In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the narrator Ishmael spends an entire chapter explaining why he believes that whales are really fish. There is just one problem: whales are mammals, of course.
In this blog, I have written a lot about “the Truth” or “truths”—how the humanities express some of the deeper realities of life. But what about the inaccuracies, when works of art are just mistaken? What do we make of texts when they get the facts wrong?
This isn’t a minor question. Literature has a long memory because we still read classics composed hundreds—sometimes thousands—of years ago. Almost any historical piece of fiction will get something wrong. Any cosmology written before the seventeenth century will be geocentric, even though the solar system is heliocentric. There are numerous anachronisms in Shakespeare’s tragedies. In his Julius Caesar for example clocks struck time, when in fact the mechanical clock was invented in the fourteenth century.
The first response to these errors is: so what? We don’t read Shakespeare to learn about the history of technology, but to gain his insights. We don’t read Moby Dick to learn about whales, but about Ahab’s very human obsession. We can usually compartmentalize the authors’ insights away from their flawed understanding of the world. The only one who can be upset about Ishmael’s mistake is, well, a whale.
But the situation is actually very complicated. Factual errors are one thing, but what about flawed perceptions of other human beings? There’s reason to interpret Richard Wagner’s deformed and corrupt character Alberich as a Jewish stereotype (although this isn’t entirely clear—but Wagner really was a renowned anti-semite). With this in mind how should we approach his Ring Cycle? We can’t simply discount it, because it’s a musical masterpiece. Its impact on European music cannot be measured. But we can’t pretend that he didn’t hold and express offensive opinions. Nor can we take refuge behind that old staple, “he reflected the beliefs at the time.” Many people in the nineteenth century did not share his beliefs, and some challenged Wagner’s anti-semitic writings. Cultures are never monolithic, after all. What now?
It comes down to insightful readers. Writers don’t simply dictate to passive readers; readers aren’t mere sponges, absorbing indiscriminately everything the author thought. Readers engage with and interpret literature. It is the on-going interaction between works of literature and their readers over the years that makes them great. The acknowledgement of objectionable opinions doesn’t change the writers, who are usually dead, but it destroys two-dimensional images of them. And that can be a positive development. Calling people “great authors” glosses over the fact that they were human beings who blew it sometimes.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Isn't It Ironic?
Among the allegations about childhood sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Europe earlier this month, Father Raniero Cantalamessa caused further scandal. He likened the media’s interest in the story to anti-semitism. The outrage was intense, particularly among Jewish groups: how could anyone compare the experience of Holocaust victims to the publication of credible accusations?
Father Cantalamessa fell into a common trap regarding language use. A staple among apologists for the Church is the idea that anti-Catholicism is the last religious prejudice tolerated by the mainstream culture. Prejudices against all other religions are considered politically incorrect; but denigration of Catholicism is still countenanced. Hence, anti-Catholicism has become the anti-semitism of our age, they argue. Father Cantalamessa mangled the argument, however.
But the problem was greater than simply one person’s clumsiness. Languages develop within groups of people, and insiders become used to the group’s expressions, arguments, and stories. The group members become so habituated to their own language that they can succinctly allude to it, sometimes with a mere word. The problem, as Father Cantalamessa discovered, is when they do so with outsiders, who do not share a similar background.
One theory of the novel is that it is a genre that represents the society’s many languages. The author brings together the speech of different groups, and puts them in dialogue with each other. The author can do this by having characters that are insiders. Their statements naturally reflect the group’s opinions and thus contain the group’s language. But the author can also do so by imbedding the statements in the prose, by “citing without quotation marks.” If you listen to passages, you can tell that the narrator is making indirect reference to someone else’s words.
When done right, the novel’s collision of languages yields fruitful results. With all due respect to Alanis Morisette, irony is not “rain on your wedding day.” Irony is the literary technique of making a statement that conveys the opposite meaning. Irony, in other words, is the technique of taking insiders’ language and revealing its artifice: its presuppositions, its biases, and omissions. And irony highlights the flaws in their argumentation.
Despite the fact that many editorial writers try to be ironic, irony is actually a difficult technique. But Father Cantalamessa perfected it, probably on accident.
