Liberal Arts, Deliberation, and Democracy

John Churchill
Secretary
The Phi Beta Kappa Society
Duke University
April 10, 2006

Liberal education is a pretty thing.  We are very interesting people.  We are the people you want to have dinner with, to talk to at cocktail parties.  We can explain the difference between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, between classicism and romanticism, between impressionism and expressionism.  We can talk about post-modernism till the cows come home.  Nietzsche?  Gotcha.  Beckett?  Got the ticket.   We can follow the articles in TIMEmagazine about nanotechnology, the piece in The New Yorker about cloning, and the congressional debates about immigration policy.  Hey, we know what this stuff is about, and we have informed opinions.  Isn’t that pretty?   Called on at random, we can talk about Mozart or hip-hop.  Or Mozart   and hip-hop.  Disquisitions with the aura of sophistication are ours to produce at a moment’s notice on any topic you care to mention.  Water on the moons of Saturn?  Saturn plants in Middle Tennessee?  Tennessee Williams?  William Carlos Williams?  Juan Carlos II?  Li’l Kim?  We are a dream of random access and free association, a grab bag of stuff sorted and unsorted, human rummage sales of knowledge.  We are liberally educated.   But wait, folks, there’s more.  We are great talkers.  We can chatter the ears off an elephant, and make a fencepost laugh.  We can argue and convince.  We can sell ourselves, our products, and our services.  That makes us great professionals. The very things that make us so much fun also lead to our professional success.  Liberal education is pretty, and useful, too.   But even that’s not all.  We have higher thoughts.  We have “a sense of something far more deeply interfused.”   We can tell the good from the bad and both from the ugly.  We have not just taste, and not just discernment, we have values.  And our values are not the grubby little unexamined prejudices we started with.  We’ve met Socrates and wrestled with Machiavelli.  We know why we believe what we believe and why we don’t believe the rest.  In this process we have come into contact with what things mean.  We are deep.
This just gets better and better.  We are pretty, and useful, and now we are also profound.  This liberal education is good stuff, and we are justifiably proud.  We deserve a celebration.  I have to tell you now, though, that everything I’ve said so far leaves things in a sorry state.   Let me explain why.   Forty-two years ago a body called “The Commission on the Humanities” urged the creation of a “National Humanities Foundation,” an agency of the federal government whose purpose would be to promote the development and dissemination of knowledge in the humanities.  This effort led directly to the creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it bears a continuing relevance to the relation between liberal education and America’s fate.   The Commission’s report alludes to the need for  vision :  for “whatever understanding can be attained by fallible humanity of . . . enduring values . . . .” (4).  It sets out the need for wisdom , and not the wisdom of the few but wisdom dispersed among the many:  “To know the best that has been thought and said in former times can make us wiser than we otherwise might be” (4).  It alludes to the need of a nation obsessed with military spending, and a military presence throughout the world, “to maintain the creative and imaginative abilities of its own people” (5).  It insists—and this is 1964, remember—that “World leadership of the kind which has come upon the United States cannot rest solely upon superior force, vast wealth, or preponderant technology” (5).    The Commission goes on:  “Only the elevation of its goals and the excellence of its conduct entitle one nation to ask others to follow it lead.  These are things of the spirit.  If we appear to discourage creativity, to demean the fanciful and the beautiful, to have no concern for [humanity’s] ultimate destiny, . . . then both our goals and our efforts to attain them will be measured with suspicion” (5).    Finally—and again I ask you to remember that this is 1964—the report admonishes that “when men and women find nothing within themselves but emptiness they turn to trivial and narcotic amusements, and the society of which they are a part becomes socially delinquent and politically unstable”  (5).  We need to be pulled from “the abyss of leisure” (5).   It is entirely mind-boggling that decades before “reality television,” iPods, and   People magazine we could have been warned about “the abyss of leisure.”  Even the Super Bowl lay then in America’s fecund future.   How further down this dismal road are we now, away from vision, wisdom, elevated goals and excellent conduct?  How much deeper into the abyss of leisure?  How much more are we insistently measured by the yardstick of suspicion?   The need for vision, wisdom, and sympathy, and creative imagination on the part of Americans, along with the need for elevated goals and excellent conduct on the part of America, has not gone away.  Absent their realization, again in the words of the report, “both our goals and our efforts to attain them will be measured with suspicion.”   