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The Death of Liberal Education: Its Implications for the University, Democracy and the American Polity

By “liberal education” I refer to two competing things which have been in tension since the ancient world, both of which have traveled under the label “liberal education”: 1) the tradition of seeking the truth wherever it is to be found and however “useless”[i] or inconvenient it may be, a tradition commonly seen as flowing from Socrates’ unrelenting questions and advice to those who would remain good to avoid politics, and embodied in Aristotle’s idea that man is first of all, before he is a political animal, a contemplative being, a being intended for a life of theoria 2) the tradition of preparing people for civic life, the life of free citizens, especially articulated by Cicero.[ii] The former tradition prepares one for failure, that is for being conquered by the world as it is, and is exemplified by the deaths of Socrates and Jesus; the latter hopes for success, and is exemplified by the Utah legislature or almost any elected official speaking of education as a road to rising in the world and making more money.

Framed in its most plausible form, the idea of an education suitable to a free citizen, the second tradition has been the special preserve of those who see education as having an overriding goal, enculturating a person into some specific society, making him a functioning and productive citizen of that society. Hardly ever has either of these two traditions existed in a pure state; commonly they are run together, as in the title of the present essay. Indeed, there is a case to be made that education must participate in both idealism and realism, that is, cannot but stand in tension between quest for the truth and a reading of the times.[iii] Historically most education has mixed the useless and useful together, for instance valuing both the quality of one’s conversation and the fact that the ability to speak well allows ingratiation into others’ good opinion. A person could be valued both for his conversation itself, and
then seen as someone likely to be able to persuade others to desirable courses of action.[iv]

The distinction between education for truth and education for success seems to be unfamiliar to many today, and a word needs to be said about this. Stanley Fish contrasts the teacher who asks “What do you think?” with the one who asks “What is the truth?”[v] It is this latter who fosters education for truth. Outside the so-called hard sciences and various vocational fields, it is not very popular today to say that education is about finding and teaching the truth. The universities have a kind of schizophrenia necessary to prosper in a pluralistic society, on the one hand refusing to stand in loco parentis, that is to back some positions as actually true and to teach some particular idea of goodness, but often in fact doing just this. For a long time Americans were shielded from the full implications of the fact that they were “a bar room brawl of contrasting cultures” by the strength of the Protestant establishment, but now that that has dissolved and we find that we are to praise what we formerly denied, the schools have lost what moral compass they once possessed.[vi] Likely they preach such “safe” things as tolerance and diversity, and refuse to take a stand on more controverted questions. What we get is a short list of things that may be treated as “obviously” true, and a longer list of all those issues on which there is too much disagreement in society to hazard a stance. Especially in K-12 but also in the colleges, though the language may be of “teaching values,” prudence suggests keeping one’s mouth shut. How after all in a pluralistic society can there be universally “shared values”? Anything but a pluralism of the surface involves discordant world views, incompatible ideas of the good. Even something like “tolerance” is not really a universal value, but a value affirmed in certain influential circles.

It has been said that ancient Greek culture was a success culture, both at the beginning, and if we are counting noses, all along the way.[vii] Homer’s heroes are men who strive to succeed in any situation, and so it is no surprise, not having discovered the English notion of sportsmanship, that they cheat, especially in sports, if it wins them the prize. Odysseus delights in showing how he can rise above disadvantage, how he is the cunning one who can master any problem. He does not so much aim at truth as at excelling. Until today, this is the primary ethos of the Mediterranean, the ethos of the Sophists, with their promise to educate one to win friends and influence people.

Into this world Plato was born, and he took a very different view, a view often read unto all the Greeks by people who have not studied them very carefully, but arguably always the view of a minority. What we learn from the life of Socrates is that, beside piety, coming to know the truth is the most human—but also divine—of all human activities. When eventually the Athenians sentenced Socrates to death, one of the three charges against him was corrupting the youth, that is, teaching the young to seek the true, even if it lead to rejection of conventional wisdom, the wisdom of the father and the city. The Athenians had enough of Socrates finding the holes in conventional arguments and—even worse—teaching the young how to do this. That democracy was a special object of his scorn, and in a situation in which some could see that indeed Socrates was right to trace Athens’ disastrous course in the war against Sparta to the misjudgments of its democratic government, did not help. Hence,  Socrates’ argument that a wise man avoids politics.

