What is the Relationship between Liberal Education and a Free Society?
In Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky finds himself lying injured in the grass after barely surviving his first battle against Napoleon’s forces. As he looks up to the clouds, he notices their beauty for the first time, proclaiming, “‘How quiet, peaceful, and solemn; not at all as I ran…not as we ran, shouting and fighting, not at all as the gunner and the Frenchman with frightened and angry faces struggled for the mop: how differently do those clouds glide across that lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last!’”[i] That which is most beautiful often exists outside of one’s immediate perception. Life is difficult and confusing, and it so often mars the truth and beauty that exists throughout time and place.
By reading Tolstoy, one can appreciate that it is possible for the difficulties of life to give way to something that is simply and truly more. In this passage, Tolstoy represents the power of disillusionment—of divergence from the normal perspective. At first, Andrei—like all individuals—focuses solely on the task at hand. He only cares about what is in front of him; however, after fixating on what exists above his reality, he immediately discovers happiness. This is a pertinent metaphor for the function of liberal education within society. The study of the liberal arts removes the shackles of functionality and places value on virtue and truth. In essence, a liberal education refuses to concentrate on the study of the means and instead orients itself towards the ends of the individual and the greater populace. The relationship between liberal education and a free society is freedom itself. By focusing on ends rather than means, one can free themself from the cave of uncertainty and chaotic indecision and, instead, turn their attention to the light.
Without the awareness that virtue and truth provide, society remains tethered to the pursuit of extremes. A liberal education teaches the value of temperance. It diminishes the desire for rapid and brash decision-making by instructing students to pursue careful paths of self-restraint. A student from a liberally educated background will find themself tossing aside the will to follow the telos of hubris. Rather than becoming Xerxes and vowing to conquer for the sake of conquering, a liberally educated student will heed the warning of Cyrus that “soft lands breed soft men.”[ii] Cyrus was warning the Persians that the pursuit of new land will diminish the value of the values of the heartland that they hold dear. The eyes do a disservice to the heart. A liberal education leads to a society free from the desire for new gains that are anathema to the values they already hold dear. Decisions are a dime a dozen, and yet with the wrong justifications, they can lead to drastically different outcomes. It is the justification of a decision that matters the most. One cannot take control of their fate selfishly; they must remain responsible for the past and build on its wisdom. Learning to appreciate the virtue of temperance keeps these radical desires at bay.
A liberal education grants freedom to society through lessons in prudence. Prudence prevents adherence to new ideologies. It allows Statesmen—in the words of Russel Kirk—to look before they leap and take “long views.”[iii] Lessons in prudence free society from reactivity, as the virtue is applied through reason and careful, realistic aspirations. Those without a liberal education are in danger of applying themselves for the sake of misplaced values and unattainable goals. If it follows the path of reactivity, society remains in bondage to the will of the idealist—one who cannot bring their claims down from the clouds but, nevertheless, radically pursues them. A free society is one that works towards an end that benefits all people; one that does not operate for power or self-preservation but instead for the eudaimonia of its citizens.[iv] If prudence is to be pursued, students of liberal education must order their loves towards this end. They must follow St. Augustine’s command to look inward at their souls, “…for truth resides in the inmost part of man. And if you find that your nature is mutable, rise above yourself…strive, therefore, to reach the place where the very light of reason is lit.”[v] A free society does not pursue itself. It pursues what is good.
Furthermore, a liberal education provides lessons in fortitude rather than fear. It does not leave students to the darkness with only nightmares and worst-case scenarios to guide them. It, instead, argues for carefully reasoned courageousness. It teaches students that, when the fog of fear threatens to encapsulate all that they value, they must trust what they know to be right and carry that truth with them just as an officer carries the standards into battle. When asked why they act with courage, students must reply that they do so because both their heart and their head support their action. It is not enough to follow the heart; doing so can lead to foolhardy actions. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man, “The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”[vi] By pursuing courageous measures through a reasoned framework, society is free to act without the presence of fear or carelessness.
A liberal education uncovers the true meaning of justice in society. While authoritarian rulers demand that justice is merely the application of their personal will upon the people and, contrastingly, socialized groups insist that justice is the enforcement of equality in all possible areas, a liberal education teaches that justice is founded on the appropriate pursuit of the common good. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. articulates the virtue of justice in his “Letters from a Birmingham Jail.” He writes, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”[vii] King does not demand all to consent to a mutual existence where everyone is treated equally. Additionally, he does not argue in favor of a commanding authority to force people into obedience. Instead, King makes it apparent that a necessary part of society is interconnectedness. This social fabric is not intent on bettering one another through random, half-pitched ideas and desires; rather, it looks towards destiny for direction. Destiny, for King, was the Truth proclaimed by the Christian God. In pursuing this same objective Truth, society may be free from the injustice that arises due to improper, conflicting guidance.
