Utility in the liberal arts: A cue from Dickens

 

by Anu Saha

Custodian of the arts: The Bodleian Library at Oxford has one of the world's largest collections of works in the liberal arts

Listen up! The verdict is in: in these hard times, fiction is irrelevant and poetry is frivolous. The Times portrayed a bleak trajectory last month: enrollment in the humanities is dwindling, funding for programs in languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion has slowed to a drip. The facts are all that matter, plain and simple, with no room to wallow or wonder. In this information age, the humanities increasingly appear to be a decadent luxury; the Dead Poets’ Society is not seen as likely to save the economy. Let’s face it, the worlds of Dickens, Kant, Auden and Foster did not feature in Friedman’s book about the flat world. We lovers of the written word, the sonnet, and oil on canvas, suddenly find ourselves having to justify the existence of these seemingly superfluous pursuits.

Is there a need to change the current perception of the liberal arts as an esoteric education for the elites to one with direct links to practical and economic considerations? Or, is the primary purpose of the humanities to go beyond practical considerations and develop critical reading, writing and thinking skills which indirectly influence any vocation? Where do the humanities fit in this age of ubiquitous information? These are old questions. While those in the humanities ponder the meaning of life, their more pragmatic counterparts question the value of this pondering, especially in hard times and in an age where greater emphasis is being placed by policy makers and administrators on the need for scientists and technologists.

Dickens resonates in this discussion. Particularly, the opening lines of his novel Hard Times:

Now, what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children. Stick to the facts, sir!

How dreary. The prototype of utilitarian education at its finest. Published over 150 years ago, the novel was set in the context of the toils of industrialization, when technological innovation sent GDP growth into overdrive. This, combined with the mind-numbing materialism of the period, resulted in pressure to create an education system that was (with the exception of elite schools) tailored to produce quantitative, ‘factory ready’ skills, with little emphasis on the development of the imagination.

Sound familiar?

The narrator of the novel’s opening lines is Thomas Gradgrind, the Dickens archetype of the all too pragmatically minded educator of the industrial revolution era. In the novel, Gradgrind is forced later in his life to face the consequences of his inane philosophy when confronted with his daughter’s terrible unhappiness in the factual world she grew up in that he so vehemently defends. This is not to say that an education without a focus on critical thinking skills leads to mass depression, but that the novel provides a brilliant depiction of the consequences of binary thinking (perceiving that everything is either on or off, true or false, black or white). The characters in the book find it difficult to know their own minds and discover alternate possibilities for their personal and social problems. In the conflict rich context of today, this theme is, to put it mildly, particularly relevant.

Will a black-and-white approach to thinking solve problems with population, water, alternative and green energy, all in the context of globalization with newly emerging centers of power? It’s doubtful. In an interdependent world, it seems to me that the ability to compromise is more important than purely staunch conviction, the ability to find alternative means a surer sign of progress than the ability to find the right answer. Perhaps it is because of this interdependent theme, this facet of our existence, that we may have a greater case today for the continuance of the liberal arts tradition than that of Dickens and his cohort over 160 years ago. In today’s world, more so than during the industrial revolution, there may not always be a right or wrong answer.

The challenge now lies in making this case persuasively. While the liberal arts are relevant, not enough has been done to emphasize their pertinence and practical applicability in today’s world. In this, the argument for rethinking the subjects with due consideration to current topics and realities warrants merit. This should be more than just a PR exercise with policy makers to garner increased funding. What is needed is a shift in the way these subjects are taught and studied. This approach has already been used in some fields with positive results (using the U.S. as an example since it is my best point of reference for post-secondary education at this point). Links between psychology and business have had profound impact on the study of organizational behavior in business schools. Political science and economics have fared similarly, with some business schools now housing graduate programs in political economy (contrary to the traditional model where teaching and scholarship was managed by the arts and science faculties). Elements of philosophy can be integrated in business ethics classes and the same principles can be explored in the languages and literature.

If science and technology are to be the key determinants of economic vitality, it must be acknowledged that both interact with and are nurtured by society, particularly, a society that fosters individual curiosity and allows experimentation and deviation from the often hackneyed norm. The focus in this discussion should be on how the humanities can inform the sciences – the poet who contemplates the road less taken may someday inform and inspire the scientist who must venture on such a path in the journey toward innovation.

I think both poet and pragmatist would agree: this would make all the difference.

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Filed under: Alternate Progress , Anu, Culture, Liberal Arts

Satyam and Me

By Anu Saha

In the infamy of Satyam, if we were to peer into the looking glass, what would we see? Would it be just a singular (albeit colossal) aberration amongst an otherwise functional system of governance? Or would we see an affliction that is larger than the corporate entity, a systemic disease in the culture at large, of which this incident was only a symptom? And most importantly, would we see a reflection of ourselves? In this debacle, are we equally culpable? Thoughts on what the scandal tells us about attitudes towards government and culture are discussed.

