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Flourishing humanities; flourishing economy

By John Armstrong - posted Tuesday, 11 November 2008


The humanities have been shy of evaluation; they have become embarrassed by the educational project of cultivating wisdom and taste. They have lacked missionary zeal (and the abilities to make good such a mission); they have been nervous of commerce and wealth. The ideal educational project for the humanities is to teach depth of feeling, seriousness of thinking and the lessons of experience to politicians and consumers. But this has been almost the opposite of what has been happening.

The least likely projects for humanities classes would have been the cultivation of good taste, wisdom and maturity, and the last people invited into the discussion have been politicians and mass consumers. They have been seen as a philistine enemy rather than as the proper focus of education.

Maturity doesn't lie just in thinking; it depends on the relationship between experience, action and reflection: the mere passing of time or the fact that a lot happens to you in the course of a life doesn't on its own ensure wisdom. So, to be the agents of the maturing process, the humanities need to pay much closer attention to the relationship between ideas and the rest of life.

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It isn't that the humanities as practised in universities should become the general portal of public maturity; it is, rather, that they could and should play a foundational and formative role; they should shape the climate of ideas that are then given more concrete expression in other areas. The visual arts, for example, have completely failed to be sources of maturity in our society. And one sign of what's so wrong there is the lamentable internal code language and stray assumption that masquerades as clever discussion. That fault does not originate in the visual arts - they are the carriers of the virus - but it thrives because of the weakness of the humanities.

One of the key strategic ideas deployed by Karl Marx was that the kind of economy you have powerfully influences the kind of culture you get.

So if you have an economy based on buying and selling, on financial speculation and the amassing of private wealth, then you get a culture that reflects this. If you are bothered about the culture, you have to take a long road through changing the economy.

But there is another side to the story. The kind of economy we have depends on our collective cultural resources. What we collectively admire, love, find exciting or admirable determines what will sell and what the profit margins will be. It determines how much people are willing to borrow. It determines how a successful career is imagined.

Through the 1970s the big theme in business was the creation of desire. An essential message in advertising was: We know what will make you happy. The message was less than candid because the subtext was: how can we get you to want the things that will make us rich?

Since the '90s businesses have become more and more responsive to what people want. They aim to target more closely than their rivals exactly what people are willing to spend their money on and to provide that more efficiently than their rivals.

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Now the essential message of advertising is: you know what will make you happy and we're listening to you.

But the big opportunity for the future is going to lie in desire leadership. It marries the two earlier trends: creative leadership in influencing what people want, together with a service towards actual needs. The hopeful future of business lies in serving mature needs, not just fabricating new wants.

This is where the humanities come in. The underlying point of the humanities - often submerged by scholarship - has been the study of what it is good to desire and what our real needs are. If the businesses of the future can focus on these and if we can be wise enough to concentrate on them, then the relationship between the economy and the humanities will be one of mutual assistance rather than conflict.

We should not regard this with suspicion. The idea of a civilised modern society should be one in which a strong commercial instinct serves a mature and widespread conception of the good life.

When the humanities go into recession, the economy comes loose from its moorings.

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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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All articles by John Armstrong

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

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