Most Greeks refused to accept the cogency of what Socrates said, or to admire his willingness to die rather than save himself. That is, most Greeks remained oriented to success as the goal of life. But some of the later Christians—followers after all of a crucified God—did see Socrates’ point. This is why in the second century Justin Martyr, stating that in the times before Christ those who lived reasonably were Christians, specifically named Socrates (The First Apology, 46). In being faithful to the truth, Socrates anticipated the life of Jesus, “the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6).” No more than most Greeks did most Christians follow such a form of life, but roughly what the Christians called “saints” were a band of people, found in every age, who place fidelity and truth over success. Educationally they are allies of our first tradition, willing to be martyrs because clinging to and aiming at the truth. Not all of them are contemplatives by any strict definition, but they all see temporal advantage as not worth winning at the expense of fidelity to the truth.

If in America we now have “busy” religions which often present themselves as means to success, and which, having long ago driven off the monks, hardly have any contemplative dimension to them, we can begin to suspect how dead the first tradition of liberal education must be.[viii] Even the well-meaning think of the restoration of liberal education as consisting of instituting a few more courses reading great works of literature, or perhaps studying history in more depth, or requiring a foreign language or two. Liberal education is hardly understood as determination of and adherence to the truth. Again, how could we pursue such a project in a pluralist or multi-cultural society? In fact, conceiving of the highest form of education as quest for the truth is likely to win one the label of being “authoritarian” or the reward of being classified with those who oppose “diversity.”

When I speak of the death of liberal education, it is primarily the death of the first tradition to which I refer, but as I have already said, arguably both are dying. The first tradition never had much of a place in American culture, with its emphases on action, pragmatism, and a reduction of religion largely to moral categories. The great philosophers had said that the contemplative life aims at the great transcendentals of the good, the true, and the beautiful, but in America, if any of these have been of concern, it has been largely the good. The second educational tradition is dying for a whole host of reasons, commonly recognized, and centering in the United States on the refusal of students to work hard or of parents and teachers to demand much, what we might call democratic laziness. Since people still insist on being thought well of and on thinking well of themselves, things like grade inflation are an almost inevitable result. As the United States sinks to the level of a third-world country in which cultures of incompetence make it difficult to compete on the world market, or perspicaciously to handle one’s own financial affairs, the decay of the second tradition of education makes it ever more difficult for the young to cope with the problems of everyday life.

* * *

Historically both the tradition of seeking the true and the tradition of  preparing for success began in some form of elementary study by which one acquired the tools of learning, typically some form of grammar study, which could then pass on to a trivium (originally grammar, rhetoric, and logic).[ix] This could in turn expand into some form of a quadrivium (originally arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) of more advanced studies which allowed the student to understand in a general way the main fields of knowledge and their relationship to one another. As knowledge increased, there were various attempts to expand the curriculum to, as they say, keep up with the times. The most historically important of these was the Jesuit ratio studiorum of 1599, which formed the education of much of the upper and upper middle class into the twentieth century.[x] By origins this was a Catholic form of education, but in Europe it provided a program of studies crossing confessional divisions. This education was unabashedly elitist, aimed at insuring both that one would share a common knowledge with other educated men, and that this knowledge would be a real knowledge that could be transferred into an influential life in society. In a certain sense, what I have been calling two opposed traditions came together, for the conviction was that truth really makes a difference, and that therefore a correct knowledge of the world makes one more effective in the world. The Jesuit goal was not to flee politics, but to shape them to the greater glory of God. Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605), an essay on why Christians come to grief in this world, might be taken as a dissent.

