In Defense of Liberal and Fine Arts

In Defense of Liberal and Fine Arts

I just heard a piece on NPR’s “Fresh Air” about Steve Jobs’ belief in the interrelatedness of technology and liberal arts.  As a graduate from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky with a major in History and English, I remain convinced that my education’s broad-based knowledge has served me well.  Those of us in the College of Arts and Science had to take a number of hours in physical and biological sciences, arts and humanities, mathematics, philosophy, and languages along with many more hours in our major field.  This broad-based knowledge has allowed me to find interests in many things, not just my own majors.  It has allowed me to think in complex ways using both sides of my brain, and that alone has further enriched my life.

My friends, fellow high school teachers in the fields of higer mathematics and science, are also talented in music and/or art.  My daughter, a PhD in micro-biology, was as gifted in music and composition as she was in science.  My brother-in-law's major in English did not impede him in any way when he and his friend created LexJet, a company focused on technology.  Their creative ways of implementing new ideas have made LexJet one of the fastest growing small companies in Florida.

I am always saddened when I hear politicians say we need to stress only technology, math, and science and go on to say or imply that anything in the arts is either a luxury we can’t afford or simply superfluous.  We need arts, science, and technology.  Steve Jobs’ iPhone, iPad, and Macintosh computer have revolutionized technology, and he did this by applying the arts and employing both kinds of experts in the design of his projects.  If one studies the great past civilizations--from the Greeks and Romans to the Renaissance--one thing is a constant: arts and science were honored equally.   

 

The Greeks were both scientists and scholars and created or invented many things we continue to use.  Philosophy was valued as highly as mathematics; art was as honored as much as science.  Research in all of these fields was supported by the government.

·         Anaximander, a philosopher from Miletus, is historically accepted as the creator of the first map of the world, and the creation of the map greatly improved navigation and trade.

·         Greek dramatists included Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Lysistrata; plays like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

·         Masks used in the enactment of dramas were designed to maximize acoustics and the theatres were architectural wonders built on hillsides and arced to allow many to see the plays well and to hear the actors perform. The grand Greek amphitheaters were constructed so as to transmit even the smallest sound to any seat.  Art, therefore, produced science and technology.

·         The love of art did not hinder the Greeks in their development of the modern weapons of their day, including the catapult, the best “weapon of mass destruction” for more than a thousand years.  

 

The Romans, like the Greeks, valued art, music, philosophy, and science in equal measure. 

·         Pythagoras, 5^th century B. C. Italian philosopher--someone most of us learned about in math class when we were introduced to the Pythagorean Theorem-- exposited that mathematics was everywhere, and that music depended upon math.

·         The Roman Colosseum and the Pantheon; sculpture like Apollo Belvedere; landscape paintings and elaborate mural; Media, Oedipus, and Agamemnon —these are but a few of Rome’s artistic wonders.

·         The creative minds that produced the fine arts aided the development of aqueducts that delivered water to cities, indoor plumbing, dams, bridges, and vast systems of highways, not to mention lipstick and umbrellas.

It goes without saying that Leonardo Da Vinci is the epitome of the marriage of art and science as he not only painted The Last Supper but also designed an airplane.  To Leonardo, Mr. Renaissance, art and science were one.

 And so, it seems counterproductive to say that we, in the U. S., must have either math science, technology or the arts.  We should value all of these.  A wealth of information allows for a thinking outside the box so needed in planning for the future. 

It is because I see value in the arts as well as the sciences that I view funding cuts in art and music in elementary and high schools as very short-sighted.  Creative thinking is not only a skill used by painters and writers, it is also a skill vital to dreaming up new concepts in technology.  Florida’s Governor Scott has disparaged college majors like anthropology, having said it was a useless skill.  This just shows that he has a limited awareness of anthropology as a discipline.  Does he not see merit in demography, an understanding of cultures? It is this lack of vision in Scott and others that could doom us to a world of only technocrats.  Without fiction, movies, opera, live theatre, painting, sculpture, dance, and all forms of art, how drab our lives would be.  We’d be little more than automatons.

