Gotham Diary:
The Broccoli Problem IV
29 July 2014
This is where you come in, as a member of the Honourable Elite.
If you read this Web log with any regularity, and (presumably) find it at least occasionally interesting, it is almost certain that you were given a reasonably good education and that you did not stop thinking when you collected your diploma. If you are an American, it is also (sadly) likely that you were not the first person in your family to go to college. (If you’re British, it’s less likely. You might even be Alan Bennett!) Having been raised by at least one educated parent, you were encouraged to do well in school, which you did, no matter what your grades were, because you wouldn’t be reading this if thought and reflection (not quite the same thing) were not some kind of habit, acquired long ago and with the inspiration of one or two very good teachers.
It doesn’t matter what you do for a living. That’s part of what “Honourable” means, and why I apply the British spelling. I don’t mean to push the allusion to titles too far. You didn’t acquire membership status at birth. But you were given the opportunity and, judging by your presence here, you took it. You didn’t give it much thought — how could you have done? I just made up the title the other day.
What’s more, you probably believe that “the elite” is a term that refers to other people. Perhaps you are personally acquainted with one or two members of this “other people” elite, but it’s unlikely that you know more than one or two, or that you know them very well (unless they’re family members), because, if you did, then you would probably be too busy to be reading this. We think of this “other people” elite as made up of the men and women who “run things.” It makes sense to think of these men and women as constituting a “power elite.” The power elite is very important to the business of shunting money among and making executive decisions on behalf of public and private affairs, but it has little time or inclination for thought. For all their status, members of the power elite are likely to complain of stressful, overbooked schedules that put them at risk of collapse if they do not keep themselves physically fit. To the extent that they are problem solvers — as most of them are, most of the time — their minds proceed in the direction opposite to that of thought. When we solve a problem, we expect to cross something off a list. When we board a train of thought, we expect to see more of the world.
I do not mean to be dismissive of the power elite. But it cannot be denied that, money aside, it contributes little to our cultural life. In the old days, there used to be, every now and then, a prince capable of wielding cultural influence — Louis XIV and (even more) Joseph II come to mind. But princes of the old times were so powerful that being powerful did not take up every waking minute of the day. Nobody is that powerful anymore, except for a Bill Gates or two. And Bill Gates, although he came from a fine professional family (his mother was a regent of the State University), was not brought up to be a prince.
You, then, are (presumably) not a member of the power elite. That’s not the important thing. The important thing is that, without you, our cultural life would be diminished. Without the Honourable Elite collectively, cultural life would come to a complete standstill. Artists and poets and the like could not support themselves, either financially or as meaningful audiences, if they had none but each other to count on. Let’s get that straight. You matter.
If you’re like most Anglophones, you probably believe, paradoxically, that you are both lazy and deprived of leisure. Neither is the case. But you are probably somewhat disorganized when it comes to free time. Aren’t we all.
But you do matter.
***
Meanwhile, over here, we have “the humanities.” Whatever the humanities may be, they are called “the humanities” because they embody reflections on those aspects of the human condition that are peculiar to human beings. Mortality, for example, is common to all living things, but consciousness of mortality — the knowledge that you are going to die — appears to exist only in people. It is one of the most powerful motivations of humanist thought, and indeed arguably the most powerful, because full consciousness of mortality is beyond human comprehension. What does it mean to die? No one can say. (This is one reason why human meaning cannot be reduced to words. Another is that we experience meaning in our unique individuality, which puts it beyond the reach of a shared medium such as language.) No one can say what it means to die, but that hasn’t stopped anybody from thinking about it. What is love? What is friendship? What is evil? What is happiness, anyway? These are all peculiarly human questions, partial answers to which, sifted over centuries and from many voices, constitute the body of thinking that we call “the humanities.” Some of this thinking is expressed in words. Some of it is expressed, more obliquely but also more powerfully, as art.
Over a period of about five thousand years — a small, if not astronomically insignificant fraction of the age of the human race — the pursuit of the humanities has piled up a rich store of texts, objects, and skills (required by the performing arts). Political thought (if not the interplay of “politics” itself) is a branch of the humanities, as is psychology, to name another branch of inquiry into human life that has undergone severe reformation since the Eighteenth Century. Our table manners may not be humanist in nature (however human), but our thoughts about them are. Everything that human beings do is, potentially, an object of humanist thought. This includes, formidably, everything that human beings have ever done.
Just as there are two kinds of elite (according to me), there are two kinds of humanist activity. One we will call Scholarly Humanism. I don’t think that this needs further definition, because it is simply what most people mean by “the humanities” — something studied by smart people somewhere else. (“Other people” again.) The other is — yes! — the Honourable Humanities. This is experienced by you, a member of the Honourable Elite, whenever you read a book or attend a concert or visit a museum. Et cetera. It does not happen when just anybody does these things. It happens when you do them because, as the core of your education, you have been given an appreciative apparatus that would be unlikely to develop spontaneously in any human mind. This apparatus converts the raw sensory experience of words, shapes and movements into a sense of the meaning of things.
We may not be able to express the meaning of things, but that doesn’t stop our healthy insistence that the meaning of things must be beautiful.
Not broccoli. Beautiful.
Daily Blague news update: Econ, Yukon.