And The Meek Shall Rule

We are deemed to be in an age of specialization, one in which even the venerable MBA is viewed as being too general. Consultancies and corporations are now seeking Masters in Management, Finance, Marketing, or Accounting because they are seeking people who know more about less. Not only is this contrary to the very notion of innovation, I will argue that the MBA is not general enough to bring maximum value in a rapidly changing world. In business school, we are taught to study Jack Welch as the epitome of management, but William Shakespeare knew just as much about strategy, management, and human nature. Business ethics courses invariably examine Enron as the ultimate violator, but MBA students would be better served to begin with Machiavelli. And who could teach more about goal obsession than Herman Melville? What follows is my essay calling for more liberal arts education, not less, in the process of crafting the modern, global businessperson.

Even while engineering schools are working overtime to churn out massively protruding left hemispheres with withered frontal lobes, the Information Age is winding down faster than Cher’s latest Botox treatment. When business schools talk about “thinking outside the box” they envision a bigger box, but marketing says, “blue with white racing stripes this time.” Mass communications schools are cranking out talking heads that sound like HAL singing “Daisy” when they are unplugged from the media conglomerate mother ship. Pure science still plays an important role, but let’s face it, they make me nervous with all this chatter about restructuring DNA. We’ll scribble Fermat’s Last Theorem on a box of Girl Scout cookies, throw it into the Biosphere, and communicate over the videophone for the next hundred years or so. And let’s not even discuss the lawyers.

Who will lead this mutant army into the 21st century? What creature can rise from the pit of ignorance and harness the skills that will define society in the next Age? We shall call them “Hew-Men” and they shall be carved from the trunk of a classic liberal arts education. Built on a foundation of arts, literature, philosophy, language, history, political science, and other humanities, they shall define what we are becoming because they know where we have been. Like Newton, they will see further into the future by standing on the shoulders of giants. But what will this brave new world hold for Hew-Man (and his publicist)?

The Information Age will join the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment in the annals of history and none too soon. Our overwhelming specializations have triggered a wave of outsourcing, to the point where a twelve-year-old Romanian orphan has replaced Data and is now running the Starship Enterprise. Thank you very much geeks, we now have computers and the Internet; everything after that will be incremental: “See, if you move the mouse over her sweater, it disappears!” After twenty years of remission, I can almost feel my acne swelling to the surface. Faster processors, bigger hard drives and more bandwidth just means that porn will be broadcast in 3D SenSurround. Business majors will ogle at the development and lay out viral marketing product placement subscription-based models that never need to make a profit, as long as the accountants play ball. 2D faces will chatter about its greatness, failing to mention that their parent company holds a 30% stake. And the lawyers will press their best “perp-walk” suits in anticipation of the whole thing going nuclear. All the while, the world is emerging from its chrysalis and a new age is almost upon us. Unlike the stranglehold that logic has held over us ever since Brattain and Bardeen were poking each other with cat’s whiskers, the next evolution will be conceptual, driven by pure right brain creativity.

The upcoming Age of Abstraction demands pedal-to-the-metal transcendental understanding of the Big Picture and only a broad-based education in the classics will prepare our feeble minds to see the enormity of What Can Be. This new period of social development offers more than simple opportunity for those pursuing arts and humanities, it is a rock-solid guarantee against outsourcing and having to move to the Black Hole of Calcutta to keep your job. Unless you want to move to the Black Hole of Calcutta, in which case your liberal arts education, particularly the philosophy of Camus, will come in quite handy on a daily basis.

The days of the left brain are numbered and rightly so. Let’s face it – massive left brain trauma can now be repaired with a 2 GHz Xeon processor, an iPod and car battery. However, the right brain isn’t quite so simple – not even Deep Blue can comprehend that the Meaning of Everything is 42. When armed with a liberal arts background steeped in the classics, you don’t just think outside the box, you realize that there wasn’t a box to begin with. Try and get a machine to do that! This is not to say that we shall all lounge in a state of perpetual daydream, wearing togas and spouting profundities like a bulemic at the Golden Corral.

Internet-time has sped everything up to a techno-frazzle pace. We don’t have the luxury of whittling a round disk from a block of stone and proclaiming, “I shall call it ‘Wheel.’” There have been a few useful developments in humanity over the last 14,000 years and, to keep us from repeating the past, they can only be instilled with a liberal arts education. Once that knowledge is acquired, the future can be envisioned and attained because the student ingrained in classic liberal arts has also been taught how to think. Autonomously and without umbilical cords. O.K., not exactly independent thought because we are all carrying a lot of psychological baggage, but our student has been taught how to examine their familial Samsonite and deal with it.

Globalization is turning the world into a melting pot that will positively overwhelm anyone that is not culturally literate. If you turn Billy Bob loose at the Jakarta office, soon enough he’ll be naked prey, running through the jungles of Java with Borneo headhunters on his tail. Without cultural literacy, he’ll become Darwinian road kill. Liberal arts gives us the patience to engage in exotic rituals beyond the ceremonial StarbuxMochaFrappuchino. Education in the humanities provides the wisdom to know when you’ve had too much cachasa, and the understanding that she’s either too young, too expensive, or both.

As our society becomes ever more complex, the maintenance of language and linguistics is crucial to our definition of reality. Is he speaking in Ebonics or does he have Ebola? Is reality TV really reality, really? Answers to these age-old riddles can only be approached with a solid background in liberal arts. Remember, whoever defines our culture will control it.

In his polemical 1886 work, “Beyond Good and Evil,” Nietzsche defined the uber-mensch, a superman that will transcend traditional dualisms and exercise his will to power. Only those with a liberal arts education know that Nietzsche went barking mad, like a rat in a tin outhouse on a hot, summer day. The rest will kneel before the icon of Liberal Arts and bow to its ascendancy. At the very least, we’ll make good conversation at the water cooler.