HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK
National Research Priorities Strategic Forum
The Shine Dome, Canberra, 26-27 June 2002
The 'humanities' and the compartments of knowledge
by Lawrence Warner
Lawrence Warner is the Executive Director of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His research interests focus on medieval literature, and he is currently collaborating with Emeritus Professor George Russell FAHA on editing a manuscript for the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. He moved to Australia in 2000, and took up his current position at the Academy in December of that year.
One issue that I think that Leon will also speak to, and that has been spoken to many times, quite obviously, since it has been announced that we are not supposed to ask it, is: what is the role of the social sciences and the humanities in this process? I will say that clearly there has been a problem of communication. Part of the problem goes right to the top. There is a Chief Scientist, there is a committee in which innovation has been defined before anything else as science, engineering and technology. There is no Chief Humanist or Social Scientist, there is no equivalent body for the social sciences and the humanities. There is not yet – at least we hope there will be – a body equivalent to FASTS. So if innovation is Australia's priority, which I think the government has been saying for a while, and it has been defined as a non-social science and humanities discipline or set of disciplines, that is why we are concerned. If there are no humanities scholars on the Taskforce this year, that is another cause for concern. The consultation process had already done some internal consulting before reaching out to us, and I think that these are not insurmountable problems. I think that the fact that the Academy of the Humanities is one of the hosts today, and that I am up here speaking to you, bodes well. But we need to be careful about how we talk about these things.
Another thing is that when people say social sciences and the humanities are necessary to implement whatever priorities you decide – clearly a lot of people have been saying that, we have heard it two or three times today – although I don't blame the committee in the slightest for saying, 'Don't ask that question. We've already considered it,' the assumption behind the question and that answer is that, still, social sciences and the humanities are handmaidens to a whole set of other disciplines. That is also the assumption behind the announcement, 'Implementation is really the only thing that will wait till later. We will consider everything now.' I think it is clear that those kinds of distinctions should not have been made.
That was my preamble. The very helpful comments in Joanne's talk, in particular, prompted me to focus much more specifically.
I will begin by quoting from the abstract of an article that appeared relatively recently in the New York Times, in April 2001:
Intelligence and law enforcement officials say a dire lack of foreign language expertise is undermining America's national security. They note that, in the post-Soviet world, threats are more diffuse and scattered all over the map. Military, diplomatic and intelligence officials warn of critical shortages in their ability to understand languages of other nations and so unravel their secrets. They say the need for language proficiency has grown as security threats have fragmented and the ability to eavesdrop has expanded.
The most glaring example of the problem is that the FBI had ample evidence of terrorist activity long before the attack on the World Trade Centre, but nobody who understood Arabic was involved in the relevant intelligence-gathering operations. In a very eerie scenario, that article was brought to my attention on September 11, Australian time, when the Languages Committee of the Academy of the Humanities had a meeting at DEST to try to implement something for the languages, which are in very bad shape in Australia, and did not get very far. We kind of rolled our eyes at this committee, and then the next morning it had come true and it was quite horrible. This has become something of a genre piece, certainly in the States.
An editorial in October entitled 'America doesn't know what the world is saying' lamented the fact that since September 11 the FBI has been forced to seek out translators of Arabic, the fifth most widely spoken language in the world, and of Pashtu, the language of 35 per cent of the people of Afghanistan, including the Taliban. Earlier this month, in an editorial called 'Lost in translation at the FBI', a PhD and Middle Eastern study has reported:
Less than a week after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, I responded to the FBI's calls for Arabic translators. I know of a half dozen other Middle Eastern studies graduates who also applied – PhDs, who like me are proficient in one or more Arabic dialects as well as in modern standard Arabic. Ultimately, dismayed by what seemed to us the agency's flawed understanding of what proficiency in Arabic means, none of us pursued our candidacies.
The situation in Australia is no more promising. The number of languages taught in Australia went down from 67 in 1995 to 53 in 1999. In the 1970s there were five professors of Russian; today there are none, and virtually no independent departments of Russian. There is no fully dedicated professor of German; we are down to four professors of French.
My point is not so much that languages should be a research priority, although in about five minutes I will be saying that. As we undertake the research priority setting exercise it is imperative that we protect and nurture pure research. This is something, of course, Michael said, and I join many others in feeling that. We simply do not know where future benefits will come from and we must ensure that doors are not closed. If something like September 11 happened here tomorrow and if we found that we did not have the language capacities to have dealt with it, then we would have to wonder why is it that we are waiting for another year even to think about implementing whatever social sciences and humanities priorities might come about. The assumption behind that decision was that they really aren't priorities.
The Academy is deeply concerned about the levels of funding at stake in this exercise, as well. The 33 per cent ARC announcement earlier this year did not instil lots of confidence. It was a real blow. And to have priorities added both this and next year in a zero sum game is a fraught exercise. We just need to be conscious of this. Vicki Sara gave that as the last word at the scoping workshop at Ian Potter House in May, and I was very pleased to hear someone voice this deep concern that we have.
At some point in the next day and a half, if this exercise continues the way it has been so far this month, you will hear a quip about Old Icelandic skaldic poetry. Most likely it will come up with the word 'basketweaving' connected to it. This is of course invoked as an example of the kind of dry-as-dust research that cannot possibly pertain to Australia today, although we are very happy to have it studied – I hope most people would think that – or at least as something that is not relevant to Australia's research priorities. I think, though, this is a salutary example to take on board as we think about the process of the priority setting exercise. We should not be too quick to pigeonhole either skaldic poetry or, indeed, knowledge at large into predetermined categories.
