Arts or Engineering?

Which do you prefer: answers or puzzles? I’m generally allergic to binaries of all kinds, but when I was asked this question, it stuck in my head. Unable to reply, I enquired why I was being asked. Oh, I was told, it’s the difference between scientists and artists and I can never figure out where you sit.

I was reminded of that conversation by a correspondence I’ve been having with a reader who wrote in reply to my Financial Times article about the tendency of businesses to favour hiring STEM over humanities graduates—only then to complain when they found their young employees less capable of creative and critical thinking. Their new hires were avid for answers but deeply uncomfortable with the ambiguity of puzzles.

My correspondent, Mark Bessoudo, decried my polarization of science and art. But that wasn’t my point. Both domains can and should develop critical and creative thinking. But where, in the humanities, there’s no escaping uncertainty, ambiguity and doubt, current science and technology teaching rarely venture there. The polarization of disciplines—denigrating and defunding the arts while proffering science, tech and math as the answers to everything—is the problem.

On this, Mark and I agreed. Better than that, he directed me to his elegant essay, Plato for Plumbers in which he argues that “at almost no point in their education, training, or practice are engineers given the proper intellectual tools with which to reflect, in any meaningful way, on themselves, each other, or their world-transforming enterprise. Engineers, and the general public, rarely stop to ask: “Should we do this, simply because we can? Is this actually good for the betterment of humanity or for the planet?”

By contrast, arts and humanities have to concern themselves deeply with consequences. Every note, word, colour is a choice that either limits or expands what could come next. Writers, dramatists, painters, musicians are constantly asking themselves: if I make this choice, what will it mean, how will it be felt, seen, heard—and what will follow? For many, like Lee Child, Olga Tokarchuk and Haruki Murakami, who often start their novels without pre-determined plots, consequences and meaning are an inescapable part of the process. Thinking those through is a demand intrinsic to the work. They get very good at change. The experience becomes a habit of mind.

That such thought processes are underplayed in the teaching of science, engineering and technology is a present danger for students, and for all of us. Because this narrow band of thinking is now so dominant. Readers of Sarah Wynn Williams’s jaw-dropping Careless People can’t but see how profoundly the founders and staff of Facebook had neither interest nor capacity to consider consequences beyond the financial. The social and political toxicity of the Internet as a whole could be described as the abject failure to imagine repercussions. Carole Cadwalladr’s most recent TED talk, the cruel and grotesque face of online recruiting, Jacob Silverman’s forthcoming book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, together with the now pervasive recognition of online enshittification: all of these describe the chronic failure to think, to speak out, to argue, to say no. It's all, dare I say it, wilful blindness.

Do read Mark Bessoudo’s essay; it’s short, beautifully written and worth your while. I didn’t know him, or his work, before our email correspondence, so I can only attribute his reading of my mind to the zeitgeist. Because we need far greater degrees of critical and creative thinking, challenge and scepticism than a cause-and-effect efficiency mindset bestows. This is what, I presume, Stuart Russell hopes to achieve when he integrates philosophers, lawyers, sociologists into his AI lab. But his is far from standard practice, in academia or in business.

I can hear a chorus of voices arguing ‘Gee Margaret, you really think we can fix the mess we’re in by doing more arts and humanities?’ I’m not so naïve as to imagine that that alone will cure our crises. There is no single answer. Waiting for one is immobilizing. After the collapse of Enron, there was a brief scurry to inject ethics classes into business schools, a quick fix that made no impact and faded out quickly. Habits of mind aren’t derived from a few essays and tests but by action, practice and experience.

Our problems are many and complex and if we are to fix them, we will need many and complex changes. But I am confident that we will make progress only when we can apply a greater capacity to think beyond the moment, to consider consequences, to imagine more deeply in order to keep asking: “Should we do this, simply because we can?”

Thanks Mark.

To Go Deeper

My latest book was published last month and it explores the nature and process of creativity through the eyes of writers, musicians and artists. At the time it was commissioned, it felt risky. In an age where engineers are kings, who cares about the arts? I was warned that the subject was niche—a position severely dismissed by my first interviewee, an economist! So I’ve been heartened by the responses I’ve received. It feels as though the book has given people permission to say out loud that the arts matter. Aren’t trivial or marginal, but essential.

For the Love of It

I love this painting by John Kirby, because it is a puzzle. What is the subject thinking about? He looks sad, but maybe he’s just thoughtful. Has he done something wrong—has something wrong been done to him? I’m drawn to it and I care—but why? It’s ambiguity is its attraction. He has lived with us now for over 25 years and I’m still wondering. Do I even want an answer?