The Jesuits gave liberal education its classical shape for centuries. All through the European middle ages and then into the early modern period, the ancient classics, first Latin and later Greek, had a pride of place in study. Though it is not surprising that the literary patrimony of the past was the basis of present study, in one respect, this was odd. As Christianity spread the Christians had formed a Christian culture of their own, producing great works, say of literature, works such as The Song of Roland, Parzival, or the Divine Comedy. But it hardly occurred to the Christians that the new culture they had created, an embodied form of Christianity, might itself become the basis for study. Of course in their love of the Bible, more generally their study of theology, it did, but the surprising fact is that when in the sixteenth century the Jesuits composed their curriculum, it was rooted in study of the ancient Greek and Latin, largely pagan, classics. So it was to remain into the twentieth century, even at such bastions of Protestantism as the northern universities, Oxford or Helsinki, or at Harvard in the New World. Critical here was the fact that a common curriculum created a common European culture, with common values and a common intellectual inheritance. When we speak of the growth of multiculturalism today, we are describing the disappearance of this common memory and identity.[xi]

This kind of education, built around knowledge of Greek and Latin, now has almost vanished, but for many people formed in it, its slow fading away marked what they meant by the decline of liberal education. The Great dividing point in the United States was the Second World War, after which millions of young men, who before the war could hardly have expected a college education at all, came flooding into the schools on the G.I. Bill. My own university had only about 5000 students in it before the GIs returned, but of course there has since that time been a continuing expansion in which higher education has become available to almost everyone. Throughout the country the state campuses have multiplied, along with the community colleges. An almost inevitable result of this expansion has been the jettisoning of liberal education by almost anyone’s definition but a Dean’s. Understandably careerism rules, that is the need of students to prepare for careers, for they no largely come from the upper classes, and must prepare for a life of work.

My argument is not simply that liberal education by almost any definition has vanished, though people continue to speak of it, but that it has vanished because the society on which it had depended has vanished. Here I would invoke the analysis of John Lukacs. Lukacs argues that we are living at the end of a bourgeois age in which some of the most valued achievements of the last 500 years, including print culture and liberal education themselves, have been diminished beyond recovery.[xii] We can easily expand Lukacs’ list of what is disappearing to include piano lessons as a required rite of childhood, attendance of live opera and symphony, and newspapers. Here in Utah, though the size of the newspapers has declined, some of this is not as obvious as elsewhere, for there are some advantages to being “out of it.”

Many things have contributed to the decline of high and middle-class culture, some of them when they first appeared not at all seeming to be enemies of liberal education. When, for instance, the GI Bill was first written at the end of World War II, the advantages of sending millions of ex-soldiers into the educational system seemed such an obvious benefit to them, an obvious “thank you” for their wartime service, that few talked about the likely impact of this on elite liberal education. Who then predicted state legislatures utterly disinterested in the contemplative aspect of liberal education but very interested in educating as many as possible for productive careers as cheaply as possible? Who foresaw the pressures of such developments in favor of what in Utah are called “articulations,” treating courses from all the campuses of a state system as if they were equally demanding or equally well informed? Again when about this time government and business became increasingly involved in higher education, hoping for the universities to help them in their research and so forth, who forecast the coming dependence of whole departments and colleges on such industries as the pharmaceutical?

* * *

Democracy, so dependent if it is to be intelligent on study of such things as geography, language, politics, and the cultures of others, is in terminal arrest, if not dead, replaced by democratic populism. In the United States, a nation of neophiliacs, one can win an election by just repeating one word, “change.” I must be frank and confess that I never believed in democracy as a form of government anyway, whether direct or representative. The only understanding of democracy I would defend is one which intends advocacy of a fixed constitutional and legal order. But then I would point out that one does not need a democratic form of government to achieve those objectives. They have existed in many centuries and places which did not have a democratic form of political life.