People are not just talking about clouds in the sky when they mention skaldic poetry. This is a project called 'Skaldic poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages', based at the University of Sydney, which is endorsed by the Union Academique Internationale. It is an example of how Australian research is internationally recognised and that we need to be players on the international scene. It is also at the forefront of the use of information technology to push the boundaries of knowledge and innovation. I have just returned from a two-day seminar on the Textual Encoding Initiative, a computer markup language that has placed what might seem to be terribly old fashioned materials at the forefront of scholarship in ways that have immediate attraction to our students. And we should not downplay our students when we are talking about our research priorities, either. It was led by a scholar of Chaucer and the research assistant of the skaldic poetry project. This is a simple reminder that information technology and new media are fields that simply do not fit within the division between SET on the one hand and the humanities, creative arts and social sciences on the other hand, which is just the old C P Snow two-cultures paradigm that the government adopted before the process of consultation even began. If skaldic poetry seems obscure, then I ask you to ask yourself where New Zealand's tourism industry would be if J R Tolkien had not studied it and Old English. It's not a frivolous question.
Where would the Australian film industry be if George Lucas had not been so interested in the writings of Joseph Campbell? And before we laugh too heartily, even if we dismiss those things, we should ask: what will future generations make of the cultural activity in which we are engaged today? Discussion of research priorities is no less concerned with the now national identities and is no less creative than was the creation of skaldic poetry in the Scandinavian Middle Ages.
The Academy of the Humanities, then, would urge the Australian government and the public to dispense with this paradigm to embrace all areas of knowledge from the outset, pointing out that this two-cultures paradigm is neither natural nor particularly helpful. If we were going split the four Academies, we could just as easily have done it – as I have already suggested – as the Academy of Technological Sciences and the Humanities, or by doing the pure research with the Academies of Science and the Humanities, and applied with the others. You can go on like this forever. It is just best to take all of the best minds in Australia from the beginning, we believe, and implement the priorities from the beginning as well.
We believe that nearly all the themes of fundamental importance to Australian research have strong social and human dimensions. It is imperative, then, that Australian humanities and social sciences be involved in these priority projects, and that is why it is particularly disheartening that there are no humanities scholars on the Panel. Poor Minister McGauran said to me, 'Oh, you have Fellows on this Panel,' and I said, 'I don't think so.' 'Well, there are scholars in your disciplines,' and I said, 'No, I really don't think so.' Fortunately, I was very happy that the Taskforce had called my office to ask for recommendations for humanities people. I mean, they did pick it up in good faith, I think; it is just unfortunate that there are no humanities people on the Panel itself.
I am now going to turn to the areas that we do believe should be considered as research priorities. I am going to go ahead and take advantage of this podium to do that, and I am glad that the committee has already asked for this by Friday anyway. We must remember that there are some fields in which Australian research is or must be internationally cutting-edge, there is no question about that. And there are other fields, often of a cultural or a historical dimension, in which research is only likely to occur within Australia because of the uniqueness of the phenomena studied. Joanne has mentioned, of course, that things unique to Australia are things that we should be considering. That seems to be something that is said and then we rush off to say, 'Well, the States are doing nanotechnology so we'd better.' That needs to be thought out more carefully, we believe.
First, the multimedia arts, which I have already touched upon. I am going, just for the fun of it, to call this the Attack of the Clones priority. This is one of the startling growth and profit areas at the turn of the millennium. In contrast with North American and European practice, the multimedia arts and, more broadly, the cultural industries in Australia are little supported by research. They reside awkwardly on the borders of entertainment, art and research. The Australia Council, for instance, has a multimedia panel. The cultural industries so frequently based upon use of multiple art forms – the visual, the sonic, the textual – are the growth industries of today. In Britain, for instance, they employ one and a half million people, and they have become a special initiative of the Blair government. They are essential to the lifestyle and well-being of the young, who, one recent research study concludes, consume such forms of multimedia popular culture for some two hours every day. (If you want your young taxi driver to understand, then call it Attack of the Clones and they'll get it.) Strong Australian investment in multimedia art research is needed if Australia is not to become even more of a derivative culture.
Second, as I have also already mentioned, languages: Multilingual Australia. Australia makes too little use of its linguistic resources. In an age when English is starting to lose predominance as a world language of communication – in 1998, 80 per cent of the materials on the world wide web were in English, and today that is 45 per cent – and when native English speakers are a declining percentage of the world's population and, excluding the US, hold a declining percentage of the world's wealth, Australia is doing little to avoid the drift to a monolingual and monocultural citizenry. The dangers to Australia of pursuing its current path of reduction in language teaching and research are self-evident. By contrast, the European Union has recently developed research and education campaigns with the long-term goal of trilingualism of all European Union citizens – the mother tongue plus one official European Union language plus one other, preferably of a neighbouring state. Australian trade and industry will suffer as e-commerce grows and the very e-medium of that commerce becomes increasingly multilingual. Equally, Australian cultural diversity will suffer. And finally, as I have already indicated and has happened in our neighbour the United States, Australian security will suffer.
Our third nominated priority we will call the Dreaming – Australia's Indigenous culture. Here is an obvious example of something that, if we do not study it, who will? If this falls off because we have announced priorities up to whatever percentage, what will happen to Australian culture? It is a sobering thought. In general, Australian culture, like the environment, is unique. Australian environment has come up a lot, of course. The pre-eminent and most defining element of our culture is our Indigenous culture. We already have a strong base in research about and by our Indigenous peoples. The Academy's Knowing Ourselves and Others report of 1998 identified significant strengths which we would like to be further strengthened.