Father Cantalamessa fell into a common trap regarding language use. A staple among apologists for the Church is the idea that anti-Catholicism is the last religious prejudice tolerated by the mainstream culture. Prejudices against all other religions are considered politically incorrect; but denigration of Catholicism is still countenanced. Hence, anti-Catholicism has become the anti-semitism of our age, they argue. Father Cantalamessa mangled the argument, however.
But the problem was greater than simply one person’s clumsiness. Languages develop within groups of people, and insiders become used to the group’s expressions, arguments, and stories. The group members become so habituated to their own language that they can succinctly allude to it, sometimes with a mere word. The problem, as Father Cantalamessa discovered, is when they do so with outsiders, who do not share a similar background.
One theory of the novel is that it is a genre that represents the society’s many languages. The author brings together the speech of different groups, and puts them in dialogue with each other. The author can do this by having characters that are insiders. Their statements naturally reflect the group’s opinions and thus contain the group’s language. But the author can also do so by imbedding the statements in the prose, by “citing without quotation marks.” If you listen to passages, you can tell that the narrator is making indirect reference to someone else’s words.
When done right, the novel’s collision of languages yields fruitful results. With all due respect to Alanis Morisette, irony is not “rain on your wedding day.” Irony is the literary technique of making a statement that conveys the opposite meaning. Irony, in other words, is the technique of taking insiders’ language and revealing its artifice: its presuppositions, its biases, and omissions. And irony highlights the flaws in their argumentation.
Despite the fact that many editorial writers try to be ironic, irony is actually a difficult technique. But Father Cantalamessa perfected it, probably on accident.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Don't Count on It
A recent story in the New York Times discusses Google’s improved translation algorhythm. A scientist at Google said: “This technology can make the language barrier go away.” Don’t count on it.
I performed a little test, one we language teachers do for the benefit of our students. I translated a simple passage into Italian; then I translated the translation back into English. Sounds simple enough, right?
Here’s the original:
Hello my name is Fabian. How are you? I'm forty-four years old, and I've been teaching since nineteen eighty-eight. I am married and have a seven-year old daughter. I've lived in Tucson since nineteen ninety-seven.
Here’s the translation of the translation:
Hello my name is Fabian. How are you? I'm forty-four years, and I taught from eight nineteen eighties. I am married and have seven year old daughter. I lived in Tucson since nineteen ninety-seven.
What’s really funny is the translation itself. In Italian, it rendered “forty-four” as “forty-two four” (“quarantadue quattro”) and “seven-year old daughter” as “seven years daughter” (“sette anni figlia”). It didn’t even attempt “nineteen” but left it in English (“ottanta nineteen-eight” and “nineteen novanta sette”). Strangely it translated some of these unreadable items back into readable English.
And none of this even brings up the inevitable cultural references in everyday speech. “Caporetto” translates as “Caporetto.” You need to know that it was the site of a major rout of the Italian army in World War I to understand why it’s commonly used to describe catastrophes large and small.
I have no beef with Google or any web-based translation. There are many websites that can be made accessible by their technology. But when people conclude that technology can make language study obsolete, well, that’s just not the case. Take it from me, I taught from eight nineteen eighties.
I performed a little test, one we language teachers do for the benefit of our students. I translated a simple passage into Italian; then I translated the translation back into English. Sounds simple enough, right?
Here’s the original:
Hello my name is Fabian. How are you? I'm forty-four years old, and I've been teaching since nineteen eighty-eight. I am married and have a seven-year old daughter. I've lived in Tucson since nineteen ninety-seven.
Here’s the translation of the translation:
Hello my name is Fabian. How are you? I'm forty-four years, and I taught from eight nineteen eighties. I am married and have seven year old daughter. I lived in Tucson since nineteen ninety-seven.
What’s really funny is the translation itself. In Italian, it rendered “forty-four” as “forty-two four” (“quarantadue quattro”) and “seven-year old daughter” as “seven years daughter” (“sette anni figlia”). It didn’t even attempt “nineteen” but left it in English (“ottanta nineteen-eight” and “nineteen novanta sette”). Strangely it translated some of these unreadable items back into readable English.
And none of this even brings up the inevitable cultural references in everyday speech. “Caporetto” translates as “Caporetto.” You need to know that it was the site of a major rout of the Italian army in World War I to understand why it’s commonly used to describe catastrophes large and small.