The reasons thinkers gave from the ancient period into early modernity for seeing democracy as one of the worst forms of government have always seemed to me obviously true. Further, I can not see that we even live in a democracy. What we generally have world-wide, where democracy is claimed, is managerial states. But let me withhold my reservations and ask what is necessary for democracy to flourish. Constitutional democracy for it to be intelligent depends on an electorate which is literate, studies the issues, and is self-disciplined. We have none of this. In fact, Jay Leno through his Jay-Walking makes us laugh at the monumental ignorance of so many Americans. And of course Leno picks especially on college students. I grant that, for his jokes to be jokes, there must be a fair number in his audience who do grasp the facts, but I am certain that any reasonably well-read person in our society judges the level of any shared useful civic knowledge as being very low. Mark Bauerlein of Emory has titled a book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; or Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30.[xiii] We will return to the relation of the computer to “dumbness”—or rather ignorance—below, but one can hardly be unaware of the drop-off in reading habits that has followed in the wake of the so-called communications revolution. I don’t know how many have seen the recent Catherine Deneuve movie, “A Christmas Tale,” (2008) but it once again reminded one how France is still, relatively speaking, a nation of readers, or at least that older Frenchmen still read. The head of the family, the owner of a chemical factory and therefore not what we would consider one of the literati, even brings a book to the dinner table to read during family squabbles. My local Salt Lake reviewer typically warns his readers that such French movies are “talky.”

Constitutional democracy depends also on families, churches, and communities which nurture such of the civic virtues as self-discipline, but all these are weakening under the onslaught of liberal mass culture and consumerism, the desire for the ephemeral. In 2007 PBS’ “Frontline” mounted a truly sobering series, “News War,” analyzing the present state of the news media and showing how especially economic factors are undermining their very existence, let alone quality.[xiv] Slogans rather than analysis are the order of the day, and the news broadcasts have as much the flavor of game shows as of anything informative. Bauerlein argues that there is a direct correlation between time spent on screen and one’s ignorance of complex words. Can anything but tyranny lie on the other side of such developments?[xv]

The spread of the horizontal world-wide youth culture that has followed on the communications revolution does not just mean that every day popular culture trumps what is left of elite culture, but that adulthood or maturity itself is disappearing. More and more Americans never grow up, never even want to grow up. Their desire is the opposite, to be always young. No one wants to be the disciplinarian, to encourage adolescents to leave adolescence, and the psychology departments encourage immaturity at every step, labeling persons who promote maturity as “authoritarian” or “intolerant.” One writer has spoken of “the death of the grownup.”[xvi] As people read less and less, they will less and less know the ideas our civilization has carried, and be evermore more poorly equipped to exercise intelligent citizenship.

Lukacs’ analysis brings out the universal significance of what various critics have been saying about this or that cultural development. For instance, Charles Rosen has written about what has been happening to music under the pressure of technology.[xvii] The adoption of the metranome in the nineteenth century represented a certain victory for mechanization in which an abstract or mathematical time was imposed on the flights of the spirit; but now recordings threaten live music itself, destroying more than advancing live public music in all but those large cities in which the opera and symphony orchestra still can survive. Even there, the pop music concert dwarfs the symphony concert. Of course the “listening public” for classical music has decreased for many reasons, but the outcome is a death of the music which had once been supported by bourgeois culture analogous to the far-advanced demise of reading.

I read some time ago that the vocabulary in college textbooks in my own field, history, had been reduced by 40% during the last ten years to accommodate the decreased vocabularies of young Americans. In the new age of oral culture which is upon us, fed above all by the communication revolution and the computer and the English departments, we may expect growing illiteracy and inability to express oneself clearly. Many students already are unable to identify the parts of speech. The drug-enhanced haze of the popular music concert, with its obliteration of the self-conscious individual the bourgeois age had fashioned and valued, will for the most part have replaced the elite culture of the symphony hall or the opera house. Some new form of the oral culture put behind by the advance of Christianity as a “book-religion” in the early middle ages and the discovery of the printing press in the late middle ages, now is upon us.

“Print culture,” that is the culture of the bourgeois age that is now closing, was itself “just” the form that a book culture going back to late antiquity took when the printing press was invented in the fifteenth century. Larry McMurtry, a partisan of the old culture, writes of his own experience:[xviii]

“Today the sight that discourages book people most is to walk into a public library and see computers where books used to be. In many cases not even the librarians want books to be there. What consumers want now is information, and information increasingly comes from computers. [Computers] don’t really do what books do and why should they usurp the chief function of a public library, which is to provide readers access to books? Books can accommodate the proximity of computers but it doesn’t seem to work the other way around. Computers now literally drive out books from the place that should, by definition, be books’ own home: the library.”

