The Liberating Arts aren't really for everyone

In my quest to give you top-of-the-line GB-related content, I just read The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education. It was a’ight. But it does fall into the trap of not defining what, exactly, it is talking about. This anthology, by Christian publishing house Plough has a number of essays, mostly by educators, responding to common critiques of the Liberal Arts (“The Liberal Arts are Racist”, “The Liberal Arts are Elitist”, etc).

But what are the Liberal Arts of which they speak? Surely not the medieval ars liberae (grammar, rhetoric, logic, music, astronomy, math, and the one I always forget, maybe geometry???). Instead, the intro essay says:

If we shift to the Latinate word “liberal,” we recognize that these arts aim to foster liberality or generosity, the dispositions that make friendship possible. The purpose of freedom is not to pursue some kind of narcissistic self-fulfillment but to cultivate friendship with others. Hence the liberal arts aim to form us to use our freedom for these proper ends rather than squander it on lesser goods.

To put it simply, this is nonsense. What does such an education look like in practical terms? What books does it involve? How many classes do you need to take? Does it involve midterms or papers? Does it have required attendance for study section? Are the classes taped and the lecture notes posted online?

The anthology works because we all have some sense of what the liberal arts are: small college classes that are grounded in reading and discussion of primary texts in the arts and humanities. But the rhetoric of the anthology requires the liberal arts to be in crisis, to be fading away. And there’s a way of defining the liberal arts in which that is true, and a way of defining it wherein it’s not true.

I’ve already written about the ‘vulgar’ or ‘common-sense’ definition of the liberal arts: it’s the content and the method of ‘liberal arts’ colleges. But as you read this book, The Liberating Arts, it’s clear that it’s not a formal exercise we’re engaged in here. We are not defending all liberal arts colleges. Indeed, liberal arts colleges are one of the hotbeds of the kind of ‘postmodern’ relativism that these authors dislike. Instead, we are defending an education grounded in both a certain set of texts and a certain way of reading and evaluating those texts. To read a classic text the way Edward Said does—seeing how it is imbricated with imperialism or racism—is not really the liberal arts, at least for the purposes of this anthology.

This anthology wants students to, at the very least, read classic texts, largely philosophical works, epic poems, and novels (Shakespeare, Milton, Aristotle, St. Augustine and Dante make continual appearances) and evaluate them for the light they have to shed on truth, goodness, and beauty. This liberal arts education aims to teach us what is true, good and beautiful.

But because this set of texts, this instructional method, and this goal is merely implied by the book’s rhetoric and its audience, it is freed from asking itself a number of tough questions. For instance, when it asks “Are the liberal arts racist?” It is free to look at the history of Black people reading liberty into classic texts. But it doesn’t ask, “Are there other texts and other methods of instruction that are less racist?” When it asks, “Are the liberal arts only for the wealthy?” It tells about all the poor people who’ve received consolation for the liberal arts; it doesn’t ask, “Are there other courses of study that are equally consolatory, but are less time-consuming and, therefore, more accessible to poorer people”. The systematic mystification about the nature of the education being recommended means that all the difficult questions about it get elided, because those difficulties only arise when we consider specifics.

Nobody is against learning about truth, goodness, and beauty in the abstract. The question is, how do we learn about it best? And is that the best use of peoples’ time?

The question of time is most wanting when they discuss whether engineers and scientists need the liberal arts. There is an anecdote about a structural engineer who double-majored in engineering and the liberal arts. The liberal arts really made his engineering, like, better. But the obvious rejoinder is: a course in engineering and a course in liberal arts might make you a better engineer; but a course in just engineering will also make you a pretty good engineer! Is the benefit really worth the cost? And, moreover, why isn’t it the opposite? Does learning engineering make you a better liberal artist?

The best essay in the collection was one from Joseph Clair. It was called “Truth U, Justice U, and Jesus U.” It paraphrases an essay from Jonathan Haidt about the various models of education in the United States:

Despite frequently being casually conflated, the terms “liberal” and “progressive” represent different political traditions in the West, and when applied to the liberal arts represent different approaches to education. “Liberal” liberal arts education represents a modern vision of the disciplines oriented toward an Enlightenment-style view of objective truth pursued by rational and empirical methods, whereas “progressive” is often associated today with postmodern visions of education that are suspicious of privileged categories such as knowledge, truth, and understanding. Progressive liberal arts education is aimed toward dismantling systems of illegitimate power and ensuring equality of outcomes for all. Melded with this mission of social justice is a corresponding emphasis on trauma and the paradoxes and slipperiness of selfhood and identity.

NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that these two visions of the liberal arts are ultimately incompatible, and that universities ought to be forced to make a choice between the aims of objective truth and social justice, and organize academic life accordingly. Haidt creates a helpful typology, calling the “liberal” approach “Truth U” and the progressive approach “Social Justice U.” He notes that almost every major liberal arts institution in America today has become a Social Justice U, by default of the demography of the professoriate. One notable exception is the University of Chicago, with its classically liberal commitments enshrined in its “Chicago Principles” on academic freedom.

The author, Joseph Clair, argues that both Truth U and Justice U are flawed, and the real answer is what Haidt dismissively calls “Jesus U”. I think Clair makes a pretty good argument!

The telos of Jesus U is love. Here the love of learning is tethered to love for God, love for neighbor, and a healthy self-love. Here is a vision of education that eclipses any purely material view of human personality. The social-science caricature of the human person found in both Truth U and Social Justice U amounts to a reduction of human desire to either bare economic self-interest or raw social power. Neither gets to the true depth of human personality. Each appeals to the language of psychology (whether as trauma or happiness) at key moments to get out of the flattened secular horizon and move into the realm of true meaning.

Ultimately it’s the same nonsense that all Christian intellectuals spout, about how secularism and liberalism lack any source of meaning, and if we’re going to lead lives with purpose and transcendence, they have to be grounded in Jesus. My rejoinder is simple: according to Christian dogma, faith is a gift from God. He either bestows it, or he doesn’t. If he’s chosen to bestow it upon a person, then their course of study will naturally be inhabited by a Christian understanding. If he’s chosen not to bestow it on a person, then to learn everything from a Christian perspective is absurd and counterproductive: it would be the opposite of a true education, because all the questions that would animate a secular education—ideas about meaning and purpose—would be forestalled. I don’t need to go to college to learn that the truth is only knowable through Jesus Christ: I could just as easily read that on a bumper sticker.

I am sure that to the person with faith, Jesus adds an unimaginably deep layer of meaning to all of their learning, but so what? Personally, I am happy to learn about the antics of a first-century AD magician and the people who, after all these centuries, still believe in the magic he did, but to believe in his divinity is a thought experiment that grows old rather quickly.

But at least Clair is directly dealing with the question of alternatives. Most of these essays don’t. And yet we know there are alternatives. If you go to a secular university, you will likely not be taught the liberal arts, as constituted by these contributors to Plough magazine.

But what will you be taught at that secular university?

Well, whenever I read something like this, I like to check out, just for fun, what the authors think about trans people.

In this case, the authors were drawn from contributors to Plough, a Christian journal, so it’s simple to search for this answer. On the scale of transphobia in Christian journals, it ranks pretty low! But it’s still pretty anti-trans. The mentions of trans people are relatively kind, but the journal’s stance is decidedly against medical transition. From this journal, and a few others I googled because they were mentioned in the anthology, I learned that a substantial number of Christian ethicists think that the transgender identity is a result of freedom run amok—people now have so much hubris that they think they can alter their essential nature.

How fixing genitalia that are causing you psychic pain differs from a prosthetic leg or fixing a congenital cleft palate is unclear. It seems to rely on some platonic ideal of humanity—such and such is a ‘normal’ person, and we can use medicine to restore that normalcy, but not to alter or deviate from it. At its core, it’s the trap of rationalism. As I once noted in an essay for LitHub, I perceive GB enthusiasts as being particularly prone to rationalism: the attempt to use pure reason to figure out the natural or ideal state of the universe. People sit in their rooms and read these old books and spend a lot of time thinking, and they inevitably fall into an is/ought fallacy. You can use reason (hopefully backed up by empirical evidence) to determine how things are But that tells you nothing about how they ought to be. In this case, you can certainly determine that most human beings have such and such qualities, and they require such and such qualities in order to reproduce, et cetera, but that tells you nothing about how people ought to be.

Indeed, the very fact that human beings can transition—that giving someone cross-sex hormones creates a number of bodily changes resembling puberty—gives the lie to any essentialism of this sort. If human beings are able to do something, why shouldn’t they? Obviously, that could be asked about any moral question, and it is one of life’s great mysteries: why be moral? On what basis?