I have no beef with Google or any web-based translation. There are many websites that can be made accessible by their technology. But when people conclude that technology can make language study obsolete, well, that’s just not the case. Take it from me, I taught from eight nineteen eighties.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Eppur si muove (And yet, it moves)
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two is four. If that is granted then all else follows.” —George Orwell, 1984
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is renowned as one of the founders of modern science. This year marks the four-hundredth anniversary of his discovery of the moons of Jupiter, a discovery that induced him to accept Copernicus’s sun-centered view of the solar system. What is less well known in the United States is that he was also a great writer. Nowadays we tend to divide the humanists from the scientists, but Galileo was both.
Dan Brown cast Galileo two-dimensionally as the first casualty of the war between science and religion. But Galileo saw no distinction between faith and reason either. He wrote that God composed two holy books, the Bible and Nature. When the two seem at odds, it’s only because people are reading the Bible incorrectly. The Bible, he wrote, uses metaphorical language that is easy to misinterpret; it ascribes a mouth and hands to God, for instance, a limitless Being who literally has neither.
Because it was the creation of God, Galileo held an equally expansive view of Nature. In one lyrical passage, he wrote a parable of the scientific method. A man wants to learn about Nature’s sounds. He begins with the singing of a bird, then the chirping of crickets, the vibrations of strings and the whistle of a reed. Each time the man thinks he’s categorized all the possible sounds, he discovers another way that Nature creates them. He concludes that he knows a few ways that Nature creates sounds, but there must be thousands of others that he has not experienced.
As a figure, Galileo exemplifies that the categories we find so natural—science v. literature, science v. faith—are artificial. He illustrates that, when done correctly, they all work in the service of the truth.
Perhaps the best example of Galileo serving the truth didn’t occur in reality. The legend has formed that, just after the Inquisition forced him to recant the heliocentric theory, he muttered “Eppur si muove” (“And yet, it moves”). The meaning of the statement is clear; the Inquisition could force one man to deny the truth, but it couldn’t actually change the truth. The statement doesn’t express defiance so much as faith: Nature’s truths are always available for someone—anyone—to see.
There is great comfort in the sentence “Eppur si muove.” George Orwell wrote of a frightening government that defined truth as whatever the party needed. Through torture, it makes Winston actually see that two fingers plus two more can equal five. Our society is unlike Orwell’s dystopia, but we are inundated with falsity, misinformation, half-truths and spin. From urban legends to political commentators to advertisements, it seems that the truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The legend of Galileo reminds us to have faith. Despite some people’s cynical efforts, the truth remains unchanged, inviolate, and will someday be revealed.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is renowned as one of the founders of modern science. This year marks the four-hundredth anniversary of his discovery of the moons of Jupiter, a discovery that induced him to accept Copernicus’s sun-centered view of the solar system. What is less well known in the United States is that he was also a great writer. Nowadays we tend to divide the humanists from the scientists, but Galileo was both.
Dan Brown cast Galileo two-dimensionally as the first casualty of the war between science and religion. But Galileo saw no distinction between faith and reason either. He wrote that God composed two holy books, the Bible and Nature. When the two seem at odds, it’s only because people are reading the Bible incorrectly. The Bible, he wrote, uses metaphorical language that is easy to misinterpret; it ascribes a mouth and hands to God, for instance, a limitless Being who literally has neither.
Because it was the creation of God, Galileo held an equally expansive view of Nature. In one lyrical passage, he wrote a parable of the scientific method. A man wants to learn about Nature’s sounds. He begins with the singing of a bird, then the chirping of crickets, the vibrations of strings and the whistle of a reed. Each time the man thinks he’s categorized all the possible sounds, he discovers another way that Nature creates them. He concludes that he knows a few ways that Nature creates sounds, but there must be thousands of others that he has not experienced.
As a figure, Galileo exemplifies that the categories we find so natural—science v. literature, science v. faith—are artificial. He illustrates that, when done correctly, they all work in the service of the truth.
Perhaps the best example of Galileo serving the truth didn’t occur in reality. The legend has formed that, just after the Inquisition forced him to recant the heliocentric theory, he muttered “Eppur si muove” (“And yet, it moves”). The meaning of the statement is clear; the Inquisition could force one man to deny the truth, but it couldn’t actually change the truth. The statement doesn’t express defiance so much as faith: Nature’s truths are always available for someone—anyone—to see.