Lessons regarding Faith are central to a liberal education as well. Liberal education does not necessarily lecture on the personal development of faith; instead, it demonstrates how the faith of some can quell the fears of many. Lessons in faith are capable of freeing society from fearfulness. Faith and fear are not very different. Both look to the future with a degree of concern. Faith places that concern on how one is to act to achieve what is certain to occur. Fear is overly concerned with present action because what will occur is as undiscernible as the present. A liberal education teaches students to be brave in their certainty. If they know that what they believe is true and good, then acting on it will yield positive results. A free society that is wise in the inclinations of a faithful disposition will act boldly. An excellent display of faith occurred on the evening of February 18th, 1546, when Martin Luther neared the end of his life. He was asked by Justus Jonas, “Reverend father, will you die steadfast in Christ, and in the doctrine, you have preached?”[viii] Luther answered in confidence that he would, and then passed from this life into the next. When questioned as to whether it believes in the truth to which it abides, a free society should answer as Martin Luther answered on his death bed. A society is only free when it remains steadfast in faith.
A liberal education teaches the virtue of hope instead of instilling doubtfulness. Hope has been dismissed for ages as an inclination of the weak. Presently, having hope is viewed as an earnest wish for what cannot ever be achieved. A liberal education combats this idea. Aristotle disagreed with this misunderstanding of hope in his Nichomachean Ethics. In Book Three, the philosopher writes that someone who is courageous displays a hopeful temperament.[ix] Courage and hope are inseparable. A free society must understand that hope is a virtue that charts a path to a better future. Far too many leaders have fallen to hopeless desires of progress. These progressive movements constantly coalesce in the use of force and oppression. The virtue of hope frees society to work in a beneficial manner of advancement. The martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer exemplifies the virtue of hope. During the growth of Nazi influence in Germany, Bonhoeffer turned to hope to solve a paradox that existed in his decision-making. As a leader of the Confessing Church, he could not plot to take the life of Adolf Hitler; however, he feared that, unless action was taken to permanently remove Hitler from power, the Fascist leader would conquer Germany. Bonhoeffer turned to the hope of forgiveness that undergirded his Christian faith and participated in the plot to kill Hitler. When society is faced with the need to reform for its betterment, it must rely on the virtue of hope to provide the freedom to act just as Bonhoeffer did during Nazi rule.
Finally, a liberal education instructs its students on how to love. This love is not the subjective, emotional love that we feel in relationships. A liberal education teaches about the importance of ordering one’s loves. Society can only remain free if it loves its ethical convictions more than personal interests. One must place love for what is right over preferences. Alasdair MacIntyre labeled the disordered love of preferences as “Emotivism”. In After Virtue, MacIntyre writes, “Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they moral or evaluative in character.”[x] Emotivism cannot order the loves of a free society. If emotivism takes control, society will turn on itself in an attempt to acquire a variety of conflicting desires. The liberally educated student loves what is ethical and does what is moral so that society may flourish. Emotional loves are secondary. This is not to say that one’s love for their country should supplant the love for one’s own family; this would be a gross misinterpretation. Rather, the love for one’s family should be an objective form of love that extends to the rest of society to unite it in an ordered, responsible framework. If one’s loves are ordered in any other way, free society cannot endure.
The relationship shared between liberal education and a free society is centuries in the making. It is a timeless affiliation due to the unchanging nature of the virtues that a liberal education professes. The virtues of temperance, prudence, fortitude, justice, faith, hope, and love instruct society that freedom is tethered to underlying values that cannot be ignored. To be truly free is to be truly responsible to these virtues. Sir Roger Scruton wrote that a line of obligation exists “…that connects us to those who gave us what we have; and our concern for the future is an extension of that line.”[xi] To promote freedom in society, a liberal education looks to the past. It studies the writings and the words that came before us. It seeks to prove that lessons in virtue compose a single thread that guides the values of the past into the present so that students within a society may preserve what is good and promote what is right, thus obtaining freedom.
Notes
[i] Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (Holland, OH: Dreamscape Media LLC, 2017), 259.
[ii] Herodotus, Robert B. Strassler, Andrea L. Purvis, and Rosalind Thomas, The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories (Landmark Series. Pantheon Books, 2007), 9.122.3.
[iii] Russell Kirk, “The Errors of Ideology,” In The Essential Russell Kirk (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007), 369.
[iv] Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics.
[v] Augustine, De Vera Religione, 39.72.
[vi] C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Quebec: Samizdat, 2014), 9.
[vii] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” In Samford University Core Texts Reader Volume Two (Acton, MA: XanEdu, 2014), 475-476.
[viii] Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1988), 103.
[ix] Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 3.7.11.
[x] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 11-12.
[xi] Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (New York, Ny: St. Martin’s Press, 2017), 45.
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