Without pausing here either to share in McMurtry’s lament over what is disappearing, or to try to speak of possibilities present in what is appearing, we might simply observe that the computer is bringing a new oral culture in which, though of course one must have print to use the computer, one reads for information, not generally for enjoyment or to liberalize one’s view of the world. We might speak of the kind of reading involved in using the computer as “half-oral.” It still involves reading, which pretty much disappears from the zombie-like world of the iPod.[xix] My own university is proud of The Princeton Review ranking it as the third most high-tech campus in the country, with apparently no one pondering the cultural downsides of this. Many things in their old forms are in danger, for instance religion. Christianity came to center stage in the world of the book, and we can reasonably ask what the passing of the book, that is of a culture built on reading, means for Christianity, a “Buchreligion.”[xx] Is the answer not already appearing in those “oral culture” practices of our day, for instance in church music generated more by pop culture and the guitar than in continuity with the church music of the past? Do not the so-called mega-churches herald a repackaging of worship as entertainment, at the furthest distance from a worship centered on silence and contemplation?

We of course still have elites, but these in our society arguably serve rather different purposes from the educated elites of the period that is ending. For instance, although education has always provided pathways to personal advancement, it hardly ever in the ancient, medieval, or early modern period was solely that. Widely accepted was the idea that education was to make one a more complete human being, that education was about matters of truth and falsehood and things that to know and live by made one a better human being. The educated man, say the town doctor, was expected to play in the town string quartet. Since the things which enrich human life are presumably approximately the same for all educated people, so far as formal education was concerned, considerable thought had to be given to curricula, to deciding what things the educated should know for sure. Now all this is gone, and, except in a few hold-out schools, education has become largely utilitarian. My own university like most advertises not that it will give you the knowledge without which life is empty, but career success.

The decay of what early modern Europeans thought of as liberal education has been going on for a long time. About a century ago George Santayana thought Charles W. Eliot, the President of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, an ominous first-fruit of the destruction of liberal education in the name of preparation for successful careers. Today much discussion is given to entrance standards, but not much to what one should actually learn once admitted. What discussion occurs is normally inside departments and aimed at what a major should know of his chosen discipline. The discussion of what a human being should know qua human being, a discussion of its nature extra-departmental and therefore likely under the purview of some dean, is generally very muted. For a host of reasons, the consensus seems to be that there can no longer be a consensus about curricular matters, so deans give leadership on things quite peripheral, often essentially social questions such as diversity, about which—irony of ironies—there may be some consensus.

And so we have a spate of recent books on “the aimlessness and moral confusion” of American higher education, whether at elite or non-elite schools.[xxi] Most schools have given up on, or find risible, the idea that they should form good human beings. Whether this was an inevitable product of democracy or not—and I am inclined to say that it was—it certainly makes democracy by most conventional understanding impossible. To educate good people you need the consensus about the nature of the good that aristocracies, even bourgeois societies, not democracies, typically produce. The great dream in America, especially since the second half of the nineteenth century, held at all levels of education, was that the common school—public education—could supply the needed consensus about the good, producing shared values and common loyalties, above all to the state.[xxii]

Much of the narrative of modern European history centers on the state’s continuing attempt to monopolize more and more of life. In the early modern period this involved reducing the power of nobility and Church; especially, in regard to education, of Church, since it was the Church that, everywhere, provided the schools.[xxiii] The situation in America was different, partly because still in the eighteenth century generally in Europe one dominating Church, usually Catholic but sometimes Protestant, provided education, whereas in America there were many churches; and partly because the existence of federalism in America made any control of religion/education by the federal government more difficult. The struggle of state against church necessarily had in America to be more defused. The American form of state monopoly, especially in the wake of John Dewey (1859-1952), pragmatism, and progressivism, has been the common school. The public school has been used in the face of ethnic and religious pluralism to propagate a common civic religion or patriotism, belief in America itself (the religion of America is America).[xxiv] For a while, especially if one were part of the Protestant majority, this seemed to work. Now that the surreptitious struggle against pluralism of earlier American history, caught in the slogan ex pluribus unum, has faltered in the face of a more full-blown advocacy of diversity, the question increasingly is what values are to be taught. As already said, this question can have no certain answer in a democracy composed of those with deep differences in world view.