There is great comfort in the sentence “Eppur si muove.” George Orwell wrote of a frightening government that defined truth as whatever the party needed. Through torture, it makes Winston actually see that two fingers plus two more can equal five. Our society is unlike Orwell’s dystopia, but we are inundated with falsity, misinformation, half-truths and spin. From urban legends to political commentators to advertisements, it seems that the truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The legend of Galileo reminds us to have faith. Despite some people’s cynical efforts, the truth remains unchanged, inviolate, and will someday be revealed.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Dante with Pecs
This month Dante’s Inferno has gotten a lot of media attention. By Dante’s Inferno, I don’t mean the great poem. Xbox just released a game entitled Dante’s Inferno, in which players lead a buff warrior-knight, Dante, through the nine levels of hell. He must battle his way to the very bottom to save the soul of his beloved Beatrice, who had been kidnapped by Lucifer.
I write that Xbox’s game is “entitled” Dante’s Inferno and not “based on it” because it bears little resemblance to Dante’s poem. In the poem, Dante journeys through hell and interacts with the damned. There is some action, as when his enemy Filippo Argenti tries to grab him. But it is nothing like game character blasting his way through a horde of unbaptized babies in Limbo. Xbox kept Dante’s infernal topography and the names “Dante,” “Virgil” and “Beatrice.” But they changed everything else to make a more exciting game. Indeed, in the poem, Beatrice is a heavenly being who Saves Dante. “Saves” with a capital “s,” because her intervention allows him to turn from sin towards redemption.
Xbox’s game raises the question of the difficult relationship between mass media and the arts. When mass media—movies, TV shows, and now video games—are based on literary works, they have to transform the texts, sometimes dramatically. Film scripts need to shorten and condense the plots of novels; they have to simplify complex ideas, and put them in the mouths of characters. No one would play a game literally based on Dante’s “Inferno”—it’d be too plain dull!
Of course, there is a positive side when mass media is based on literature. Games and films generate interest in the works among people who otherwise might not read them. And when they are successful, more interest—and sometimes money—goes toward the works and the people who study them.
What causes consternation among readers of those works is not so much how the media alter them. That is to be expected. It’s how the new versions actually supplant the originals in many people’s minds. The show (or game) becomes the new “standard,” and has the tendency to marginalize the original. JK Rowling’s books are rich, nuanced works, which the films strip down to their most simplistic form. Yet for as many times as I’ve read all of them, I can’t help but picture Harry Potter as Daniel Radcliff.
At times, people expect the original to have the changes—and the special effects—of the latest movie, TV show, or game. Worse still, others don’t realize that those changes have nothing to do with the original.
Case in point: conjure up the image of a velociraptor—about the size of a man, green lizard-skin, maybe 12 feet long from nose to tail. This is the velociraptor from Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. And it’s incorrect. Scientifically speaking, velociraptors were about 6 feet long, and stood about waist-high to a person. As happens with literary works, the movie-version has totally supplanted the scientific reality in people’s minds.
Oh, and they were probably feathered too.
I write that Xbox’s game is “entitled” Dante’s Inferno and not “based on it” because it bears little resemblance to Dante’s poem. In the poem, Dante journeys through hell and interacts with the damned. There is some action, as when his enemy Filippo Argenti tries to grab him. But it is nothing like game character blasting his way through a horde of unbaptized babies in Limbo. Xbox kept Dante’s infernal topography and the names “Dante,” “Virgil” and “Beatrice.” But they changed everything else to make a more exciting game. Indeed, in the poem, Beatrice is a heavenly being who Saves Dante. “Saves” with a capital “s,” because her intervention allows him to turn from sin towards redemption.
Xbox’s game raises the question of the difficult relationship between mass media and the arts. When mass media—movies, TV shows, and now video games—are based on literary works, they have to transform the texts, sometimes dramatically. Film scripts need to shorten and condense the plots of novels; they have to simplify complex ideas, and put them in the mouths of characters. No one would play a game literally based on Dante’s “Inferno”—it’d be too plain dull!
Of course, there is a positive side when mass media is based on literature. Games and films generate interest in the works among people who otherwise might not read them. And when they are successful, more interest—and sometimes money—goes toward the works and the people who study them.
