Amir Abou-Jaoude Assignment 4

The past is dead. Take any time period--for example, the Victorian era. In that age, there was much discussion about reconciling religion and science. Politicians worried about how to deal with the increasing numbers of the industrial poor. Some rallied against child labor while others advocated for more rights for women. Inspired by Karl Marx, young socialists went on strike on May 1, and anarchists attempted to wreak havoc on every institution of society. Intellectuals of the time wrote lengthy treatises on all these issues. They wrote about the viability of Darwin's evolutionary theories and the reconciliation between religion and science, the dangers of socialism, and the grim future that lay ahead, a future that seemed to be determined by further industrialization.

We do not read those proposals anymore, those works that were so important in their day. Instead, we read the works of Charles Dickens.

Dickens was aware of the economic, political, and social turmoil surrounding his native Britain during the Victorian era. As a young boy, Dickens had worked in factories--forced to shine shoes because his father was one of many thrown in debtor's prison. It was in these sordid surroundings that Dickens got the inspiration for some of his most memorable creations--Fagin, Ebenezer Scrooge, and David Copperfield to name a few. After the publication of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in 1836, Dickens became a celebrity. At the height of his fame, there were even brands of clothing based off of his books. Still, Dickens always remained committed to documenting social issues in his books.  His portraits of orphans, cheaters, and desperate workers captured the Victorian era. Long after the theories of Thomas Malthus and Edwin Chadwick have faded from the popular consciousness, novels like Bleak House and Great Expectations remain widely read.  At the heart of Dickens's work lies two fundamental questions. Where was Britain now, after the Industrial Revolution, and where was it going?

Indeed, all the liberal arts, from literature to the visual arts to theater to film to social studies, attempt to answer variations on those questions. The crux of the liberal arts is perhaps best expressed by the title of a Paul Gauguin painting--Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? The earliest students of the liberal arts attempted to answer those questions. By drawing herds of bison and horses on the cave walls at Chauvet, the first painters tried to capture nature around them and determine their place in the universe. The writer of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh wanted to tell a story from the past so that his readers could apply its lessons to the future. Shakespeare's work looked into the past to answer questions about the identity of Elizabethan England, and the Lumiere Brothers were interested in looking how the past, present, and future affect one another. When Edward Gibbon wrote his chronicle of the fall of Rome, he was also writing about his Europe--a Europe in which ancient political structures were crumbling due to the influence of the American and French revolutions. 

For me, the liberal arts remain a reminder of where my generation fits into the grand scheme of the human experience. As Americans in the 20th-century, we come from a long tradition of progressive ideas. Today, as we face new social, economic, and political issues, we must make choices that will change what the United States is in the future. By examining the living, breathing, artistic records of a past civilization, we can use where we come from to influence who we are and where we are going. As the philosopher George Santayana wrote, "those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it," and the liberal arts remind us of our past and our identity in an increasingly busy world.