Scribbles

I’ve nursed this nagging thought in my mind for a while now, the question of where to place liberal arts in our society. My challenge in even raising that question was that I couldn’t resolve what liberal arts – English, History, Languages, Philosophy – actually stood for, and whether they were indeed subjects that propel us in the areas I find sorely lacking: critical thinking and its articulation. And while they remain difficult to categorize generically, two articles (linked below) I read recently clarified for me what I believe to be missing in either practice or the value we grant them. Reading Seth Godin’s recent Linchpin pushed me to the conclusion that we need these essential skills to live as humans instead of merely surviving as drones.
 
For those of you who know my academic/mercenary background may point out the contradiction. I am after all a student of engineering and computer science, topped off with additional degrees in CS and business. And for those who go further back to my undergraduate days, you may remind me of my belittling of liberal arts majors and their lack of post-graduate earning potential. That sentiment, while incorrect, did reflect my immigrant background and the general environment at the time. A large motivation in my developing years was to make a better life for myself and family. And I didn’t have parents or mentors who ever stressed the value of liberal arts. That coupled with a desire to make something “real” (and cool), made engineering a natural career choice. This quote from William Chace’s Decline of the English Department sums up my situation nicely and puts the attitude of my time in perspective with that of a few generations ago (emphasis mine):
 

Finding pleasure in such reading, and indeed in majoring in English, was a declaration at the time that education was not at all about getting a job or securing one’s future. In comparison with the pre-professional ambitions that dominate the lives of American undergraduates today, the psychological condition of students of the time was defined by self-reflection, innocence, and a casual irresponsibility about what was coming next.
 
Also visible in the late 1940s and early 1950s were thousands of GIs returning from World War II with a desire to establish for themselves lives as similar as possible to those they imagined had been led by the college generation before their own. For these veterans, college implied security and tradition, a world unlike the one they had left behind in Europe and the Pacific. So they did what they thought one always did in college: study, reflect, and learn. They would reconnect, they thought, with the cultural traditions the war had been fought to defend.

 
My attitude in college was study, learn, and earn. After all, there were student loans to pay back and family to take care of. There wasn’t much room for self-reflection. It took a decade after personally experiencing the dot-com bubble, global outsourcing, and the worse financial crisis since the Great Depression, for me to see how we arrived in the age of white collar slavery through that very system I came out of. Today corporations dole out deliverables and its accompanying script to follow. Every output is measurable. People sit in cubes and use their brains to generate words and numbers instead of sweating under the sun erecting pyramids; yet still no true thinking, deciding, and its associated risk taking are necessary. So are these white collar workers – the accountants, analysts, lawyers, programmers, whatever office person – really valuable, or simply replaceable cogs that can be swapped out for the next cheapest alternative?
 
As the years progressed, I’ve come to realize the value for effectively thinking, communicating those ideas, and acting on them, all things we’ve been deprogrammed to do. I’ve witnessed this through my professional experiences: programmers who generated ideas instead of just pumping out code, or consultants who did those things better than everyone else. These things translated into huge profits for the businesses they were hired by. Ironically, even corporate executives want other people to do the thinking and risk-taking for them. (Hey, we followed the money consultants’ advice and failed, it’s not our fault.)
 
The most valuable people, the ones reaping disproportional rewards are the creative types who bother to reflect, create, and share. The rest are commoditized and weeded out through a slow death of declining salaries and vanishing long term security. This is evident in all forms of businesses and media: technology companies, movies, food production industry, even newspapers. This phenomena is magnified by our information age. There’s little value in sheer quantity (when’s the last time you read anything memorable or even thought-worthy from the AP?), because there’s already too much content on the Internet. The problem is winning people’s limited attention to consume your content. And they won’t unless it’s of value.
 
What does this have to do with the role of liberal arts? Our entire system, from education to corporations to democracy, predicates its existence on making drones out of us, beating us into conforming to non-thinking, not-challenging the status quo. That’s a slippery path and that’s why we should emphasize true thinking in our education and especially in our value system. It may seem inconsequential to producing growth or saving the world. How can dead authors help us today, right? I say it’ll yield a better society, one not soley measured by per capita GDP. Meacham puts up a good argument:
 

… the difficulty of making the case for something so expensive and so seemingly archaic—an undergraduate liberal education—in an economic and cultural climate that favors efficiency and tangibility. It is inarguably hard to monetize a familiarity with Homer or an intimacy with Shakespeare.
 
It is just possible, though, that the traditional understanding of the liberal arts may help us in our search for new innovation and new competitiveness. The next chapter of the nation’s economic life could well be written not only by engineers but by entrepreneurs who, as products of an apparently disparate education, have formed a habit of mind that enables them to connect ideas that might otherwise have gone unconnected.

 
I’m not arguing for everyone to pursue a liberal arts degree. I am saying we should elevate its status and more importantly what it represents: rigorous thinking, reflection, and articulating one’s mind. Demand more of others and yourself. Be picky in what you consume and spend the effort to digest the quality out there. Reward your favorite writers and columnists through buying books or sharing links to their writing. Reward the filmmakers out to generate thought and not mere blockbusters. Subscribe to the blog that makes you think. Pay for the music download that made you feel something. Do all that, incorporate it into you, and give it back in your personal form. Become a producer, not a consumer in the world of thought.