Yes, we do need young people who are very computer savvy, but who will dream up the next computer?  We do need doctors, mathematicians, and engineers well skilled in their fields; but as importantly, we must have the creative minds to discover new ways to cure diseases and questioning minds to lead us to a better understanding of our universe and a desire to explore others. 

To ensure that our country not only keeps apace with the rest of the world but also excels in all areas, we must have a generation who can use both sides of the brain, a brain that can look beyond the paradigm, to think over, under, and outside the box.  If we only focus on one kind of knowledge and devalue all else, we will be a second-rate nation that learns to use what other nations develop.  Yes, there is a place for the liberal and fine arts.  Don’t lose sight of that.

It's Time to Choose, and I Choose Government

It’s Time to Choose, and I Choose Government

Witnessing the recent Congressional debacle, it is apparent that the pro/con government debate is in full throttle. It’s time to choose a side, and I choose government.  A government small enough to drown in a teacup is not my cup of tea, if you’ll pardon their pun.  I like many of the things that government does, and I’ll bet many others do as well if they take the time to consider something else besides the rhetoric.

First of all, what is “government,” this word some use synonymously with all things horrid?  The legal definition of government—according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Law (copyright 1996) is:
1 : the act or process of governing; specifically : authoritative direction or control
2 : the office, authority, or function of governing
3 : the continuous exercise of authority over and the performance of functions for a political unit : RULE
4 a : the organization, machinery, or agency through which a political unit exercises authority and performs functions and which is usually classified according to the distribution of power within it b : the complex of political institutions, laws, and customs through which the function of governing is carried out
5 : the body of persons that constitutes the governing authority of a political unit or organization.

I am not sure what part of government all the naysayers abhor, but it is ironic that many of the “I hate government” people are actually a part of it, Actually, we all are.  Government  is us if we participate as voters, and we all need government whether we know it or not. The federal, state, and local governments make our lives manageable.

America is a great nation because fifty states function as one nation under a federal system.  No one state has the wherewithal to stand on its own—and yes, Gov. Rick Perry, this also means Texas--and our fifty states would be considerably weakened were we a European Union-like confederation. As a united group of states, we do need a federal government to govern.  The Founding Fathers envisioned things like interstate commerce in our earliest days.  They imagined a people who traveled from state to state as citizens of the same country, not tourists needing a visa to go from Kentucky to Ohio, from Georgia to Florida.  Yes, they did see a need for states’ rights, and they provided for those with the Tenth Amendment, but they did not set up states as independent countries.  Furthermore, this country fought a bloody Civil War to determine that we were a union of states making up one country.

And so, what can government do for you?  Thank the government that you have an interstate highway system that makes traversing this country much easier than it was before Eisenhower—yes, Eisenhower, a Republican—helped to make this a reality. If you commute by rail or transport or receive goods by rail, thank the government and Abraham Lincoln—another Republican—for that.  He had the foresight to continue building the transcontinental railroad even during the Civil War.  If you have visited a National Park, thank Teddy Roosevelt, another Republican. T. R. was a conservationist and proud of it.  He signed into law five areas into the National Park system. The Antiquities act—1906—allowed President T. Roosevelt and his successors to designate historic landmarks and structures so that they would be preserved for succeeding generations.  These important decisions by three Republican presidents depended on a government large enough and powerful enough to see beyond the moment and into our futures.  What would they think of the Republicans who want to diminish government  into tea-cup-drowning size.

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When you turn on your faucet to get water, don’t you want to be reasonably certain that you won’t be ingesting toxins and pollutants?  Don’t you want to feel safe eating fish caught in our lakes and rivers?  Don’t you want to know that you are not water skiing in sludge if you vacation on a lake shore?

By the1970’s, Lake Erie became so polluted because of the quantity of contaminated industrial waste that the Detroit River actually caught on fire. The beaches were filthy and laden with bacteria.  It was not safe to eat any fish caught in Lake Erie or its tributaries.  Time magazine reported in August, 1960:

“Each day, Detroit, Cleveland, and 120 other municipalities fill Erie with 1.5 billion gallons of ‘inadequately treated wastes, including nitrates and phosphates. These chemicals act as fertilizer for growths of algae that suck oxygen from lower depths and rise to the surface as odoriferous green scum. Commercial and game fish—blue pike, whitefish, sturgeon, northern pike—have nearly vanished, yielding the waters to trash fish that need less oxygen.  Weeds proliferate, turning water frontage into swamp.  In short, Lake Erie is in danger of dying.”

