Life Without Sciences And Arts

In 1750, The Academy of Dijon offered a prize for the best essay on the following question: "Have the arts and sciences conferred benefits to mankind?"

The question rephrased by some history books: "Has the reestablishment of the arts and sciences contributed to the purification or corruption of morals?"

The winning essay was the famous essay "Discourse on the Science and the Arts" which surprisingly took the negative of the proposition with no better boldness.

Before quoting some sentences from the essay I want to express my support to the efforts of those who are open to questioning our fundamental social and political issues. Most of our social diseases creep in silence to our communities because of our failure to notice the subtle changes within our dynamics, which slowly grow to build a legacy, formulate a law and finally shape a tradition. Sciences and arts are integral parts in defining the identities of different nations; and today sciences and arts are pumped into our blood with every heart beat. Therefore, the question of whether sciences and arts made us better people is strongly related to the age we live in, and this gives us a motivation to give more scrutiny to the essay we have in hand.

The author of the essay is the famous and controversial philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. He is the author of "Social Contract", a famous political book that was the bible to most of the French revolutionists. I can summarize his life as a man who is hated by everybody but influenced everybody. If you read his autobiography "Confessions", you will definitely hate him. He spoke about his sins in a free and non-regrettable fashion which leaves you with astonishment. On the other hand, he is considered an important figure during what is known here in the west by the name "Enlightenment", especially with his political philosophy. His writings helped developing the romanticism artistic movement. Scholars until this date debate on his philosophy whether it promotes totalitarian states (with Hitler in its extreme example) or triggered the establishment of democratic states, an idea which was immature at that time. A middle opinion states that his political views are pseudo-democratic, which acquired some acceptance in the academic circles.

What is totalitarianism, romanticism, pseudo-democracy… do not worry about that. Many writers use "big words" to convince you of their superior exposure to the topic, while they might be the most ignorant of it. Great writers are not those who write in a language that is only understood by the 5% percent top academicians, but those who present complicated ideas in simple terms without devaluing the intellectual contribution. In other words, good writers are those who push you to read the rest of the article by showing some relevance and importance of the topic discussed to your "being".

Let me tell you now about the specific "day-dreaming" that the philosophers were experiencing in which Rousseau contributed. They ask you to imagine that, through some sort of a miracle, we get a chance to visit one of the primitive old communities - whom many find no problem in calling "savages", and those with little more politeness use the term "noble savages"-. There is no government, no laws, no sciences, and no arts. We live to answer the call of nature: get food (through hunting or agriculture), drink and generate more little savages. We live in harmony with nature, pure water in the rivers, fascinating scenes of the mountains and the woods, and clear sky with full moon and virtually connected star networks. Do you think this life is better or a life with junk food, about two hours commuting in the city transportation systems, another two hours receiving light emissions from our laptop screens, mad entertainment, destructive weapons, crazy drinking and drug consumption in downtowns?

Rousseau does not show diplomacy! He is shouting: "Everything is good in leaving the hands of the Creator of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man". "Men are perverse; they would be even worse if they had had the misfortune of being born learned". "Sciences and the arts owe their birth to our vices; we would be less in doubt about their advantages if they owed it to our virtues." "Luxury seldom thrives without the sciences and arts and they never thrive without it". "Until then the Romans had been content to practice virtue; all was lost when they began to study it". He then scans through history: Egyptians, Persians, Romans, and Greeks arguing that the civilizations vanished when sciences and arts flourished. Our philosopher seems to be an angry man, but we get more excited the more we read!

To him our education systems produce "fake humans" who do not know what "life is". Keep in mind that he is talking three hundreds years back, and those who want to bet that if he happened to be in our time he would have committed suicide are probably correct. He says: "Indeed, with what eye does one think that men (i.e. students) who are crushed by the smallest need and stopped cold by the least pain could face hunger, thirst, periods of fatigue, dangers and death?"

In one of his foot notes he celebrates a story narrated by Plato about how one of the sons of a royal lineage, in old Persia, was brought up. "After his birth he was given over not to women but to eunuchs, who because of their virtue had the greatest influence with the king. They took charge of making his body fair and healthy, and after seven years they taught him to ride and hunt. When he turned fourteen, they placed him in the hands of four people: the most wise, the most just, the most temperate, the most valiant of the nation. The first taught him religion, the second always to be truthful; the third to conquer his appetites; the fourth to fear nothing." He then comments: "All, I would add, to make him good, none to make learned".
Let us give Rousseau 10/10 because everyone wishes that their sons be that royal kid.

