The following is a reprint, with some redactions, from a corporate publication penned by yours truly. It relates to a fundraiser in which I am a committee member. I am addressing a business audience. Not sure how well it sits with the wider organization, but at least Marketing liked it. - CSK
Consider everything you ever thought beautiful and useful in your life. Your home, your car, your computer, the electricity that keeps your family cool in summer, the gas that keeps your loved ones warm in winter, the light bulbs that guide your children's footsteps at night, the treatments that keep their glasses of water safe to drink.
Is there anything in your life worth having that has been untouched by art or science, or the inspirations behind both? Is there anything that has not been made healthier and safer, more beautiful and more likely to flourish, without an appreciation that the world can and should be made better, and the skill to make that world a better and more beautiful place?
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Nothing is made less by the arts and sciences. Almost everything is made better and more beautiful...even how we choose to give thanks for such gifts and the inspiration that sets them to good use.
Nothing made by the hands of man, of woman, or the hands of man and woman together, is made anything but better by the arts and sciences.
Consider what the arts mean over all things: judgment, discretion, appreciation of values and the ability to envision something new, something ideal, something better than what is right before us.
Consider what the sciences mean, in the same fashion: the knowledge by which we judge, discern, evaluate, enjoy and realize the ideal into the real.
And redefine what is real by doing so.
There is nothing in your lives, in the range of your senses, not even outside the range of your wildest notions, that is not amplified and enhanced and glorified by the improvement of the arts and sciences. The first gift is the ability to dream. The second is to make fertile seed of those dreams, and better lives for ourselves, our kindred and our countrymen.
Wherever the arts and sciences are cherished, civilization reigns. And in those lands where all are free to dream and build, all are free, for all can see the difference between right and wrong with their own clear eyes, and preserve what is good and make right what they must.
Where the arts and sciences are in decline, the reverse is true. Where these crafts are mocked or suppressed, hoarded by a few or despised by the many, the good fruit of human enterprise dies on the vine. Even the absence of the arts and sciences is damaging: All are diminished when none are aware of the difference between what is and what should be, between what is and what is possible.
At the heart of the matter, that is what the arts and sciences are about. Not pretty pictures and elaborate equations but visions of better lives and better tools with which to build them.
