“… the lilt of language listening to lines …”

by David Benjamin 

 

“…  The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures … They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling …” 

― Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

 

PARIS — Rampant among the philistines of the right these days—well, forever, actually—is the well-financed convictions that all universities and colleges should be turned into trade schools, turning out “entrepreneurs,” “innovators,” financiers, techno-whizzes and various other species of the main-chance genus.

Mississippi, West Virginia and Wisconsin are seeking to flush frivolities like poetry, music and art history from their universities’ curricula and plunge the savings into kids who hanker to code and coeds hungry to manage hedge funds. 

I object to this deathless trend partly because I value the education I got but mainly because the movement to devalue all that I’ve learned has haunted me since the day I first fell in love with the lilt of language listening to lines from Dr. Seuss.

Recently The Ojo-Yoshida Report profiled a techno-whiz named Jim Keller who attained fame and fortune in CPU architecture. In a tone of mild astonishment, the story noted that Keller’s “other” major, in college, besides electrical engineering, was philosophy. 

Why, might ask the utilitarian capitalist, would a crackerjack EE divert his focus even briefly toward pointless Platonic musings, impractical Kantian ethics and Pascal’s non-profit reflections on sin?

On the other hand, why would a comparative literature major venture to learn anything of the chemical processes that result in the synthesis of polypropylene? The first answer to both questions is that both Plato and polypropylene are interesting. The second answer is a Churchillian paraphrase: Some folks are born learning, some achieve learning, some have learning thrust upon them.

Polypropylene was thrust upon me because as ghostwriter for a book about inventions called Breakthroughs, conceived by technology consultants at Arthur D. Little, Inc. I had no background in chemical engineering, nor in the physics of Godfrey Hounsfield’s creation of CAT scan x-rays, nor to the mixture of electronics and tenacious marketing of VHS that made the Victor Company of Japan the video-recording capital of the universe. To explain the technologies I chronicled in Breakthroughs, I had to understand enough to unravel and articulate their mysteries in language accessible to people as technologically ignorant as me. Among my secret weapons for tackling this challenge were Herman Melville, T.S. Eliot, the Beat poets of City Light Books and an art history professor at Rockford College named Philip Dedrick.

I brought to the task of explaining a dozen of the 20th century’s most historic commercial creations (Nike sneakers, the FedEx network, Walkman, the compact disk) a journalist’s eye and a liberal arts education. Example: in Carol Arnold’s high-school English class, I puzzled over the staccato rhythms and shifting allusions in Eliot’s The Hollow Men. By myself, I never quite plumbed the depths of the poet’s psyche. But, prodded by Ms. Arnold and aided by the insights of classmates, especially a beautiful budding artist named Patricia Williams, I came to grasp enough of Eliot’s mood, message and metaphor that I could talk about the poem, somewhat coherently, with other people. I felt exalted.

Likewise, my study of the so-called humanities opened to me the reason for all of Melville’s intricate and penetrating digressions in Moby Dick, as well as a sense of Ahab’s pathology, his obsession with the whale and how his monomania has manifested in people of my acquaintance. Indeed, anyone who doesn’t hear echoes of the the one-legged Ahab in Donald Trump’s rabid quest for vengeance against Joe Biden is suffering from an educational deficit.

Anyone who has tried to read Moby Dick, Ulysses or even Dr. Seuss knows that literature can be as daunting as polymer chemistry. But art is different. It’s the easy, accessible “humanity”. You might not know anything about art, but you can’t help staring, with mixed feelings at the Venus de Milo, or with horrified fascination at The Raft of the Medusa. If somehow, all your life, you can keep staring at more art in all its myriad media, you can’t but feel richer in spirit and smarter than the average bear. Mr. Dedrick, my art history professor, instilled in his every student not just an appreciation of art—from the Egyptian sculptors of Mycerinus and his queen to the tomato soup cans of Andy Warhol—but love. He loved art, we all loved him, so we all had to love what he loved. Exalted!

Lately, when I talk with college-bound teenagers, I tell them to study all the science, technology and business administration available, so they can snag that seven-figure income they crave before they’re thirty. But, I beg these kids to detour at least once into the humanities and take an art history class. A little knowledge—paging through the illustrations in H.W. Janson’s History of Art or roaming the galleries at the Art Institute in Chicago—bestows upon dilettantes like you and me a certain intellectual glow, but without pretense. Great art conveys a sensory immediacy unlike any other creative pursuit. Poetry’s dandy, Ogden Nash might whisper, but Rembrandt’s quicker. Whether you show it off or keep it to yourself, there’s a lifelong pleasure in being able—at a glance—to tell Manet from Monet, or Hiroshige from Hakusai, to feel awed and mystified at how on earth J.M.W. Turner did that stuff, or to wonder how John Singer Sargent made the faces on his portraits come virtually to life on canvas. 

Once you’ve fallen in love with one of Modigliani’s naked women. or cracked the code of Emily Dickinson, seen Jesus through the imagination of Kazantzakis, or gotten lost in that breathtaking Puccini aria in Gianni Schicchi, you not only want to see, to understand, no know more of this good (hard) stuff. You need to know. Novelist Mark Slouka has said, “The humanities, done right, are the crucible in which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test. They teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do, but how to be.”

Double-major techno-whiz Jim Keller grasped intuitively that a range of interests and cultivation of curiosity enables the humanist to delve more deeply into not only a chosen area of expertise, but into realms of knowledge beyond vocation and specialization, into worlds alien, daunting, exalting.

By learning the liberal arts, as Leon Wieseltier wrote, “individuals can know more than how things work, and develop their powers of discernment and judgment, their competence in matters of truth and goodness and beauty, to equip themselves adequately for the choices and the crucibles of private and public life.”

To justify expelling liberal arts from our universities, the philistines of the right—who have no grasp of paradox—insist that teaching kids works by Richard Wright, Diego Rivera, Bob Dylan “indoctrinates” them with ideologies that narrow their interests and confuse their values. Better to deny kids access to King Lear and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail than to shake their faith in white privilege. Better to steer them into bytes, bottom lines and business math than risk the threat that Junior might be heard reciting Gregory Corso at his wedding rehearsal…

“Should I get married?/ Should I be good?/ Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and Faustus hood…”

The philistines of the right, of course, couldn’t distinguish Corso from Keats, They talk about indoctrination. because they’ve never been really concerned with education—not the sort that reaches, teaches and enlightens everyone but a prep-school elite. They fear not “indoctrination” but learning itself. They understand, without having the insight—or vocabulary—to express it, that the glorification of commerce at all costs is the most pernicious, and profitable, form of ignorance.