Everywhere in the world the ordinary man in the street has been brainwashed into supposing that the only thing that matters is economic success. Continually it is drummed into our heads that the test of progress is an increase in Gross Domestic Product. Personal worth is seen in terms of money.
Since there is no place in GDP for beauty and love and goodwill and philosophy and laughter and the myriad other courtesies and graces of life, we have got to the stage in human history when ruthless economic efficiency counts far above civilized human behaviour and the quantity of material possessions ranks infinitely higher than the quality of human aspirations. All third world countries, including our own, have been dragged unprotesting onto this unstoppable bandwagon.
Take literature as an example. In this age when science and technology are worshipped because they are seen as increasing material wealth, literature is viewed as a diversion, an amusement at best, a luxury that a serious, poor, determined-to-be-successful country can hardly afford. If you want to judge in what regard literature is held find out what priority is given to ordering books for a country’s National Library.
But this homage paid to technological and economic advance obscures the importance of literature and all the arts. They should be seen not as decorative luxuries but as necessary complements to our industrial, agricultural, mining and technological activities.
Matthew Arnold, the great 19th century cultural critic, saw poetry as needing to play a leading role in society. In 1880 he wrote: “More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”
That is an extraordinary high estimate of poetry’s function and the generations since then have rejected that high estimate. Yet I sincerely believe that good poetry, good literature, indeed all good art is absolutely essential in order to focus attention on mankind’s deepest purposes, wise or unwise, and upon values which really matter and for which the best men and women in history have been willing to live and die.
The best scientists themselves appreciate the limits of technology and science. This is what Victor Weisskopf, a distinguished physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, once wrote.
“…Important parts of human experience cannot be reasonably evaluated within the scientific system. There cannot be an all-encompassing scientific definition of good and evil, of compassion, of rapture, tragedy or humour, or hate, love or faith, of dignity or humiliation, or of concepts like the quality of life and happiness.”
The fact is that neither science, nor technology, nor economics, nor business can define for us the quality of happiness which, as Thomas Jefferson famously proposed, is the right of all of us to seek to attain. The hard, objective sciences supply hard, objective facts but they cannot give true guidance through the ultimate mysteries of life and death. A study of the humanities, great art, great literature, can much better do that. And this is as true today as it ever was.
Today we are said to have entered “the age of information.” Informatics, we are told, is the leading edge of technology and will increasingly dominate our economies and our societies. This, to me, is a terrifying thought simply because information is by no means the same thing as knowledge, much less wisdom. The poets have always known this. Listen to the chorus from T S Eliot’s verse drama the Rock:
Endless knowledge, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of
Stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, but ignorance of the
Word……
Where is the wisdom we have lost in
knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in
information?
To me it is absolutely clear that great literature is much more richly packed with meaning and real wisdom than any technology can ever be. No nation, however materially poor, can afford to neglect art and literature in the headlong pursuit of objectives which are solely materialistic, technological and economic. We must never allow ourselves to be brainwashed by the so-called rich and successful countries into assuming that posture in our nation’s affairs.