The prize

When walking down a long road, progress is measured by landmarks, way-markings on the landscape to indicate how far you have traversed.  The places marked may be hospitable and beautiful, prompting you to stay awhile to catch your breath and admire the view.  Other places may be less welcoming, frightening even.  You shut your eyes and hurry past quickly, but you can never shake off the memory you were there.

This week I reached a good place.  In December last year I entered a competition for postgraduates in the College of Arts and Law at Birmingham University.  The challenge was to write a 750 word essay in answer to the question, ‘Is there still a role for the arts and humanities in a world increasingly dominated by science and technology?’  If your first reaction to the question is, ‘How preposterous!’ then we appear to have something in common.  This question came as I digested the disappointing news that the arts look to be omitted from the English Baccalaureate.  I felt compelled to write, not to win, but to make a point. Why can’t we be good at everything?  So I banged out my passion for all subjects – arts, humanities, science and technology - and sent it off, thinking not much more of it.

Two weeks’ ago an email popped up in my university inbox.  I had to read it a few times to make sure of its contents - I had won the competition and was being invited to a reception to collect it.  This is my first university prize.  I felt enormously proud, not least because as an undergraduate I thought myself incapable of such things.  But that is a story for another time.  For now, you shall have to trust me and believe that this is very significant.  I have changed.

So, on Monday 28^th January I made my way to the university to receive my award.  I had no brief on what to expect.  I entered and found that I was overdressed (note to self: you are now a student, not an office worker).  Also, I am not very good at ‘mingling’.  I tend to cling, limpet-like onto those who, like me, are also terrified and stand there, rock-like, submitting themselves to my panicky grabbing-on.

After a glass of gulped wine a tall, lovely lady emerged as out of a dream.  I still have no idea who she was, though we talked for some time.  She told me that she wanted to introduce me to Jan Watts, who was Birmingham’s Poet Laureate for 2011-2012 (amongst many other things) and also a member of the judging panel.  I shall bask in the memory-glow of meeting Jan for some time.  She took my hand and thanked me for writing the essay.  I cannot describe how that makes me feel; it is all a writer requires and to come from her was…well, it was good, put it that way.

The prize was given.  My name was announced, badly as always.  One day I shall publish a small book, phonetically describing all the delightful ways in which people pronounce Krawec (it is Kre-vetch, if you were wondering).  My prize was a shiny new iPad, which is a rather elegant and technologically brilliant way of playing Connect 4.  I told my husband that I thought the prize was such, but as I had deleted the entry email I stated I wasn’t sure, lest I turned up and discovered my award to be a signed copy of Jeremy Clarkson’s: ‘Why I Hate Staffordshire So Much and Other Pointless Tales’.  How devastating that would be.

My deepest regret came when one gentleman, a lecturer I think – asked if we were going to be given a chance to see the essay.  I should have shouted out, ‘I hope so!  Because that is what I really want!  To be read, to be discussed and debated!  That is all!’  But I didn’t.  Not so much the ‘wit of the stairs’ but rather, the wit of the journey home.

I am told that it will be published but I would like to share it here with you, my reader (s?).  It is not an academic piece and was never going to be for 750 words.  Instead, take it as the impassioned ranting of this Black Country wench after one too many down the RVT:

Is there still a role for the arts and humanities in a world increasingly dominated by science and technology?

Let us imagine for a moment that the world passes a law to ban the senses of taste and smell.  It states that these senses are superfluous and ‘not necessary for the function of a normal human being’.  If such a ruling were made, what would you think of it?

You might consider the law unenforceable.  After all, taste and smell are an integral part of being alive.  It would seem that the only possible means of ensuring co-operation with the new law would be to physically remove our senses – a mass operation for the masses, so to speak.  Or you may merely think the law ridiculous, a bad joke.  How could a person not take pleasure from eating ice cream?  Fight the urge to sniff a rose? 

Both conclusions are entirely rational.  Such a law would be absurd; utterly wrong.  Being human means to taste and to smell, as well as to hear, see and touch.  We do all these things and more.  The remit of human experience is vast and spectacular.  We have yet to find our limit.

So, knowing this - how ridiculous dismissing those things that make us human is - why then forsake half the human experience?  Because this is the implication of our question: To reject the role of the arts and humanities is to reject being human, just as abandoning science and technology would also refuse who we are.  They are wholly part of our lives, created by us, for us.  We may as well seal our nostrils up and pull our tongues out rather than never again compose poetry or dance to our favourite song.

For our ancestors the question would seem unintelligible.  The word ‘scientist’ was only coined in the nineteenth century.  The people who pioneered the practice of science were termed ‘natural philosophers’ before this and their work was considered to be another of the Arts.  Looking further back we find the men and women of the Renaissance.  Would we favour the design for the flying machine of Leonardo da Vinci to the cost of the Mona Lisa?  Leave her painted loveliness languishing in some dusty attic?  Of course not; we recognise his genius in both the mechanical and the artistic.  If we accept his duality - why not accept our own?

But the world was in some ways simpler then.  As science and technology expanded it required specialists, thus the figure of the fifteenth century all-rounder seems impossible to find today.  However, this makes it all the more vital to champion the role of the arts and humanities.  The inspiration that one person may lend to another, the need to interpret advancements in technology to make them accessible to all makes it vital to share our respective research.  If being human means to practice art, humanities, science and technology, then the way we understand the world includes all these.  We cannot and should not seclude ourselves.

Let us briefly analyse this so-called dominance of science and technology.  In its most immediate and popular form – the internet – we witness the proliferation of arts and humanities across the medium.  The self-published book, the You Tube video, Google Translate – this is technology and art in tandem.  It seems as though modern life is answering the question without our help, and the answer it shouts out is a firm and unequivocal: ‘Yes!’ 

It is scholarship in the arts and humanities that we question most of all.  We believe that theatre, music and their ilk are natural talents not requiring the nurture of a classroom; that the humanities are ‘weak’ subjects unable to withstand the rigours of test and analysis.   And yet, in the giant economies of countries such as China, we witness huge cultural investment in the arts and humanities.  They demand success across all faculties.  If we are to compete with the rest of the world we need to equip our children to become world-class in anything they set their minds upon. 

In conclusion, there will always be a role for arts and humanities because they make us who we are.  If we stand back and survey the picture formed from the myriad of specialists who make up the world, we will see the face of the most brilliant natural philosopher to have ever existed; the supreme combination of our human whole.  We need not question where our focus should be.  Instead, our joint motto should simply state: ‘Excellence in All Things’.