctance to ask why this particular application of rigour or cautious interpretation is so important. Does it matter if one misunderstands Kant or has a false belief about the date of a Watteau drawing? Well, it may, but all the work now has to go into explaining why that is the case, what these details of knowledge contribute to life.

The questions should be much more urgent. Scholarship takes the comfortable supposition that it does not have to justify itself because in a civilised society the values of careful neutrality can be taken for granted.

Two good aspects of the humanities - the defence of liberty and the cultivation of scholarship - have become, on their own, liabilities. They do not, on their own, rise to the urgent present task.

In recent years it has been natural, all too natural, to blame the strategic weakness of the humanities on a shortage of funds. But that is not where the problem lies. It doesn't matter how much money you have or how vigorously you pursue a goal if you are pursuing the wrong goal, quickly and in luxury.

It seems as if, in a capitalist society, the premium placed on a short-term economic return will necessarily leave the humanities on the margins because in those terms their claim on attention, respect and reward is slight. And, of course, it looks as if the fault lies with capitalism. However, the problem is not with the economic system but with the preferences and choices and attitudes that collectively constitute it.

The humanities have had a marginal place because they have a marginal place in most people's lives. The causality runs in the opposite direction. It's not that capitalism has undermined the humanities; it's that capitalism has revealed the marginal place of the humanities. At least so one may think.

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But here we need to hold on to an important distinction. The humanities, as I have been stressing, are, properly speaking, the organised, careful and more powerful versions of standard human concerns. The drive towards maturity hasn't gone away, it has merely been unsupported by the things from which it most needs support. The basic problem is that, as academic disciplines, the humanities lose a sense of genuine purpose. Their goal becomes internal: to be more and more specific, to find greater detail, to become more complex.

None of this need be so bad. After all, part of maturity is coping with complexity and paying attention to logic and the details. But the humanities pursue these fragments in isolation. It is as if they are endlessly discovering more about a few pieces of a large jigsaw and unimpressed that hardly anyone is paying attention. So these valuable, though partial, contributions get lost.

To generalise boldly: three underlying characteristics have reduced the influence of the humanities, and so have undercut the foundations of civilisation.

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



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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).

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

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