What causes consternation among readers of those works is not so much how the media alter them. That is to be expected. It’s how the new versions actually supplant the originals in many people’s minds. The show (or game) becomes the new “standard,” and has the tendency to marginalize the original. JK Rowling’s books are rich, nuanced works, which the films strip down to their most simplistic form. Yet for as many times as I’ve read all of them, I can’t help but picture Harry Potter as Daniel Radcliff.
At times, people expect the original to have the changes—and the special effects—of the latest movie, TV show, or game. Worse still, others don’t realize that those changes have nothing to do with the original.
Case in point: conjure up the image of a velociraptor—about the size of a man, green lizard-skin, maybe 12 feet long from nose to tail. This is the velociraptor from Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. And it’s incorrect. Scientifically speaking, velociraptors were about 6 feet long, and stood about waist-high to a person. As happens with literary works, the movie-version has totally supplanted the scientific reality in people’s minds.
Oh, and they were probably feathered too.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Sick at Heart
Help! The king is ill and is killing his subjects!
After learning that his beloved was unfaithful the king lost his mind. He began marrying young women, bedding them on the wedding night, and then executing them the next morning. But when Scheherazade was in his bedchamber, she told him a story; she embedded one story into the first so that when the evening ended, the narrative was incomplete. She thus postponed her execution by a day. The next evening she did the same thing, and so on for many more nights to come.
After a thousand and one nights, however, a funny thing happened. The stories came to an end and the king was cured of his insanity.
A more dramatic cure takes place in Boccaccio’s Decameron. During the plague of 1348—a real event which killed over a third of all people throughout Eurasia—ten youths escape to a Tuscan villa. They spend two weeks telling a hundred tales. But at the end, they return to Florence… and the plague is gone.
Of course, I’m not going to suggest that literature can cure mental illness, to say nothing of physical ailments. But for centuries literature has brought comfort to readers.
For centuries, the history of literature was about giving voice to different groups—people of a common language, heritage or citizenship, or of a particular region or belief. The process is still ongoing.
For example, in a society that still undervalues certain groups—women, people of color, of lower socio-economic status, or of certain sexual orientations—it can be uplifting for individuals to “read their story.” Of course, the works are fictional, and therefore not literally “their story.” Still it is important for people to see themselves as actors in the world, even when the society defines them otherwise.
But socio-politics is only part of the picture. Literature can speak to difficult experiences, and can help people make sense of them. Whether dealing with emotional betrayal or universal calamity, it gives a person the sense that someone else understands their predicament. And that knowledge alone can be crucial.
Literature may not change tragic circumstances, and it won’t cure psychosis. But it can make a difference in how someone faces their situation. And sometimes, that makes all the difference in the world.
After learning that his beloved was unfaithful the king lost his mind. He began marrying young women, bedding them on the wedding night, and then executing them the next morning. But when Scheherazade was in his bedchamber, she told him a story; she embedded one story into the first so that when the evening ended, the narrative was incomplete. She thus postponed her execution by a day. The next evening she did the same thing, and so on for many more nights to come.
After a thousand and one nights, however, a funny thing happened. The stories came to an end and the king was cured of his insanity.
A more dramatic cure takes place in Boccaccio’s Decameron. During the plague of 1348—a real event which killed over a third of all people throughout Eurasia—ten youths escape to a Tuscan villa. They spend two weeks telling a hundred tales. But at the end, they return to Florence… and the plague is gone.
Of course, I’m not going to suggest that literature can cure mental illness, to say nothing of physical ailments. But for centuries literature has brought comfort to readers.
For centuries, the history of literature was about giving voice to different groups—people of a common language, heritage or citizenship, or of a particular region or belief. The process is still ongoing.
For example, in a society that still undervalues certain groups—women, people of color, of lower socio-economic status, or of certain sexual orientations—it can be uplifting for individuals to “read their story.” Of course, the works are fictional, and therefore not literally “their story.” Still it is important for people to see themselves as actors in the world, even when the society defines them otherwise.
But socio-politics is only part of the picture. Literature can speak to difficult experiences, and can help people make sense of them. Whether dealing with emotional betrayal or universal calamity, it gives a person the sense that someone else understands their predicament. And that knowledge alone can be crucial.
