"And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art"
About this Quote
Haldane flips the usual hierarchy of “useful” knowledge with a scientist’s relish for a clean inversion. The line starts by conceding a familiar modern demand: artists should get a dose of science, presumably to keep up with the age of machines, medicine, and measurement. Then he pivots, and the real target comes into focus: the people who run the world of production - “masters, labour and capital” - are the ones in urgent need of aesthetic education.
The intent isn’t to romanticize art; it’s to indict a culture that treats it as decorative, optional, or childish compared with technical literacy. Haldane’s subtext is that the brutalities and banalities of industrial society aren’t just economic failures but failures of imagination: managers who can optimize but can’t see, workers trained for output rather than craft, capital that understands value only in prices. “Art,” here, is a civic competency. It disciplines attention, complicates easy answers, and rehumanizes what industry turns abstract.
Context matters: Haldane wrote and spoke from within a 20th-century world where science had become the prestige language of progress and, increasingly, of war. A scientist insisting on art for capital and labor is also a warning about technocracy: when only one kind of expertise counts, everything else gets flattened. The phrase “we must” carries policy weight, but the cleverness is in making reciprocity feel like justice rather than charity. If artists are expected to serve the modern world, the modern world should be expected to deserve them.
The intent isn’t to romanticize art; it’s to indict a culture that treats it as decorative, optional, or childish compared with technical literacy. Haldane’s subtext is that the brutalities and banalities of industrial society aren’t just economic failures but failures of imagination: managers who can optimize but can’t see, workers trained for output rather than craft, capital that understands value only in prices. “Art,” here, is a civic competency. It disciplines attention, complicates easy answers, and rehumanizes what industry turns abstract.
Context matters: Haldane wrote and spoke from within a 20th-century world where science had become the prestige language of progress and, increasingly, of war. A scientist insisting on art for capital and labor is also a warning about technocracy: when only one kind of expertise counts, everything else gets flattened. The phrase “we must” carries policy weight, but the cleverness is in making reciprocity feel like justice rather than charity. If artists are expected to serve the modern world, the modern world should be expected to deserve them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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