What exactly are the arts good for?

August 21, 2008 — peter

Richard Handler of the CBC discusses the Tories’ recent cuts to arts programs and says it’s not just the economic impact we have to consider but also the social and intellectual.

So, in a way, reading fiction is good for your social intelligence. That’s the term Daniel Goleman uses in his best selling book Social Intelligence (his previous book was Emotional Intelligence, also a best seller).

As anybody who’s had a smart but emotionally clueless manager knows, brains aren’t enough in the age of collaborative enterprise. You also need empathy.

I have met business consultants who teach the “new empathy” as a way to invigorate workers and their companies. Behind them are findings from the “new neuroscience,” which suggest that human being can’t really work independently because we are mimetic creatures who like to imitate and broadcast to each other. We are all enmeshed in each other neural circuits.

Readers of fiction, so the argument seems to go, are especially good at working with others since they “read” other people so well. They are practiced in seeing the world through the eyes of fictional characters.

Yes, the argument can and will be employed by economic boosters. If I were a PR person, I would do it myself. The good corporate cook will add a little empathy, a little neuroscience and a good measure of innovation speak.

Readers of novels will be considered assets to the company, which may be good news for women, who read the majority of novels, and bad news for most men, who aren’t fiction lovers.

Maybe, some day, guys will be given remedial courses in literature to get them up to snuff and make them more productive.

(I misspelled “intellectual” three times writing this post. I think the Tories’ cuts are indirectly making me stupider.)

Previously:

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