June 22, 2020

Horse 2722 - Hiking Uni Fees Isn't Really About Arts Degrees

In yet another move which proves to me that only is Australia moving towards functional fascism (which I am using as a descriptive term and not a pejorative), the Education Minister Dan Tehan announced last week that if you want to study arts and humanities at university then you have to pay the full economic cost of it yourself. He may as well have punched every arts and humanities student in the face personally because that's the kind of disdain which the Education Minister has shown for education. I would like to think that we have reached a new low in politics when a Minister of the Crown is an enemy of the people but I suspect that we have still further to go and we will be bashed and pushed down the stairs to get there.

Dan Tehan says the Government wants to steer people away from humanities into "job-ready" STEM fields; which basically has the effect of penalising arts and humanities students specifically with disproportionate amounts of debt. From an economic standpoint, this of course makes perfect sense because by shifting the supply curve arbitrarily, you also shift the equilibrium point to a new higher price. Also, since a higher price is a very effective barrier to entry, it means that the government has in effect determined who will study arts and humanities at university, purely on the basis of economic means. It is exactly the same strategy which is played out in school funding and results in economic apartheid by design.

The question of why the government should specifically attack the humanities and the arts, as opposed to the sciences, is both a question of ideology and teleology. It is an ideological question because it relates the enactment of policy and who gets to be able to do it and the telological question has to do with what the government intends education to do. The second is related to the first and is framed in terms of it.

I am convinced that the Liberal Party is running through the list of demands placed upon it by the IPA and is progressively checking them off as the policies that they enact, poison and degrade the proper functioning of democracy. Democracy in principle is government by the demos, that is the people, and while efforts were made to open it up from the 1830s onwards. However, government I suspect is subject to some kind of descriptive equation which always adds up to exactly 1.

Although I lack the tools, my suspicion is that within the confines of the nation state, it is possible to build an equation which describes who controls the total amount of power which exists. Power is enacted through policy and policy involves an entity taking action to achieve and do things. Within the confines of the nation state, we usually assign the authority to write the rules which we call law, to a body called a parliament, or assign them to a person called a president or king or emperor, and we assign the ability to interpret those rules to the judiciary. In times past, those three functions have been vested in a single person. In an Westminster context, Magna Carta in 1215 represents the beginning of rich people having a say, the various reform, sufferage, and representation acts starting in about the 1830s resulted in ordinary people having a say, and trade unionism and civil rights movements resulted in those ordinary people making laws and enforcible them. It is natural that those with more wealth and means should resent ordinary people having any say about how they conduct their affairs and so the last 40 years have been about those people taking back what they think should rightly belong to them.

If a national government is in essence a unitary authority, which is the sole authority to control the rules within the nation, then a great deal of the political fights which happen are going to be about who gets to control that authority. This is why I suspect that this current government has decided to hike the fees on university courses to things like law, finance, economics, law etc. They see those courses of study as the pathways to getting into the parliament and thus controlling the rules within the nation.
Likewise, since the total amount of governance within the nation also adds up to exactly 1, then calling for smaller and more limited government, means that actual governance is transferred out of the parliament and into the hands of companies and organisations which directly control the nation. This is the ideological question. Specifically, who gets to be able to enact policy? If it isn't being done by the government because governments have been forced to step out of the way, by being forced to become smaller and more limited, then the enactment of policy is by default being done by someone else. If there is one thing that powerful people hate, it is someone else having power and them becoming less powerful.

If there is anything that economists, theologians, lawyers, and financiers, s is that everyone without exception is inherently selfish. On average, the centre of everyone's individual observable universe is just shy of an inch from the outside of people's eyeballs. People can only observe the world from their own perspective and because that perspective is constructed by an ego, I suspect that it is literally impossible to build an observable universe where that ego is not the most important thing inside it. Naturally that is going to result in individual selfishness; which when compiled into families and groups, means that there are lots and lots of selfishness feedback loops going on. Also when you consider that people's ability to conceptualise any more than about 23 individual things before they are grouped is mostly impossible, then that results in families, companies, and groups and classes of people acting for the benefit of themselves. All of that roughly explains the ideology of the question here but what of the teleology? Why should selfishness and power have anything to do with the arts? It's easy to explain why powerful people do not want poorer people to have access to the levers of power by limiting their ability to get to them, but artists, that is pure artists, have no real power to change much of anything.