Rousseau wrote later a fantastic novel, Emile, in which he proposed his educational model for raising a kid on the basis of his philosophy. He considered this book to the best of his writings, and I agree with that. He is definitely talented with a bright eloquence and emotional style of writing, which I enjoy. However, this does not mean agreeing with his philosophy which I find irritating in some parts and illogical in others. I can not also ignore mentioning that he mentions Muslims (Mohammedans) in more than an occasion, but all in derogatory terms.

Do I believe that sciences and arts made us better humans? Answering within the scope of our time, I am reluctant to say my answer except in a large hall, with a high ceiling carried by long pillars centered by a dome; the ground is marble and no body is around; I will shout "No" and then listen peacefully to the echo of the word reflecting against the bricks of the hall. Think of science as technology, and arts as movies, and then squeeze your mind to spot the virtues that humanity has gained out of these two fields. Science is destroying our physical existence through the ruining of our nature, unstabilizing our ecological system, depriving our natural resources, polluting our water, exploiting our atmosphere, and creating humans with fragile bodies and weak immunity. All the luxury and comfort that we got out of technology (which is analogous to science in Rousseau's time) are hardly fair to be exchanged with the catastrophic consequences of destroying our natural world. To complete the picture, arts skillfully managed to destroy our souls and morals through creating a standard of social hypocrisy, increasing pride and arrogance, normalizing nudity and sexual freedom, and flourishing a world revolving around greed, ego and lust. From a materialistic analysis, I see humanity leading itself into a dark tunnel in steady and sorrow paces.

You have the right now to question my motivation of writing this article. Nine paragraphs colored with pessimism with no clear spiritual or intellectual benefit. It is the perfect time to add the religious touch to our discussion.

As Muslims, there is a crucial importance to be aware of the historical narration that we are exposed to in our western education. When we read the Quranic historical narration and compare it with the western narration we notice some interesting inconsistencies. The western narration of the "first man" and the whole concept of "savages" suggest animal-like humans, with much sensibility and less intellectuality. Also, the narration emphasizes the polytheist societies with a notion that savage men were rarely monotheists. Assuming that the tradition of counting previous prophets to a hundred and twenty thousands is exaggerated, there is still a large portion of human history (before Judaism) that is monotheist. Why is that absent from the western narration? Moreover, the concept of uneducated and primitive man is highly influenced by the white-supremacy which reached its peak in the colonization periods. If you read "The start and The End" (al bidayyah wa'al nihayya) by Ibn Kathir you will find a completely different narration. The Chinese, Indian, Persian and African narrations (which all are less structured than the western narration) are different than the dominant presentation of history that we hear nowadays. Should history be re-written? Yes, there is a high need for that. However, we should first figure out how to re-read it.

I personally find it difficult to digest the idea of the "savageness" of the "natural man". According to my humble contemplations on the texts, the moment the human was sent to earth, the moment he was provided by a divine social contract that reached him through prophetic revelation. Therefore, law is as old as the human being, and hence the human was never savage. Law, science, and arts, progressed with the progress of the man in history until it reached its contemporary complicated forms. The first man that lived in the first five hundred years was not savage according to the second and third generations, unless we allow ourselves to say that those who lived five hundred years back were savages because they did not have the human rights declaration, the united nations, the security council, the space shuttles, the internet, the cinema industry and rock music. In support of this understanding, we find verses in the Quran that suggest that some of the previous nations were more advanced in terms of their scientific knowledge than the latter nations.

Islam does not combat sciences or arts; in the contrary it promotes it. Architecture, calligraphy, poetry and lyrics are examples of artistic forms that thrived during the Islamic civilization. Most of the western Muslims had been exposed at some point (during their personal research) to the scientific contributions of Muslims, and so there is no need to re-iterate it here. Does not this seem in contradiction with the earlier presented view that sciences and arts contributed to the corruption of morals? The resolution of this is presented in a comprehensive and wisdom-pouring verse in chapter 30: "Corruption has appeared in the land and the sea on account of what the hands of men have wrought, that He may make them taste part of that which they have done, so that they may return". Sciences and arts are destructive because humans chose to make it that way. May He be exalted! And O humanity, when is it time to wake?

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References:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau – The Basic Political Writings:

Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts.

Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Discourse on Political Economy

On the Social Contract

Translated by: Donald A. Cress. Introduced by: Peter Gay. Hackett Publishing Company, 1987.

"A Short History of Modern Philosophy – From Descartes to Wittgenstein" by Roger Scruton. Second Edition. Routledge Classics – London and New York.

"History of Modern Philosophy" by Bertrand Russel. Routledge Classics, 1996.

"Intellectual Origins Of The Contemporary West" [Volume 2]. Prepared by the staff department of History – Queens University – Kingston – Ontario – Pearson Custom Publishing.

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