This week I am revisiting my third blog post about the value of a liberal education as depicted by contemporary poet A.E. Stallings and the witty Roman commentator Martial. Living in the real world means much more than making money today or knowing how to fill out tax forms. Young people need to know how to think, not what the answers are, but how to find them. Learning calculus can only get one so far, but one can learn anything if one learns how to read and analyze well. As much as our society has honed in on STEM education in the past quarter century, such an education can only prepare students for the jobs of today not the jobs of tomorrow, to say nothing of understanding what it means to be human.
In Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow shows us the value of the humanities by detailing the struggles of an American philosopher caught between the death of his manic mentor and the antics of a small-time mafia man. Lost between artistry and commercialism, Charles Citrine finds himself stuck in memories of Chicago streets, yet floating in dreams of Segovia and nineteenth century mysticism. Citrine is confused, wandering between American arrogance and the dead. He debates Goethe and Dostoevsky even as he experiences base struggles with gold digging women. He sees the philosophical implications, understands the meaning of little things. A familiarity with the humanities does not provide the answers, but it shows one many ways to find many different answers. A liberal education shows one the beauty and poetry of the human intellectual struggle itself.
For example, poetry allows us to see nature in a new light, as a reflection of deeper biological and human struggles, not the backdrop to them. Mary Oliver, the great naturalist poet of the twentieth century, uses sparse descriptions of nature to depict its grand scale and power. In her poem “Egrets,” Oliver provides a deeply philosophical examination of humanity’s relationship with nature, the contrasting abundance and pestilence, solace and enmity:
This deeply touching analysis speaks to the relationship between humanity and nature far more truthfully than any biology textbook. Oliver’s poem is not a technical list or a biological analysis of an ecosystem, but the relationship with the natural world that it reveals is far more important to the life of a young person.
We need to be careful not simply to conform our educational institutions to what we perceive as the most lucrative careers of the moment and not an understanding of the human experience. Allen Ginsberg shows the dangers of an education that promotes conformity quite clearly in works like “Howl.” In “Howl,” he speaks of those “who were expelled from the academies for crazy.” The educational institutions of his day were closed-minded. They thought that they were teaching people how to succeed, but they were really crushing the humanity and idealism of their students. His generation was filled with idealistic radicals who wanted to redefine their nation, yet they found themselves in the midst of overwhelming pressure to conform, to follow the crowd, and they turned to drugs and sex. Their struggle was not one of deviants trying to discover sanity, but the struggle of a generation whose nation had forgotten how to feel, forgotten how to embrace humanity.
In a way, ancient civilizations dealt with similar pressures. There is a reason that many classical thinkers ended up in prison, were killed, or committed suicide like many great minds today. Yes, it’s true that art thrives under threat, but art shouldn’t be about conquering the threat of ridicule or violence from other human beings. Art should be about conquering the threat of inhumanity, making peace with the absurdities of life.
Civilizations have always succeeded by embracing certain aspects of the inhumane: urbanism for the Greeks, militarism for the Romans, monarchy for the Persians, and materialism for the Phoenecians. At its best, American society rejects all of these, but at its worst, American society embodies all of them and more. We need to escape the trappings of empire and avoid placing ourselves too prominently on the arc of history. We need to remind ourselves of our humanity, of our humility. Young people need to be taught how to find poetry in the absurd, how to operate the machinery of the human mind. There is no better instruction manual than a liberal education.