You might be here reading this and wondering what the point of funding the arts actually is. The irony is that you are reading this on a computer, or a tablet, or a phone, which has a graphics interface which has been designed by graphic artists; looking at text which has also been designed by graphic design artists; which in turn was first imagines by movie makers and science fiction writers. Quite literally, the future was written and imagined by artists and then built by boffins in consultation with artists.
Dare I suggest that later on, you will probably watch MasterChef, or Big Brother,  or sport, or a television series, or a movie, or a multitude of other things, which have all been created and crafted by a host of artists. If you now ask what the benefit of an Arts Degree is, then maybe you need to think critically about why you are such a deeply ignorant person.

When it comes to the pure arts though, such as painting, sculpture, theatre, dance etc. even I concede that the direct economic argument falls to pieces. In this respect, I should probably be expected to side with the rentier class whose objection to funding the arts is that because there is 'no obvious economic benefit' then they shouldn't be expected to pay for it. This incidentally is exactly the same general argument against having universities not only be publicly funded but universally available. This is a question of who gets to decide what we all club together and buy. I am not going to side with the rentier class because as a citizen of a nation and a Commonwealth, I believe that the point of banding together is to make the world nicer. Why can't we as a nation have nice things? Moreover, why does the rentier class get to decide that the nation can't have nice things? Why are they morally somehow better than us?

Why then punch specifically at the arts and humanities? The problem with the hard sciences is their stock and trade is with the immutable facts of the cosmos (the word 'cosmos' I am choosing to use in the classical Greek sense of it being the world system; which mostly includes the real physical world and the real objects in space, and how they move etc.). The hardest of the hard sciences is mathematics, which contains elements like arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, calculus etc. which not only do not change but are also impervious to the whims of politics. The humanities though, contain those pesky things called opinions, beliefs, emotions, and feelings, which are all very much subject to change and being questioned.
It is the arts and humanities departments at universities where the very idea of questioning the status quo is both awakened and nurtured. This absolutely scares the people who have and control power because once you give people the tools to question why society is unfair, they tend to want to do something about it.

Please forgive me but I would prefer to live in a society where the products of all of the arts are available to everyone. If we live in a world of nothing but vulgar capitalism, then the only thing that decides what gets produced is what is profitable. That might be all good if you happen to be a rentier whose income comes from the real work of other people but it means that the society itself becomes the consumers of a world of nothing but vulgar capitalism.
People don't go to the theater because they can't afford it but what if they could? People don't go to art galleries as often as they might because either they don't understand art or they can't afford it but what if they could? When the Sydney Symphony Orchestra put on shows in Parramatta Park for free last year, you had a bunch of people show up who almost certainly wouldn't have been able to go to the Opera House. Would society be better off if normal people engaged with the arts? I would think that a better kind of people would emerge.
Moreover, if education generally is reduced to the world of nothing but vulgar capitalism, then what is the kind of society which that is likely to produce?
Australia is begining to see the effects of that experiment in the same way that the United States has already done. What you produce almost by design, is a society which matches the ideology; that is one that is reduced to nothing but vulgar capitalism. The vast bulk of people become just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation. It suits the rich and powerful few to have a dumb population incapable of critical thinking because those people might realise how much they've been shafted and start demanding change.
If the right people don't have power, do you know what happens? The wrong people get it. People who study and become politicians and councillors - ordinary voters, no less!

I hate to tell you arts students but this really isn't about you. You are collateral damage as a result of a rocket which has been fired at the humanities. This stems right to the beginning of the Liberal Party when on opening day Sir Robert Menzies, in the very first speech of the assembly spoke of fighting political warfare.

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