A recent post brought up the mention of art as related to survival. I pondered the question for a while. Is art a necessary component for survival?
Much of my earliest exposure to survival originated from books, both fiction and nonfiction. Among the books I read were the Boy Scout Fieldbook and the novel A Canticle For Liebowitz. Both books had a profound, long term effect on the direction of my prepping philosophy. Canticle For Leibowitz, for those that haven?t read it, is a novel about monks and a monastery that makes an effort to retain knowlege, after a nuclear war. The novel covers hundreds of years, as the order assists in the reconstruction of civilization. The monks painstakingly recreate technical texts in their effort to preserve knowledge, much like monks worked to preserve religious texts in the medieval ages.
There?s no question that hard science is needed for long term survival. Engineering and knowledge of nature and agriculture are both essential . But once you and your ?tribe? are well fed, and reasonably secure, then what? Art takes many forms i.e., literature, music, visual compositions, etc. Art is one of the things that differentiate us from animals. Even the most isolated barbarians still retained some type of crafts, whether styling a hand weapon or creating a clay bowl.
In a true survival situation, yes, I would choose a doctor or a woodsman over an artist. However, given a choice of an engineer or an engineer with a secondary experience in an artform, I would definitely prefer the one with experience in an art. Artists tend to think out of the ?box?. In a dire situation, I think having the ability to improvise will be extremely beneficial, artists generally have that capability.
Having expressed my opinion, what do other folks think?