But that is also the kind of question that only rationalists ask. In real life, we adhere to some sort of moral system—generally one that’s appropriate for our time, place, and social position. In real life, we have no issues critiquing or altering that moral system, on the basis of other intuitions about what is fair or right.

Modern rationalists often resort to tradition—things should be such and such a way because they’ve always been such and such a way, and this way constitutes the natural way for human beings to be. But the very fact that they are asking for change gives the lie to their claim. These liberal arts types put a lot of stock in tradition, but they ignore the traditions of our own time and place. Right here, right now, we have an educational tradition—the American secular university—that is the envy of the world, and that has produced more knowledge and given more benefit to the world than any other educational system you can name.

Right now, at least in certain times and places, we also have the phenomenon of transgenderism: that people with certain desires are able to pursue a medical change of their sex and a social change in their gender. These phenomenon that are rooted in our culture—and we know that because these things exist.

When you’re arguing something shouldn’t exist, you cannot argue that it is unnatural, because the fact that it exists shows that you are wrong. It is very worrying that the proponents of the liberal arts do not understand this basic concept.

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Personally I come to this project with a totally different point of view. Many of their essays are about whether the liberal arts can be made democratic: Can dumb people make use of them? What about Black people? What about poor people? What about engineers? (The answer to all four questions is, unsurprisingly, yes).

But I do not think the liberal arts are for everyone. Most people, I think, need nothing more than the wisdom rooted in their own particular time and place. Most women of my social class go to college, enter a profession upon graduation, marry someone in their late twenties, hit a professional peak in their thirties, have a child or two, fall off the career track, feel guilt and anxiety over their child-bearing, have conflicts with their husbands, worry about their parents, work to take care of their bodies, prepare for retirement, and, perhaps, deal with a divorce or the death of a spouse.

All of these are necessary and time-consuming pursuits. That is a full and meaningful life. You don’t need to read Aristotle to follow that path. Nor will reading Aristotle decrease the sorrow and anxiety of that path by one whit. To the extent they need emotional solace, they have therapy, exercise and antidepressants. To the extent they need spiritual solace, they have church, yoga, and meditation. To the extent they need to have their minds exercised, they have prestige TV, and to the extent they need to be anesthetized, they have all the other TV.

If you think you’re gonna have a better or more meaningful life than these women, you’re probably wrong. Because these women are trying to have a meaningful life too! In fact, everything they do—looking for a spouse, a career, and a family—is in search of meaning, and those are all very good sources of meaning! And the search for that meaning is precisely the source of their suffering! The more they search, the more they suffer. If their lives are hard and unhappy, it’s because life is simply a hard and unhappy thing!

Their problems—largely increasing loneliness, envy over other people, and a persistent sense both that their work is meaningless and that they are bad at it—cannot be cured by the liberal arts. I know this because I have read all these books, and I daily struggle with all of those problems. This sense that there’s another better and simpler path out there, and you just need to read a few books to find it—that’s not the liberal arts, that’s Christianity. They aren’t selling the liberal arts in this book, they’re selling Christianity. And I know that, because the liberal arts can’t really provide any of the consolations they propose.

The liberal arts aren’t for private consumption. They aren’t for solace—certainly a glass of wine with a friend provides much better solace. They aren’t for entertainment—a television show or a thriller is more compelling. They aren’t to reconcile you to the vagaries of date or to provide you with all the answers in life, because neither of those things is really possible.

What proponents of the liberal arts won’t admit is that the liberal arts aren’t for the average person at all. The average person can certainly benefit from them—the average person won’t be harmed by reading Plato. But the person who benefits the most from them, and the person who would be harmed the most by eschewing them, is the exceptional person—the person with an ambition to create something or do something new.

In life, you cannot really start de novo and do whatever you want. Even something as radical as transitioning is only possible because of the work of all the other millions of people who created it as a possibility. But the more you struggle against your fate—the more you attempt to find a new path, or to articulate something that is different from the answers you were handed—the more you need the liberal arts.

The liberal arts embody that struggle with received wisdom: the urge to push and prod and question. The feeling that if we write enough, if we look at all the angles, we can come up with something new, something that will shed light on these problems and offer people a way forward. That’s why we work, that’s why we write.

