Re: The Uses of the Humanities, Part Two -- Stanley Fish

My response to Dr. Fish's blog post:

When I was pursuing my MFA in creative writing (poetry), which involved creative and critical writing, I inadvertantly became much better at unrelated work, i.e. business analysis and financial software QA. In fact I’m much better at what I do than most of the MBA’s I know. Go figure.

I don’t think I was the odd man out, either. I think you can easily see this as a pattern, if you look closely enough.

The problem is that it’s impossible to draw a direct equation, as one might more easily pretend to with business education, for instance.

But maybe even Alby Einstein wouldn’t have had some of the dreams he had without a background of the things that were happening in painting, for instance, and without those dreams, where would relativity come from? After all, these dreams were visual, and where did he learn to see things like that, all the atomization of objects of the impressionists and cubists, the motion of futurism, etc.? Just a thought. Just a perhaps. We don’t know where ideas come from… And you can’t survive unless you have them every day.

At least most people can’t.

Intelligence was never a straight-forward process. And anyone who is looking to justify a particular activity by the most simple equations available to one (i.e. science yields tech breakthroughs, while business ed. yields better business), isn’t very good at intelligence to begin with.

In the end, there shouldn’t be a need to justify funding for the humanities. It’s very short-sided to think along those terms. It’s like saying, “let them eat cakes…”