Some continue to struggle against what education has become. Andrew Delbanco thinks that a true liberal knowledge should be contemplative, that is, not informed by any practical end, but he also sees that the universities are so compromised by commercial culture—especially in such areas as pharmacology and the biological sciences, with their constant promises of another breakthrough if only they are funded, that they can never “return” to pursuing such a disinterested end.[xxv] Perhaps not noticing how many formerly liberal arts colleges in the last generation have redesignated themselves universities, he hopes that the liberal arts college may still be true to its mission of allowing students “to think and reflect before life engulfs them,” and acknowledges, the “need for cultured authority” if this is to be, but does not seem to see the significant role his own liberalism has had in making such authority impossible.[xxvi] I mean by this last remark that central to most contemporary forms of American liberalism is the idea that freedom is the most important public value, and that this means that diversity is to be prized. Prioritizing these values makes the shared curriculum and required courses of the traditional understanding of liberal education impossible in any public institution of higher education.

* * *

Is there then anything to be done? It seems to me that from deep in its history, every culture forms around a nexus of beliefs and ideas the truth and falsehood of which it is likely to live out until the end. The American sources, so far as beliefs and ideas are concerned, are dominantly two, the low-church Protestantism in place by the early Federal Period, and the commitments of the Enlightenment, centered on the Revolutionary triad, “Liberty, equality, fraternity.” Neither of these is an auspicious foundation for building a polity, especially after the republicanism of the founding period had taken on more democratic form. Except as an exercise in clearing the mind, talk of ideal forms of government is hardly to the point, and like all other cultures, we likely will bear the impress of our time of origination—especially of the valuing of the individual and of freedom in both low-church Protestantism and the Enlightenment—until the end. The most we can do is to try to bring to public consciousness the dangers for any polity of a national experience shaped by these two factors. This may limit the destructiveness of living a life built on American presuppositions.

Let me then make an argument which for almost everyone, though for different reasons, is, as they say, off the screen. First, I take humans by their nature to be religious animals. Aristotle said something true and important when he said man is a rational and political animal, but it is even more important to note that first man is a religious animal. Virgil saw this particularly clearly when he presented Aeneas as pious, as orienting himself in this world by accepting his place in the generations, carrying on the work of his father, and nurturing his son. But much earlier some of the pre-Socratics, and then both Plato and Aristotle, had seen that before being a political animal, man is a contemplative animal. Aristotle’s discussion of this is particularly interesting. He saw that man is characterized by his possession of reason, and that man is naturally a social being, but he was most intrigued by the way in which man dwells in a border region between human and divine. Man is capable of theosis, divinization, sharing in the life of the gods. Thus, Aristotle holds, though humans are born into families, an evidence of their social orientation, they are also born to live in quest of the truth, not because this is useful, but because they are oriented to knowledge in itself. Another way of saying this is to say that man’s deep nature is contemplative. Though, yes, he is social and political, he may pass beyond society—in a sense beyond humanity—to share in God’s life as a knower. In the order of time he is first of all social, but in the order of being man is contemplative. Though he must have money, he is not made to make money, but to have the leisure a modest property allows in order to share in God’s life of theoria. The medieval Christian way of putting this, when asked why God created things at all, was to answer to enjoy them, that is to admire their goodness for goodness’ sake.

These are thoughts very far from American perceptions, but they do provide a measuring stick for seeing how “hopeless” liberal education in America is. We do not admire monks, the Christian successors of Aristotle living an analogue to his life of theoria. We admire business men and people who make a lot of money, and tend to reduce things which should be useless, say sport, to forms of money-making. Even the serious among us tend to assume that good literature or art should be edifying, rather than the source of joy. That is, having in this low-church Protestant, Puritan, culture lost a sense of how central the transcendental of beauty should be to life, we see only the good, not the beautiful, as a shaping virtue. The idea that liturgy or worship makes humans beautiful—not specifically good, but beautiful—is almost beyond our experience. A pagan Greek could see that if you wanted fully developed humans they had to be surrounded by beauty, because beauty would shape them; but we for the most part think of our cities in functional terms, as places of money-making. So far have we lost our way, and our educational institutions have colluded at each step in this. At the practical level, since we have almost lost the sense that religion is at the core of culture, that is, that cultures are embodied religions, we can not understand either ourselves, that is the kind of culture a largely low-church Protestantism has produced, nor others.