I remember seeing pictures of dead fish floating atop the once beautiful Great Lake.   Because of the Clean Water Act passed in 1972, water pollution limits were established.  Even though these controls worked to clean up our water, it took decades for the damage previously done to be mitigated. Not until the early 1990’s were some species not present since the days of the dying lakes seen to return.  I, for one, do not wish to return to those bad old days.  I am all for industries making a healthy profit but I don’t want those profits to be a result of their not taking the necessary precautions to properly dispose of their waste.  And so, I definitely want government regulations to see to it that they do just that. Businesses are there to make money, and many will take short cuts to do so unless there are---creepy music intro---regulations.  Our history is littered with the tragic results—human and environmental—caused by unregulated businesses.

Along with water, a basic need, we depend upon breathing air that won’t make us ill.  Again, Big Business is free to make a good profit but not at the expense of our lungs. The Clean Air Act of1970 did give the government the power to develop comprehensive standards for air quality, and I am happy that they did and do. The Clean Air Act governs the number of airborne contaminants that maybe released into the atmosphere. Some companies have protected their profits by outsourcing these kinds of operations, and critics blame the Clean Air Act for these job losses. However, the need for clean energy devices has also generated jobs and can generate more if they are incentivized.  It is incumbent upon all citizens—and this includes the owners of business and industry—to work within parameters that protect this country and its citizens. If that means government has to police their actions, so be it.  History has shown us that these corporate entities do not police themselves.

Aren’t you happy that you can be reasonably sure that the meat you purchase is safe to consume?  That the toothpaste you use doesn’t contain harmful ingredients?  Have you already forgotten the tainted foods and building materials that slipped into this country via China when the FDA and other federal regulators were fewer in number under the G. W. Bush administration? I just heard Arianna Huffington remarking that businesses were not expanding because of harmful government regulations.  Well, I want some of those regulations, and the businesses screaming the loudest about these regulations seem to be doing just fine.  Oil companies could indeed make more money without regulations about where they can drill and what precautions they must take when they do drill.  We saw what can happen even with these regulations with last summer’s sea of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.  Can you even imagine what the land and sea would suffer with no regulations at all? 

This country has seen more than a century of reforms that have made our workplace safer, our transportation less treacherous, and our food less toxic.  We have restrictions on the length of the work day, on child labor, on work environment safety. We have communities that are more secure because of police and fire fighters. Guess what folks.  This is all government.

And finally, so many in Congress keep talking about “entitlements” and the need to cut them, but I don’t hear any of them talking about cutting all the entitlements they have.  Those who have been elected to Congress get excellent health  care benefits, a fabulous pension, travel expenses, and much more than any of those under the entitlements  they want to cut ever get.  Unless those in favor of entitlement-cutting can figure a way to means test Social Security and Medicare, cuts in these programs can result in devastating losses for fixed-income seniors and the disabled.  Many of them barely eke out a living on the Social Security benefits they now receive.  Furthermore, many seniors’ whose health insurance was once provided by their employers lost that when they reached Medicare eligibility.  What is to happen to America’s seniors in a health care market that is becoming ever more expensive at a time when their health care issues become more pronounced with less and less Medicare.  One of the suggestions was to cut funds for providers, not those on Medicare.  Guess what? If doctors lose money on Medicare patients, fewer doctors will accept Medicare patients.  Then what? In the meantime, while seniors lose some health care benefits and some of their Social Security, Congress people active and retired continue to live just fine, thank you very much tax payers.

And so I say: I choose government.  It’s not perfect and does need some reform, arguably a lot of reform.  But I’d rather fix those things that are broken rather than return to a time when we had fewer protections. I don’t mind paying taxes to have this security, and as a retired teacher, I pay a greater percentage of my income than most hedge fund managers and even some corporations.  And, I don’t mind it.  Whenever I see a traffic light, a policeman, a fireman, a soldier, an airport, a highway—you get the picture—I am quite happy to have contributed to the upkeep of a nation I love.