Ideas worth studying

You have a million crowns and you must decide between funding a cure for a disease or a study on literature, what do you choose? This question, as I remember it from a conversation sometime ago, was intended as rhetorical, the answer presumed to be fairly obvious. Recently, I heard a similar idea expressed in slightly different terms: to misunderstand an important medical lesson could have fatal repercussions, but getting wrong an art theory is no big deal.

Fortunately, choices in real life are seldom a matter of either or. In the case of the opening question, a donor would probably think that a decent society needs both health and culture. The question, however, was not intended as a realistic scenario, but rather as a way of marking clear priorities: saving lives at the very top and culture at the bottom. In this worldview, the humanities are seen as a beautiful useless thing, that is, an adornment.

For the sake of debate, let’s start with what is commonly believed to be the most futile of disciplines: the arts. A look at how the arts were used for political propaganda by the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany should be enough to make us think twice about how harmless the arts might be. Closer to home, I wonder the lives of how many people have been ruined in the pursue of the ideal of male beauty once created by artists in Ancient Greece and currently exploited ad nauseam by the advertising industry.

In our time, we have rightly been taught to admire and fear science. We know that nuclear energy can serve both to power our towns and to eradicate our species. Likewise, the organisms studied by microbiologists can be used to produce both vaccines and biological weapons. Science often holds the key to life and death, but this is not the whole story. If atoms and bacteria are among the raw materials of science, ideas are the primal matter of the humanities. Like atoms and bacteria, ideas can also kill and give life. If we think of the worst crimes in history soon enough we will come across the deadly ideas that inspired them: chauvinism, racism, religious fanaticism. If we turn our attention to life-giving ideas, such as human rights, we will look for them in vain in the human genome. They are not written in the stars, either. We have a better chance to find their roots in the words of prophets, philosophers and poets.

Ideas are the software of societies. To take ideas like democracy or human rights for granted, just because we happen to live in a fairly liberal country at this particular time in history, would be dangerously naïve. If we recognise the power of ideas, we can no longer afford to regard their critical study as a trifle.