So, again, what can we do? We can tell the truth, that democracy as we have it is largely a flattering thing, telling people that they can have an intelligent polity without great effort, indeed without great intelligence. Human beings have many weaknesses and limitations, but democracy tends to be in alliance with dreamy ideas such as that of progress or the elimination of human limitations. One of the principal reasons why there has been a war between science and religion in the last few centuries is because Christianity used to tell the truth, and therefore to contradict all the propaganda on behalf of science suggesting that we are not finite and sinners. Science on the other hand has made its way by lying or flattery, by presenting itself as the avant garde of an unending progress, by promising us unlimited power over things and ourselves. Especially in America since the Enlightenment, we have for the most part—Herman Melville is the exception—had an optimistic culture, dishonest in its understanding of man and history.[xxvii] Christianity, until important forms of it were suborned into themselves believing in progress, had in this situation the unenviable task of pointing out that the idea of general progress has everything going for it but the facts.[xxviii]

Since the Scientific Revolution science has made its way increasingly by claiming to be judged by no other discipline. The first to go was theology as the Queen of the Sciences. But now, at least in the United States, most scientists claim there should be no limits on what they can do. On the face of this, this is a most improbable claim, for already Aristotle, in distinguishing between science and wisdom, noted that there are many fields which can generate knowledge, but not order it. To speak in modern voice, physics can tell us how to make an atomic bomb, but it can not tell us whether we should do this. If any fields could tell us this, they would be ethics or politics. By definition this means that physics is not autonomous, and should not act independently of ideas coming out of other fields. But the claim of recent centuries has been that science is autonomous, and science has fostered the belief that our ideal—that is the ideal of individuals—should be autonomy. We now have a civilization in which the idea of freedom is a kind of ground bass, in spite of the fact that such a notion makes any idea of a common good impossible. We have a supreme court which tells us (Casey, 1992) that we are free to fashion our own meaning of life, as if any grown-up would be interested in such a project. Again, many ideas coming from the scientists have not served us well, and we need to say that. Besides telling the truth about human limitation, we can also find those places where beauty is still present and loved, and join in support of its presence. We can live a counter-cultural life of which some may see the point.

 

Notes

[i] Stephen Miller, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art (New Haven 2006), ch. 1, as at 14-15, distinguishes between conversation that is purposeful, that is, aimed at obtaining something from the other, and that which is purposeless, what I am calling “useless,” i.e., pursued for its own sake. Some such a distinction runs throughout the historical record: see for instance on the middle ages, C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200 (Philadelphia 1994).

[ii] I have treated this distinction in “Deconstructing the University,” Reynolds Lecture, (Salt Lake City, April 1991) republished in Faith and Reason=FR 18 [1992]: 52-85, and in Communio: International Catholic Review 19 [1992] 226-53); and in “The University as Community: Community of What?” Communio 21 (1994): 344-62 and in a longer form in Ideas for the University, ed. Ed Block, Jr. (Milwaukee 1995), 29-60. The idea goes back to Christopher Dawson’s magisterial discussion in The Crisis of Western Education (Garden City, NY 1965), to be republished in with an Introduction by myself by The Catholic University of America Press. On Socrates as the image of the good, see D. C. Schindler, Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic (Washington, D. C. 2008).

[iii] This is the view of Gordon Graham, The Institution of Intellectual Values: Realism and Idealism in Higher Education (Charlottesville, VA 2005).

[iv] Miller, Conversation. I like particularly the quotations in chapters 5 and 6 of this book that suggest suspicion of the motives of good conversationalists.

[v] Save the World on Your Own Time (Oxford 2008).

[vi] See the opening and closing chapters of Walter A. McDougall, Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877 (New York 2008), with James Nuechterlein, “A Nation of Hustlers,” First Things=FT #189 (Jan. 2009): 33-38 at 37.