That restless probing is what the liberal arts teaches. But it’s precisely that kind of questioning that many proponents of the liberal arts seem to hate! They want a return to tradition. They want what they see as Christian values. They conceive of the liberal arts in totally different terms from mine: they see the liberal arts as being a way of filling people up, whereas secularism only empties them out, as in the following passage, which explicitly contrasts the liberation of empty hedonism with the true liberation promised by the liberal arts:

The free soul is not an autonomous individual indulging in licentious hedonism; rather, the free soul is an interdependent person among persons, controlling his or her appetites for the good of other people and for the good of the land and its other inhabitants. Using this freedom well, this person will form friendships rather than networks, investigate the truth without fear, love the beautiful, and find happiness in goodness.

How can this contrast be reconciled? The people in this book claim the liberal arts promotes a search for truth and meaning, yet they also assign them a determinate value—they believe that the liberal arts will lead you to a traditional Christian understanding of truth and ethics. The two things can’t both be true. Or, rather, they can, but the liberal arts seem pretty empty if they lead you on a journey that has only one destination. So whenever you turn over a rock, you think you’re looking for a fresh answer, but in the end you turn over the rock and find Jesus instead, and you say Oh you little rascal, it was you all along! Thank God the liberal arts kept me fruitlessly turning over those rocks!

And the Christians aren’t totally wrong. I think a study of the liberal arts is inevitably going to show you that a lot of human things are fake and empty, but it’ll also show you that some things are less empty than others. And the reason these people love the liberal arts is because they know that Christianity holds up a lot better than many of its secular alternatives do.

Christianity is false, but it’s less false than a lot of other stuff. Christianity is less false than drug addiction, than love addiction, than endlessly surfing the internet, or than hoping your kids will become superstars. Christianity won’t necessarily make you happy—plenty of super Christians were miserable, look at Simone Weil starving herself to death. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a viable and, in some ways, beautiful belief system.

Some things are truer than other things. Or, to put it another way, some things are beautiful and some things are ugly. There might be a class of things in between, whose beauty we haven’t learned to discern yet—we might think some things are ugly but they’re really beautiful, or we might think some things are beautiful, but they’re really ugly. We might think some things are good, but they’re really bad, etc. But if you look enough into the philosophical and imaginative literature, you notice certain recurrences, and you realize some ideas are simply more likely to be true than other ideas are.

And that’s a very powerful feeling! It’s why I can talk so categorically about the need for integrity if you’re a writer. I just know that courage and honor are important. You can certainly make an argument that courage and honor are contingent upon your ends—that in the pursuit of the right ends, you can use any means. But in the specific cases where I discuss it, that argument is false. It is mere sophistry.

It’s a very difficult thing to admit that moral and aesthetic truth exists. It goes against everything I’ve been taught to believe, but it does! But I also think that the truth isn’t only open to people who read the Great Books or study the liberal arts. I think that it’s in everything. The life of those women, trying to juggle career and love and family, is suffused with truth. I don’t want to be Panglossian here—obviously we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, nor do I think that everyone has equal access to the truth. I just think that the truth that we percieve is also a truth that structures much of the rest of society. And the fight against evil, ugliness, and falsehood, in whatever form, is a fight that a lot of people are fighting.

It’s very hard to articulate these truths. It’s so hard that you seem like an idiot or a dogmatist if you even mention that they exist. And people who percieve these truths can come to wildly different conclusions about what they imply for how people should live. Oftentimes those people can even come into conflict with each other.

The liberal arts are a record of mankind’s attempts to explain that truth. And, you know what, a lot of people have gotten very close! Like when St. Augustine explained that Rome didn’t fall because of Christianity, but even if it had, it wouldn’t have mattered, because Christianity doesn’t aim to create powerful empires—that was the truth. Or Jesus telling the rich man to sell all he owns, that is also the truth. In both cases the truth being that Christian dogma isn’t really compatible with earthly power. Christians of course find themselves nowadays in the possession of quite a bit of earthly power, and that is something they struggle with. They know that their religion makes almost impossible the exercise of sovereign authority over other people, and yet they’ve been given that authority because, well, half the world is Christian, so some Christians are obviously gonna end up in charge.

