The Liberal Arts as a Way of Being Humane
Written by: Mike Meginnis
There is a temptation to say that a liberal arts education is
essential because it enables us to fine the truth. This is facile,
but close enough. While evolving understandings of the universe and
our role therein offered by philosophers, scientists and
anthropologists suggest it will likely prove impossible to achieve
a final and authoritative understanding of reality, one who is
versed in the traditions of said thinkers would closer to such an
understanding than one who is not. If we must live without ultimate
truth, we can at least try for a contingent truth in its stead.
We cannot presume to construct even a contingent truth, however,
without reference to many methodologies and traditions. It is not
enough to understand theology - we must also study geology. More
difficult still, we must hold one accountable to the other.
Theologians must respond to the fossil record. There must be, in
short, communication between disciplines.
the alternative is not only dull but potentially deeply
inhumane. In the eyes of the literary critic and rhetorician
Kenneth Burke, the division of labor leads inexorably to
apocalyptic slaughter. When there is a class of military men and a
class of scientists, for instance, the military men will tend to
subordinate every available resource to their purposes of
destruction and domination. They in their role as planners of war
will wage war for war's sake. The class of scientists, meanwhile,
might be persuaded to quiet their consciences in pursuit of science
for science's sake. Put the two together in a room without a third
class of thinker - a poet, perhaps - and watch them make the atom
bomb.
I don't mean to suggest, and neither did Burke, that they never
would have made the bomb if only someone had been there to write a
poem. I do wonder sometimes if the Manhattan Project would have
been completed had those scientists been allowed to step into the
future and read Yukiko Hayashi's "Sky of Hiroshima," just as I hope
Truman and MacArthur might have reconsidered US tactics, especially
the firebombing of Japan, had they been able to watch Isao
Takahata's devastating Grave of the Fireflies . What I
mean to argue is that the continual state of surprise, of openness,
the humbling nature of conflict and argumentation fostered by the
gathering of diverse minds into one institution where they are not
only expected but required to converse is a necessary protection
against sophisticated savagery.
The atom bomb is often employed in such arguments, usually with
the clear implication that science is something to be treated with
suspicion - something that attends only to the body, and often
destructively, while literature, philosophy and religion steward
morality and the human soul. While it's true the sciences cannot
touch the soul if there is one, it is hardly the case that they are
some inhuman force requiring constant humanizing by pretty,
poignant lines of poetry or prose. To the contrary, the works of
Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling would have been humanized
considerably by an awareness of genetic science and its erosion of
the meaning of race. Likewise, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle
Tom's Cabin would have benefited massively from such an
understanding. Aristotle would probably have been more generous to
women in his writings had he correctly understood their anatomy and
their physical capacities, their psychological resources and
especially their profound similarities to men.
There are many terrible and convenient possibilities and
temptations opened by a selective ignorance of the world and our
many ways of knowing. As Burke wrote in the culmination of
Rhetoric of Motives , "On every hand, we find men, in
their quarrels over property, preparing themselves for the
slaughter, even to the extent of manipulating the profoundest
grammatical, rhetorical, and symbolic resources of human thought to
this end." In short, there are always material and cultural
incentives to exploit and injure our fellows, and we can always
depend on the human capacity for rationalization to help us justify
ourselves in violence and graft. Whether by narratives of national
greatness, the grandiose music of Wagner, the imperialist poetry of
Kipling, cracked pseudo-sciences of white supremacy, political
mandate or magic and mysticism, we can count on those with power or
plenty, or sufficient hunger for both, to explain and sanctify
their wars and our enslavement.
To solve this problem, he believed in was imperative that we"try
anything and everything, improvising, borrowing from others,
developing from others, dialectically using one text as comment
upon another." But why stop at texts? The temptation of the kill
being so powerful, might we not grant ourselves every possible
argument and type of evidence to contradict the murderous impulse?
Whether by reason of religious conviction, economic practicality,
anthropological concern, philosophical rationale, or even grandiose
architecture, mercy and charity are the height of human
achievement; they are rarer, more difficult, more precious and more
admirable even than our best and least contingent truths.
The best a school of the liberal arts and sciences might
achieve, then, is not the pursuit of truth. That would be good,
even great, but we can aim for better. We can live together as
engines for peace and human kindness. Even as economic blessings
allow greater and greater specialization, even as we reach new
heights in our own limited professional pursuits through the time
and focus this specialization affords us, we can refuse to think
strictly as poets, political scientists, computer programmers,
chemists, students of physics or future physicians. Together we can
help each other to think as human beings . Through
argument and conversation, through competition and admonishment,
through dialogue, we can together resist the kill. We can justify
goodness, and, if we are lucky, we can even practice it as a
university, a community, and a family.