[vii] A. W. H. Adkins, From the Many to the One: A Study of Personality and Views of Human Nature in the Context of Ancient Greek Society, Values and Beliefs (London 1970).

[viii] Lament over the increasingly frenetic nature of life is long-standing, witness William Wordsworth’s lament over “the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies”: quoted in Miller, Conversation, 173.

[ix] H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, tr. George Lamb (New York 1956), is still well worth reading.

[x] Dawson, Crisis of Western Education, esp. ch. 3.

[xi] Dawson, Crisis of Western Education, 9.

[xii] Lukacs, At the End of an Age (New Haven 2002). What I say about Lukacs here and below depends on my “The Turn to Transcendence: The Role of Religion in the Twenty-first Century” a book to be published by The Catholic University of America Press in 2010. The situation in the middle ages, when the so-called oral and written cultures co-existed and interacted, was more complicated than Lukacs imagines: see Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton 1994), 11-16, “Land, Language, and Memory in Europe, 700-1000,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 9 (1999): 169-84; Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages. Essays in a Conjunction and its Consequences in Honour of D. H. Green, ed. Mark Chinca and Christopher Yount (Turnhout 2005); and Roger Chartier, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Philadelphia 2007).

[xiii] (New York 2008). Our Fading Heritage: Americans Fail a Basic Test on Their History and Institutions (Wilmington, DE 2008), a study of a survey of civic knowledge asking for such things as identification of the three branches of American government, shows failure at ever level of civic education and in every kind of educational institution.

[xiv] Russell Baker, “Goodbye to Newspapers?” The New York Review of Books=NYRB 54, 13 (August 16, 2007): 8-12 at 12. Baker believes the damage done to newspapers is irreversible.

[xv] John Lukacs, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred (New Haven 2005), considers the foregoing.

[xvi] On this and the foregoing, see Sally Thomas, “iPhones Have Consequences,” FT #187 (Nov. 2008): 11-13. Cf. Gary Cross, Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity (New York 2008).

[xvii] Charles Rosen, “Playing Music: The Lost Freedom,” NYRB 52, 17 (Nov. 3, 2005): 47-50 at 47, reviewing Robert Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven 2005), which argues that recording has resulted in greater precision and less spontaneity and warmth.

[xviii] Quoted by Michael Dirda, “The Treasure Hunter,” NYRB 55, 13 (Aug. 14, 2008): 54-56 at 54.

[xix] Miller, Conversation, 282-313.

[xx] Normieren, Tradieren, Inszenieren: Das Christentum als Buchreligion, ed. Andreas Holzem (Darmstadt 2004). How one reads in this tradition has varied enormously over time, witness the provocative analysis of James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA 2007).

[xxi] Hylden, “Class and the Classroom,” 43, listing a sample of this bibliography.

[xxii] Charles Leslie Glenn, Jr., The Myth of the Common School (Oakland, CA 2002).

[xxiii] The tale is powerfully told by Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War (New York 2005), and Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror (New York 2007).

[xxiv] See my “Religion, Politics, and America at the Millennium,” FR 22 (1996): 285-315, and “The Quest for a Public Philosophy in Twentieth Century American Political Thought,” Communio 27 (2000): 340-62. .

[xxv] Andrew Delbanco, “The Endangered University,” NYRB 52, 5 (March 24, 2005): 19-22 at 19. Cf. my “The University as Community.”

[xxvi] Andrew Delbanco, “Colleges: An Endangered Species,” at 21. For discussion of how we should speak of and understand “liberalism” today, see of the works of Alasdair McIntyre, especially After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN (2007), and Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN 1990).

[xxvii] See Miller, Conversation, 215, on Melville’s disbelief in progress.

[xxviii] Eric Cohen, In the Shadow of Progress: Being Human in the Age of Technology (New York 2008).

 

This excerpt is from The Democratic Discourse of Liberal Education, Lee Trepanier, ed. (Southern Utah University Press, 2009).

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Glenn Olsen is a Professor of History at the University of Utah. He is the author of Christian Marriage: A Historical Study (Wethersfield Institute, 2001) and Beginning at Jerusalem: Five Reflections on the History of the Church (Ignatius, 2004).

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