LiberalArtsOnline Vol. 1, No. 2
As one of the first events sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, John Agresto, former president of St. John's College, Santa Fe, recently visited the Wabash campus. He spoke eloquently about the intrinsic value of the liberal arts, insisting that liberal education is important even if useless. On at least one point, however, I thought he went too far. Agresto argued that the liberal arts serve no moral function.
Nearly fifty years ago, the physicist and philosopher Jacob Bronowski, in a book called Science and Human Values, argued that the activity of science nurtures particular human virtues. Scientists, for example, "do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance. I do not," Bronowski emphasized, "trace these virtues to any personal goodness in scientists."
As human beings, scientists are on average probably as selfish, prejudiced, and open to corruption as the rest of us. But their scientific training teaches them that, if you fudge the data to get the answer you want, or try to win an argument by shouting down your opponent when the evidence is against you, then science stops working. Some virtues are simply required by the practice of science.
Something like Bronowski's argument applies, I think, to all of the disciplines in the liberal arts. Indeed, some role in fostering human virtues might be one of the defining characteristics of liberal education. Good readers of literature have to be able to "get inside" people very different from themselves, to see the world from a character's point of view. And there are virtues of forgiving and understanding that follow rather naturally if you've cultivated the ability to stand in someone else's shoes. Similarly, it's hard to be a good social scientist if you throw around statistics without ever reflecting on the meaning of those statistics for individual lives. And that kind of reflection has moral implications. It's hard to live in a community of learning without learning to value community, and people who value the communities where they live will work to preserve and strengthen them. It's hard to be a good artist without cultivating the kind of imagination that sees the world in new ways. Too often, lack of imagination prevents us from seeing anything but evil alternatives, and picking the lesser of the evils. People who have cultivated the right kind of imagination might actually see a way to pick something good.
Obviously, no curriculum can guarantee moral goodness. Some people pick up superb technical skills without any of the related virtues. If they learn to be clever rather than wise, they can nevertheless, by some standards, achieve great success. But by the standards of liberal education, they will be failures. A society that needs virtuous people, therefore, will seek to foster liberal education.
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LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional email essay on the liberal arts, provided as a public service of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
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