So the point of liberal education in a democratic context is not only self-development, the acquisition of useful skills, the entertainment of meaning and value.  The point is also the cultivation in one’s own life, and in the public life of our society, of a culture of deliberation.     The deliberative life is a life of choices made for the sake of reasons, in which beliefs are held because there is evidence on their behalf, and actions are taken because we consciously, all things considered, desire the outcomes to which they will lead, and in which our readiness to hold those beliefs and to undertake those actions is sustained in a network of free, open, and continuous inquiry as to what is true and good. As citizens of a democracy, we owe each other the effort to live such lives, and t make, hear, and evaluate such arguments.   Without the skills of deliberation we will be incapable of knowing   why we believe something.  We lose our intellectual independence, and become epistemological primitives who justify our beliefs by pointing to the authorities who told us so.  Without deliberation, our vulnerability to manipulation is frightening.  This vulnerability results from the neglect of the facility of critical thinking, which results from the loss of an intellectual commons, which results from a concentration on specialized, technical knowledge, and the neglect of general and comparative skills of understanding.   The importance of maintaining this deliberative commons in times of national crisis has long been understood.  In 1940 Wendell Willkie was the Republican candidate for presidency.  In 1943 he wrote in   The American Scholar that the efficiency of the Nazi war machine was built on great acuity in specialized, technical knowledge, and on the atrophy — or extirpation — of critical understanding.  This Willkie laid, fairly or not, at the feet of the German university system.  He quoted Ernest Martin Hopkins, president of Dartmouth: “It would be a tragic paradox if, as a result of the war, we were to allow our system of higher education, to be transformed into the type of education which has made it so easy for a crowd of governmental gangsters like Hitler’s outfit to commandeer a whole population.” (I owe awareness of Willkie’s argument to Pauline Yu’s “Revitalizing Humanities: Expanding the Vision of Liberal Education,” delivered to the AAC&U annual meeting, January 23, 2004.) Willkie notes that maintenance of these critical facilities is not a “gospel of high-browism” (139).  It is neither trivial nor playful.  It is the tradition of personal and political freedom.  If, in the exigencies of crisis, we neglect it, we will have surrendered voluntarily the very thing we fought to defend.   A great irony of human affairs is the fact that we are apt to destroy the good in our attempt to preserve it.  Alertness to this irony requires just the critical, self-reflective, and generally applicable intellectual abilities that are sustainable only in the deliberative commons I have described.  If we have no such commons, the intensity of our technical expertise will be matched by the naïveté and banality of our politics.  We will understand nothing more nuanced than a bumper sticker.  We will follow whoever is loudest, most strident, and simplest.  We will have no safeguards against the perennial human tendencies toward self-righteous arrogance.  So what can we do?   We must work, not to preserve but to create, in academe and in public life, a community of discourse about important things, an arena in which expertise is brought to bear on real questions in ways that reflective people can grasp and evaluate.  This is a forward-looking aim, seeking the establishment of shared arguments, perspectives compared and evaluated, decisions worked toward in deliberative conversation.   This is the way toward the preservation—or perhaps it is the reclamation—of personal freedom. It will not be enough simply to read the   Antigone , and the Iliad , and Hamlet, and Beloved, and Things Fall Apart .  But without engagement with them and with their equivalents in literature, art, music, history, philosophy, and the sciences, both natural and social, our capacity to deliberate will atrophy and be lost.   If deliberative culture is lost to us—or lost  by us—it will be because we will lack adequate, publicly accessible processes for the critical comparison of ideas and the actions to which those ideas lead .  That lack will be traceable to our worship of the specialized and technical to the neglect of the general and the humane.  And that, unfortunately, is our trend.  The work to counteract this trend must be done in confused and muddy terrain, contentious terrain, where necessary argumentation is obscured by uncertainty and ambiguity.  This is the deliberative analogue of the much-vaunted “fog of war.”  But there is no alternative, short of self-deceptive indulgence in fictitious clarity.    If we want to diminish our vulnerability to manipulation, we must insist on deliberation that situates expertise within a public domain.  If liberal education can advance this purpose, Phi Beta Kappa’s celebrations will have served an even higher end.     

Report of the Commission on the Humanities, Barnaby Keeney,   et al ., New York: The American Council of Learned Societies, 1964.