I know that this argument has been born out of rage. Rage is bad. It’s an extremity. But some extremities exist for a reason. It’s to counter the other extremes. To push people a little more to the other side, to create balance. Some anomalies are necessary. Stories, innovations, discoveries and geniuses are born out of anomalies. Even the seemingly useless anomalies have a purpose. And that purpose is to just be useless. So that it can create a distinction between the useful and the useless. There are no winners without losers. The winners can only feel great about themselves if they put down the losers, and that’s just the way it goes. Generally.
Let me get personal and play this a little nasty. Most of you must have a friend or a dear family member who’s doing arts, right? A dancer, an English major, a philosophy student, a singing teacher? Now let’s take a close friend for example. Or a sister perhaps. She’s an English major and she’s complaining about how tough her life is and how bad the pay is in the industry. Are you really going to tell her that, “Oh, your pay is much lower than mine because your work is far less significant than mine. Your work doesn’t save any life and neither is it necessary for life’s sustenance. That’s why you get paid less. You get what you deserve and that’s how the world works.”
Sure you may not have said it out loud. But you sure thought it (those who are of the opinion that there exists a hierarchy among professions where one is superior to the other). And this exact thought and feeling of superiority of one over the other is what breeds enmity and social discomfort.
“But we treat everyone with consideration and kindness, irrespective of their profession.” you may say.
Well madam, we also treat people whose values we detest with a certain level of decency. That’s a given. It’s what every human should get, irrespective of their stance. Your kindness is delivered in a sort of charity. It feels like, “I am superior to you, yet I am kind to you because I’m a good person.”
You may try to hide this charitable expression and try to make the kindness genuine. But everything is seen and felt. The diminished respect, the lack of attention given to the words of those are felt by them, even though none of it was explicitly delivered.
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Everybody yearns for respect and admiration. By creating a hierarchy and denying someone equal admiration in their field, you are pushing a person who is supposed to be someone else, into a place that they don’t necessarily belong, just by saying that that place is the only place they will get the respect that they want.
You’re depriving the world of beautiful artists who happen to want respect and admiration a little more than art. They don’t get it in the arts field, so they give it up entirely just for the sake of self respect. Had you given them the feeling wholeheartedly, they would gladly still be an artist, even with a lesser pay. Because a good societal standing will satisfy them much more than a paycheck.
It’s like there are only two options for people with a proclivity for art- become the person that society will admire but give up on your art- or be the person who you’re supposed to be and give up on the respect and admiration.
Your next argument may be, “Science is much more mentally taxing and cumbersome and tougher than arts. If given equal value, nobody will take up sciences and no job will get done, no technological progress will happen.”
To this I say, you’re damn wrong. Art is equally hard. It can be. If you say that it is easier, you are saying that with multiple levels of ignorance that I can’t even begin to explain. And I’m talking about good artists- the dedicated artists who put their life energy into its creation. Sure, a disinterested artist will not be putting in as much effort to really call it a cumbersome task. But neither will a disinterested doctor, right? There’s no nobility in a disinterested doctor, just as much as there is no nobility in a disinterested artist.
What I say is that we should all strive for EXCELLENCE in our own field that we have a natural inclination towards. Excellence, dedication and soul should be the meter to judge how professionally valuable a person is. Not the profession itself. A tag attached to you doesn’t state your value correctly. Only your true self does.
The significance of professions cannot be compared directly. They’re like apples and oranges. And each one cannot exist without the other. They’re symbiotic. Co-dependent. So I certainly will not tolerate this superiority nonsense.
Even in mathematics, when you deem something as insignificant or of lower significance, it means that if that thing isn’t taken into the equation, the end product will be almost the same. But even the dumbest people can tell that in the absence of any one professional sector, the other isn’t just affected or slightly lowered, it literally ceases to exist! So even mathematically, that’s too darn significant. None of these doctors and engineers would be able to carry out their profession with heart, without art, music and literature. They cannot sell their drugs without trade and commerce, they will not have the monetary incentive to do good, without commerce. And neither doctors, engineers or commerce folks can keep their sanity or soul together without arts. They cannot even have a normal neurological development into their supposedly “superior” brains without the beauty of life and nature instilled into their minds in the form of art. There will be no adult human to cure by the doctors or to save by the engineers, if you are broken down from within, with the lack of art. Everybody, in some way or the other has imbibed art through their developmental years, either in the form of lullabies that their parents sang, the bedtime stories they heard or the nursery rhymes which taught them how to use basic vernaculum, because all of this forced down a toddler in the form of lectures or textbooks would be outright preposterous.