Government: Boardrooms worldwide have a notorious reputation these days; board member negligence is clearly not a problem that is only unique to India. However, certain facets are specific to the Indian context. Governments and businesses do not operate in isolation from one another; the actions of the former invariably influence behavior in the latter and in India, the relationship between the two is particularly dysfunctional. In an environment where public services are acutely inefficient and it is the norm (many times a requirement) to bribe a bureaucrat to get things done, from the menial task of getting a passport renewed, to obtaining a business permit, what has suffered is our collective perception of ethics. If we bypass the system when dealing with government (which, effectively, IS the system), is it not expected that this attitude will trickle down to the private sphere? The proverbial line becomes murky and all magnitudes of malfeasance can be rationalized.

While it is true that Indian financial reporting standards are strict and the market watchdog Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) is truly independent of the government, what has been amiss is the implementation of stringent standards to alter behavior. Particularly, standards and requirements for board accountability and scrutiny, to address issues such as conflicts of interest, board meeting locations, meeting frequency, transparency, and caps on the number of boards that members can simultaneously serve on, need to be enforced. So far, these have been largely lax. Reform has not trickled into the boardroom at the same pace as foreign investment. The result is weak shareholder activism, opaqueness and familial dominance in boardrooms (as was the case with Satyam).

Culture: One incident is pretty telling. In 2001, the Bharat Ratna was awarded to Lata Mangeshkar. A clarification before I proceed. Lata Mangeshkar is clearly very talented, and, arguably, deserves all the accolades of Bollywood that she commands. My exception is not with her, but with the fact that the nation’s highest civil award for the most exemplary degree of service to the nation and the public (previously awarded to leaders such as Nelson Mandela and B.R. Ambedkar) was given that year to a playback singer. The recognition was entirely misplaced.

That year’s award decision symbolized, in my view, the incredulous tendency that seems to persist in our culture to be enthralled with the petty and materialistic. It is an insult to our principles of social responsibility and civic duty when we look to the largely make believe world of Bollywood as our highest source of national pride. It also speaks volumes about our perceptions of one other, how we view those with material wealth and those without, and the virtues and vices we automatically attribute to each group, whether they deserve it or not.

Per the letter of the law, we are equals, but its spirit has suffered, because our society does not accord everyone the requisite respect of equals in daily life. We consistently compartmentalize and treat accordingly. It happens quietly amongst us, through the seemingly mundane, the everyday: when we treat hired labor as servants instead of as keepers of our homes, when we interact with manual labor every day and never wonder whether their children go to school, when the rat race manifests itself on our roads, when 25 percent of Lok Sabha members have criminal records but were still allowed to run for office (and were even elected by their constituents!) These actions pollute our ethical norms and result in a culture of arrogance and impunity that permeates amongst those who have, and those who have very much.

Society interacts with business, and vice versa; the two are interlinked. Corporate culture and ethics are functions of the social setting within which they operate. Perhaps if we held ourselves to higher ethical standards in our personal lives, we would expect and demand the same from one another in the workplace. Perhaps then a whistle-blower would have emerged sooner from within the ranks at Satyam.

So what happens now?

On the issue of governance, the SEBI’s reaction has been largely geared towards restoring foreign investor confidence in the Indian market. The bells for reform are ringing once again, but this is an election year. Even if fortune were to favor a bill in Parliament and it were to pass as legislation, if it is not enforced according to its intent, it will be just another piece of paper. What is needed is more than a swift stroke of legislation, what is needed is policy, which, even in the best circumstances, takes time to formulate and implement. So, chances are that, this year, the repairs will be largely kneejerk – they will be band-aids, just enough to carry us through the election season but not enough to address root causes. It will be interesting to note whether any of the candidates this year will even bother to include governmental reform on the agenda. I, admittedly quite pessimistically, think probably not, though it would be nice to be proven wrong.

These are hard times and everyone is confessing, be it to fraud, or to participating in the binge of credit and risk taking of the last decade. Reactions toward corporate malfeasance in the west have been directed largely towards two groups: the perpetrators themselves and the regulators. However, reactions toward Satyam were directed at much more. Foreign investors and the press have questioned boardroom culture, corporate standards in India overall, the ability of the judicial system to effect reform, and the overall health of corporate governance in all of India’s 9,000 listed companies.

Some of these concerns may be exaggerated – ironically, the SEBI is the one institution that seems to have been given the stamp of approval for its swift action in this scandal. The agency fared better than its equivalent in the States, the SEC, which has been derided for negligence. It is clear that India is measured differently. Whether or not this is right is, to me, irrelevant, because many of the concerns raised by the international community are similar to those that we ourselves have raised before. We may not have been the direct perpetrators of this fraud, but just as the real estate crash revealed the consequences of a collectively relentless pursuit of the American dream, Satyam showed once again that ethics in the private and public spheres of our society are long overdue for reform. We would be amiss to not take note of this.

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Filed under: Alternate Progress , Anu, Culture, Government