I recently made a lightning visit to Cape Town in South Africa in order to give a lecture. The plan was to spend a week there, but it ended up being only a day due to unforeseen circumstances. During the lecture, it became obvious that the audience had heard enough. So I decided to skip the part at the end, which I already had my doubts about. But I shouldn’t have done that, because I still have the idea that I haven’t really said my piece.
The entire lecture was about my and our chaotic and organic livelihood, in which we try to create the ideal environment for us, one where we can feel like a fish in water – in the belief that this will fulfil the most important criterion for success. At the end of the lecture, I had planned to play ‘una furtive lagrima’ from an opera by Donizetti, who lived more than 150 years ago.
I heard this opera performed recently at the Eindhoven Park Theatre. Miranda van Kralingen, Artistic Director of Opera Zuid, held a passionate plea against unscrupulous cuts to cultural funding, claiming that the survival of the company was at stake. During the opera and in the days that followed, I thought about how culture is the only phenomenon that is of long-term value. Mozart, Rembrandt, Machiavelli, Rietveld and Berlage: everything and everyone ultimately fades away compared to those who create and the creations themselves.
It later occurred to me that science has a comparable status. These two areas, culture and science, readily offer seemingly harmless opportunities for cutbacks. This type of investment is not in keeping with our bubble gum machine mentality, namely, that if you put in a coin, a gumball will (most certainly) pop out. Everyone realises that if you give a scientist a million euros, telling him he needs to make a discovery within a year that’s worth hundreds of millions of euros, you’ll probably be a million euros poorer.
Yet investing in culture and science provides much more certainty of prosperity than any other type of investment. These are essential disciplines for certain progress and value increase in the relatively long term. We simply have to accept the uncertainty about the exact results. Fortunately, creativity and ingenuity are untameable.
After his rather bombastic part of my lecture, I planned to end with an image of the treetrunk garden house we made for Hans Liberg as an example that creating a stimulating environment can also be done on a small scale.
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