A collage of literary references provided by Ali Madeeh Hashmi in his article
The Measure of All Things: Teaching Ethics via Humanities
Ali Madeeh Hashmi*
“…the proposition that we can look into another person’s heart with perfect clarity strikes me as a fool’s game. All it can do is cause us pain. Examining your own heart, however, is another matter. I think it’s possible to see what’s in there if you work hard enough at it”
“Drive my car” Haruki Murakami
A physician friend once laughingly accused me of being a “Sophist.” He meant it as a backhanded compliment, but it did get me thinking. In ancient Greece, Sophists were men of erudition and wisdom who could be hired as teachers or advocates for a particular argument. The criticism against them was that they could be paid to argue whichever point of view needed to be propagated. The comic playwright Aristophanes referred to them as “hair-splitting wordsmiths.” My friend meant to apply the term admiringly to how I could sit with seemingly anyone and get along with them including people who held diametrically opposed worldviews.
I have told this story many times to my students as a teaching point since my medical specialty, Psychiatry, defies easy categorization. We are medical doctors, to start with, but then veer off into territory that has little in common with what doctors do day to day. Our work also encompasses many areas which have little or nothing to do with what is taught in medical college: religion, philosophy, culture, anthropology, sociology and, yes, ethics. In addition, coming from a family of writers and performing artists, I had always been drawn towards music, poetry, dance, theatre, painting and the like. So the inclination to find some common ground between the work that I do day to day as a practicing psychiatrist and all of these other areas of interest had been around in my mind for a long time before I discovered, to my delight, the field of “Medical Humanities.”1
As a young academic freshly returned from the USA to Pakistan, I also discovered sympathetic journal editors who liked my unusual (in Pakistan) take on matters related to psychiatry and medical practice. Many years ago, I developed an interest in the sensationalist, mercurial short storywriter Saadat Hasan Manto and wrote a piece about him.2 Later I also wrote about other prominent men of letters from our region and the West including the “God of poetry” (Khuda-e Sukhan) Mir Muhammad Taqi Mir, the syphilitic French writer, Alphonse Daudet and others.3,4
And along the way, it became obvious why medical humanities has become such an important part of core medical curricula in the West and how the humanities can, literally, make better doctors (and better human beings). Ethics, including “bioethics,” has of course been an established discipline in the West for close to a century when the term was first coined. And with the pace of technology accelerating with each passing day, it has assumed ever more importance: surrogate motherhood, cloning, end-of-life issues, organ donation, questions about gender, healthcare resources utilization, there is hardly any area in medicine that is untouched by ethical issues. As ethicists, we claim to set the highest “ideals” of behavior (as opposed to the “floor,” the basic minimum as defined by law). And in a rapidly evolving society like Pakistan, this is no small matter.
At the same time, in a society like ours, riven by poverty, social inequality and violence, what use is an abstract concept like “ethics”? The answer is obvious: if we claim to set the highest standards of conduct and behavior, we are the ones who must identify and define the factors which condemn so many people to utter destitution and, more importantly, must suggest ethical answers to them. As Manto says “If you are unaware of the times in which we are living, read my short stories. If you cannot tolerate them, it means this age is intolerable. My writing is not at fault. I do not wish to agitate people’s thoughts and emotions. How can I disrobe civilization, culture and society when it is, in fact, already naked?”5 Manto here encapsulates the essence of political economy, philosophy and empathy into four lines of text which, if one wanted, could be expanded into a whole class (or a whole course of study). Let’s take another example: when John Lennon, the lead singer of the world- famous band “The Beatles” wrote and sang his iconic song “Imagine” (1971), it became an international anthem for peace and tolerance. Those few lines, set to a quiet, haunting melody asked us to “Imagine there’s no countries/It isn’t hard to do/Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion, too/Imagine all the people/Livin’ life in peace/Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can/No need for greed or hunger/A brotherhood of man.” That song can teach us more about empathy and social ethics than a semester’s worth of classes. When Pablo Picasso painted his “Guernica,” he needed nothing else to illustrate the horrors of war, injustice and the pain of humankind such that when a Nazi Gestapo officer in occupied Paris pointed to the painting and brusquely asked Picasso “Did you do that?” Picasso famously replied, “No, you did.”
All of this is not to say that a formal study of ethics (or any other discipline) can be circumvented by reading a poem or listening to a song. In an area as delicate as bioethics, context matters and, especially for budding bioethicists, the core concepts and fundamentals need to be learned and understood well before venturing into the “real world.” But teachers can find much that is useful (and engaging!) in the humanities. And today, when all the talk in academia is about “interdisciplinary” and “transdisciplinary” studies, why would we not utilize the distilled wisdom in literature, poetry, music, philosophy and so many other disciplines to teach ethics? Even here in Pakistan, the Higher Education Commission which regulates all college and university education in Pakistan has come out with a mandate for humanities to be taught as a core course in all undergraduate disciplines. Of course, all of this presupposes that bioethics teachers are themselves, at least familiar with some of these areas. In our part of the world, reciting a famous verse by the poet Ghalib or a saying by Persian writer and poet Sheikh Saadi has been a way of making a point for centuries. Thus incorporating humanities into teaching bioethics should be an easy task. When Saadi says “Buzurgi b’aql, na b’saal/tawangari b’dil, na b’maal” (eldership is (by virtue) of intellect, not age/Wealth is (by virtue) of magnanimity, not riches), he is commenting on so many things: youth, old age, wisdom, happiness, wealth, poverty, the “generation gap” and so on. Learning about “Beneficence,” “Autonomy” and so on is essential but literature, poetry, music and other humanities can help us imbibe all of these concepts so easily and quickly while expanding the horizons of our mind beyond the narrow confines of classrooms, hospitals and clinics.
And in the end, what is ethics except for a way, as Murakami says, of trying to understand what is inside our heart of hearts; the universal standards that make us human and bind all of us together in our common humanity, across the ages and across all distances. If we can touch something inside another person’s heart by feeling what is inside ours, our shared humanity can teach us all we need to know.
References:
1 Cole TR, Carlin NS, Carson RA. Medical humanities: an introduction. Cambridge University Press; 2014 Oct 31.
2 Hashmi AM, Aftab MA. The Touch of Madness: Manto as a Psychiatric Case Study. Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences. 2013 Sep;29(5):1094.
3 Dreams are wiser than men: Papercuts [Internet]. DWL. 2016 [cited 2022Oct23]. Available from: https://desiwriterslounge.net/articles/dreams-are-wiser-than-men/
4 Latif A, Malik MF, Hashmi AM. In the Land of Pain. Annals of King Edward Medical University. 2016 Sep 9;22(3).
5 Jalal A, Jalal N (eds). Manto “Adab-e Jadeed”, Sang-e-Meel Publications, Lahore, 2012.