Literature may not change tragic circumstances, and it won’t cure psychosis. But it can make a difference in how someone faces their situation. And sometimes, that makes all the difference in the world.
Monday, February 1, 2010
No One Saw It Coming
Economist Thomas L. Friedman has discussed how the world economy has made national borders obsolete. You might think that the languages would be valued more highly right now. Yet Americans still learn foreign languages at woefully low rates.
As I have stressed several times in this blog, the value of the humanities transcends the question of job preparation. But the question increasingly posed to all academics these days is the value of their fields—“value” often understood strictly in terms of economics. Will this information help someone get a job? For many reasons, the humanities fare worse in answering this question these days.
My field, Italian, suffers the same fate as the rest of the humanities. Sometimes more so. We simply haven’t done a good job overall of explaining the benefits of Italian. People associate Italian with pleasure—food, fashion, art, and opera. But business?
For decades, Italy has been a part of the G-7 (or G-8 or G-20) groups of economically powerful countries. Last year Italian automaker Fiat announced its take-over of Chrysler. Business has become transnational, and Fiat’s acquisition of Chrysler is only another example of that fact. Fiat’s acquisition of Chrysler is a clear example of how Italian is a valuable business asset.
I wish I could say that I had some foresight of Fiat’s owners’ decision. I had no more prescience than anyone else in the US. And that’s precisely the point I’m trying to make.
No one saw Fiat’s decision coming. But in the wake of Fiat’s purchase, Italian appears a little bit more essential. Funny how that works, isn’t it? Particular areas of knowledge seem trivial until they suddenly become necessary. In the first half of the twentieth century, physics was a backwater. Then World War II necessitated the production of an atomic bomb, and then the Cold War required many more. With the government’s interest—and investment in—nuclear physics, it became the cutting edge. Similar shifts take place all the time. When President Nixon declared a war on cancer, oncology research became a booming field. With the threat posed by the Soviet Union, federal moneys went to Russian and Slavic languages. And what field could be less lucrative than paleontology—until, that is, Hollywood produces a blockbuster about dinosaurs.
A university education benefits the individual, of course, but it also benefits the society. The community profits by having people trained in many different areas. It is arrogant to presume that some fields of knowledge are essential and others are not. Because who can tell? It is just a matter of time before circumstances require a group of individuals trained in those areas.
As I have stressed several times in this blog, the value of the humanities transcends the question of job preparation. But the question increasingly posed to all academics these days is the value of their fields—“value” often understood strictly in terms of economics. Will this information help someone get a job? For many reasons, the humanities fare worse in answering this question these days.
My field, Italian, suffers the same fate as the rest of the humanities. Sometimes more so. We simply haven’t done a good job overall of explaining the benefits of Italian. People associate Italian with pleasure—food, fashion, art, and opera. But business?
For decades, Italy has been a part of the G-7 (or G-8 or G-20) groups of economically powerful countries. Last year Italian automaker Fiat announced its take-over of Chrysler. Business has become transnational, and Fiat’s acquisition of Chrysler is only another example of that fact. Fiat’s acquisition of Chrysler is a clear example of how Italian is a valuable business asset.
I wish I could say that I had some foresight of Fiat’s owners’ decision. I had no more prescience than anyone else in the US. And that’s precisely the point I’m trying to make.
No one saw Fiat’s decision coming. But in the wake of Fiat’s purchase, Italian appears a little bit more essential. Funny how that works, isn’t it? Particular areas of knowledge seem trivial until they suddenly become necessary. In the first half of the twentieth century, physics was a backwater. Then World War II necessitated the production of an atomic bomb, and then the Cold War required many more. With the government’s interest—and investment in—nuclear physics, it became the cutting edge. Similar shifts take place all the time. When President Nixon declared a war on cancer, oncology research became a booming field. With the threat posed by the Soviet Union, federal moneys went to Russian and Slavic languages. And what field could be less lucrative than paleontology—until, that is, Hollywood produces a blockbuster about dinosaurs.
A university education benefits the individual, of course, but it also benefits the society. The community profits by having people trained in many different areas. It is arrogant to presume that some fields of knowledge are essential and others are not. Because who can tell? It is just a matter of time before circumstances require a group of individuals trained in those areas.
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