The national headlines scream that Stephen Harper's government is going to "axe five more arts and culture programs." Here we go again.

It is not the cuts themselves I'm referring to. Remember the Liberals swung the axe in their day, too. They are the ones that chopped $400 million from the CBC budget years ago.

But here we go again with the whole argument about why we defend the public funding of writers and artists at all. It's our version of a Canadian choral argument, like in those ancient Greek plays, with everyone on stage beseeching each other at the same time.

"Groups protest about catastrophic cuts," I read in the Globe and Mail. But that, of course, is the job of arts advocates. They're even paid to do it as a rule, often by the taxpayer.

But because we North Americans are a practical, materialist bunch, we must always think of reasons to support the arts. Support must have a purpose.

The arts can't be just, well, wonderful, heartening, beautiful. They must be useful.

Economic engine

It used to be, in the 1960s and '70s, that the arts were considered good for national unity, for our sense of collective purpose and identity. We were seen then as a youngish, emerging country with an identity that needed forging.

Then, in the 1980s and '90s, the message changed. We began hearing that the creative arts were good for the economy.

When I was a producer on CBC radio's The Arts Tonight in the 1990s, I heard and produced many such pitches for the value of arts. The performing and visual arts, it was said over and over again, brought in hard cash to the communities that housed them.

They supported restaurants and parking lots and public transit, so the studies showed. People spent more money on arts than on sports, when you factor in movies, theatre, museums and the Cezanne prints you bought for the walls of your TV room.

Brain food

That argument continues today but with a bit of a twist: On the Globe's op-ed page, we read: "Want a culture of innovation? Fund our artists."

Innovation is the new buzzword for the so-called value-added economy: Wealth is now created primarily through intellectual capital, not natural resources. Japan and Microsoft taught us that we don't need coal and wood and mounds of potash: We need smarts.

So the arts became a really big brain gym. We use them to make our brains supple. With a vibrant, state-supported art and culture scene, you will think better and then the value of your enterprising internet start-up will skyrocket.

There is an even older argument that the arts are good for you but it has become something of an embarrassment: The neo-colonial line that told us the arts were the mental equivalent of cod liver oil. Nobody wants that anymore. It is too snobby. Stuff your elitism.

But I am beginning to detect a new pitch for the value of the arts, and the culture of support. It's still utilitarian but on a personal level.

I quote from the Toronto Star, Aug 10: "Read Novels, be Smarter:"

"For the first time in history there is now scientific evidence that reading fiction has psychological benefits" says Keith Oatley, University of Toronto psychologist and an award winning novelist (The Case of Emily V.)

In a series of experiments using people who liked and disliked fiction, professor Oatley apparently discovered that fiction readers demonstrated "substantially greater empathy" than their counterparts.

As Oately explained to the Star, "What you're doing when you're reading fiction is you're allowing yourself to become another person for a short period of time. It loosens up your personality, your rigidities."

Mimetic creatures

So, in a way, reading fiction is good for your social intelligence. That's the term Daniel Goleman uses in his best selling book Social Intelligence (his previous books was Emotional Intelligence, also a best seller).

As anybody who's had a smart but emotionally clueless manager knows, brains aren't enough in the age of collaborative enterprise. You also need empathy.

I have met business consultants who teach the "new empathy" as a way to invigorate workers and their companies. Behind them are findings from the "new neuroscience," which suggest that human being can't really work independently because we are mimetic creatures who like to imitate and broadcast to each other. We are all enmeshed in each other neural circuits.

Readers of fiction, so the argument seems to go, are especially good at working with others since they "read" other people so well. They are practiced in seeing the world through the eyes of fictional characters.

Yes, the argument can and will be employed by economic boosters. If I were a PR person, I would do it myself. The good corporate cook will add a little empathy, a little neuroscience and a good measure of innovation speak.

Readers of novels will be considered assets to the company, which may be good news for women, who read the majority of novels, and bad news for most men, who aren't fiction lovers.

Maybe, some day, guys will be given remedial courses in literature to get them up to snuff and make them more productive.

Forget the arguments

In his new primer, How Fiction Works, James Wood, the New Yorker's book critic, tells a wonderful story about how a local official in a suburb of Mexico City decided his police force needed to become "better citizens."

So he gave them a reading list on which he included works by Cervantes, Agatha Christie and Edgar Allan Poe.

Even his police chief felt reading fiction would enrich his officers. They would acquire experience by proxy. And their ethics and their compassion would be deepened.

How quaint it seemed, said Wood, who went on to note that the "cult of authenticity" in the real world usually disparages book learning

Wood doesn't explain how the experiment went in Mexico City. He is an old fashioned critic (and a marvelous writer). But, thankfully, he offers no economic arguments to justify his love of books.

He does believe that reading extends our sympathies, as the English novelist George Elliot also tells us. It expands and enriches, as do all the arts. It also enlivens and gives enormous pleasure.

Hard to quantify. But I'm happy to bank on that for the moment, particularly when the axe is being swung.