There are easy and false answers. You can reconcile Christianity with power by saying, I need to force people to be Christian, and hence save them (this is something St. Augustine rejected, precisely because people can only be saved through their own freely-given faith). You can also lay down authority and say you won’t rule over other people. That’s also absurd, because somebody has to do it. You can refuse to guide or teach other people—because who are you to dictate to other people what they ought to believe?—but that also doesn’t feel right, because if you believe something is important and necessary, you ought to give it to as many people as possible.

Those are the definitely-false answers.

The possibly-true answers are more limited. They all involve some form of moderation. The limited exercise of power to guide people in the correct decision, to incentivize moral behavior and disincentivize immoral behavior. But where, precisely, is the line? Here practicality and justice intervene, as well as the particular nature of whatever Christian dogma you believe in. It’s within the particularities of each situation, of each application of wisdom and power, that the truth becomes most important.

Because that sense of what is true and what is false, what is ugly and beautiful, will guide you towards a decision. But in the end you will never know if it is the right one! You will literally die not knowing, and since Christianity is false, you will go into the endless dark and never ever know if you made the right decision or even upon what that ‘rightness’ was founded.

And this is something we know—the right decision exists, but we can never know it for certain, or even know how we know it, or know the best way to reach it. You discuss endlessly, of course, and you second guess, but in the end, you reach inside yourself and exercise a pure will to power. You decide, this is what I choose.

It’s in making those decisions that the liberal arts have the most to offer—the decisions where you have the greatest freedom, the greatest scope for harm, and the fewest antecedents.

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In order to believe something is true, we need to think it springs from a source outside ourselves. But once we embrace that truth, it starts to seem arbitrary and overdetermined, and we want the freedom to create new truths for ourselves. But if we create a new truth, then it seems wholly personal, and to lack universal validity. We cannot impose ourselves on the universe, so the only solution is to let the universe impose itself on us, and yet we feel very strongly that if we merely accept the stamp of the universe, then we’ve lost our purpose in life—we’ve become its slaves.

The mystery is that we have this continual interplay between ourselves and the universe, between the relative and the absolute, and it should be totally arbitrary—it should feel like anything is possible, and we can do or say anything. But it’s not arbitrary. Some answers are truer than others, and yet we are always perfectly free to pick the less-true ones. It would be a fiendish design, if the universe had a designer (which of course it doesn’t).

Studying the liberal arts doesn’t mean we’ll suffer less, or even be right more often. It brings us closer to the truth, and it allows us to articulate the truth better, but we remain just as free to choose wrongly. And even if we don’t, we remain very likely to cause grievous harm or to say abominably stupid things. We’ll never really know our role in the universe’s design, or even if there is a design (or if the idea that there is a design is all just an illusion). The liberal arts give a sense of telos—the idea that there is a purpose or meaning to the universe—but our articulation of that telos might vary considerably (or we might remain forever unable to articulate it), and it’s certainly possible that our teleology is incorrect (as, when it comes to Christianity, it almost certainly is, because the belief system hinges on whether a guy 2,000 years ago really did magic, and we know he didn’t do magic because magic is impossible).

But if you’ve got questions about the way things are, and if you want to understand the logic of human existence a little bit better, the liberal arts are pretty much the only place you can go.

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So ultimately how do I differ from the Christians who wrote this book? Well, probably not that much. Like them, I defend the specific content of a certain course of study. I don’t think you can just study any books—you’ve got to study books that are the best and most beautiful of what humanity has made. To study only or mostly contemporary books means studying lots of books that are, quite likely, not going to stand the test of time. And if you study a lot of ephemera, your sense of that underlying logic will be muddied.

Mostly just a lot less certain that everyone needs to study these books. Most people seem to have the truths they need. And most people, when they think about reading the three thousand pages of Proust instinctively are like, “That’s not for me.” And they’re probably right!

I think when I recommend these books I do it because I know that the only people who are going to be drawn to them are ambitious people, who hunger to know something deeper and better. People who are ambitious for distinction, yes, but a peculiar kind of distinction that comes from, well, having good taste and having access to the truth.

And to that kind of person, they don’t really need to be sold. They don’t need to be told this book will turn you into a better engineer or even that it’ll make you happier or give you earthly tranquility (it won’t do any of those things, by the way). For that kind of person, the ability to get close to the truth is the goal. They’re sort of freed from mimetic desire. They don’t just want the things they’re supposed to want. They want to be closer to the truth, because they know the truth is good in itself.