The Use and Uselessness of Learning

Abstract

How useless are we? How useless ought we to be? Those of us engaged in the less obviously bread-producing enquiries philosophy, history, pure science, literature and the rest-have now to face these questions afresh. Answers to them which used to be taken for granted are so no longer. Those who control the flow of money have for some time been moving steadily towards a predominant, even a sole reliance on simple, often very short-term economic considerations. That tendency is widespread in the modern world. Sometimes, perhaps, it is just an understandable response of overworked administrators to the complexity of the choices before them. Any simple, quantitative criterion for example, the prospect of commercial profitability within five years-looks welcome to them. Criteria of this kind are so convenient that their force in the administrative machine is now enormous. Yet behind this pragmatic acceptance the attitude also has some ideological backing both from right-wing and left-wing theorists. It is not something that will simply go away. It needs to be explicitly answered. There is indeed something appealing about the mere simplicity of the thought that concentrating on immediate prospects of profit is common-sense, bypassing all the problems and releasing us from artificial complication. But to hope for such simplicity seems strangely optimistic. No sane person, even in the Mafia, runs their own life by calculations of short-term monetary profit. Though the early classical economists did sometimes hold out such hopes, their more realistic successors have always stressed that economics can at best only be seen as a narrow abstraction from human affairs, never properly intelligible without its wider background. 'Economic man' is a convenient ideal figure, not a complete representation of actual people. And even within this limited economic sphere, only the simple-minded would always favour short-term bargains. That obvious fact has been obscured a good deal of late by the rhetoric of 'survivalism'-by suggesting that our situation has already reached the simplicity of desperation. In extreme emergencies, such as earthquake, famine or total war, choices do become simplified in this way. Everything is sacrificed for immediate food and shelter. But that is not where we now stand. The painful complexity of our current choices stems rather from the richness of our resources, which presents a constant series of possible options. Financial pressures have nor reached the point where it makes sense to burn the Titians along with the floorboards and to eat seed corn, or to melt down all the saucepans to make fighter planes. Choices about funding for various areas of knowledge must therefore be made, and made by discriminating. What principles should decision-makers consider in doing