January 5, 2024

The public is largely unaware of it, but in the United States within about 20 years it may no longer be possible to major in humanities subjects outside of the elite universities.  This is not alarmism but an “if this goes on—” extrapolation of a trend that is well underway.  We are going, exactly, backward:  about 150 years backward, in fact.  In 1869, Matthew Arnold, who was an inspector of schools, published Culture and Anarchy after the passage of the Second Reform Bill in 1867, which gave voting rights to an expanded portion of an uneducated working class, thereby moving the question of mass education into the center of public debate.  What happens if you give the vote to all those crude, ignorant people?  That anxiety has by no means disappeared.  The Republican Party tries its best to deprive underprivileged and non-white people of voting rights on the grounds that such people in their ignorance will be lured into voting for any candidate who promises them free stuff.  Thus, electoral power allegedly turns the lower class into parasites demanding the support of a welfare state, paid for by the hard-earned tax money of their betters—who of course only vote according to what is best for the country, not, heaven forbid, for their own advantage.   

The alternative attitude is that the working class deserves to be enfranchised, but the educational system needs to be expanded to include them.  Hence the establishment of working-class universities in England and public universities in the United States.  In addition to government-subsidized large institutions, hundreds of small American colleges for non-elite students were established in the 19^th century, like my own Baldwin-Wallace College, now Baldwin Wallace University.  The same was true in Canada: Northrop Frye attended, then became a faculty member, at Victoria College, now subsumed into the University of Toronto. 

The best-known arguments for “liberal education” were published during this time, making the case for a universal education that went beyond practical job or professional training, on two grounds.  The first was “enrichment.”  The word “liberal” implies liberation, and in the old British class system meant education that was liberated from the demand to make a living.  Since the students who traditionally went to university were already free of that demand, liberal education tended to mean only giving a bit of polish and cultivation to members of the ruling class.  But gradually it came to mean education that expands the horizons of students of any social class beyond the narrow range of practical ordinary life.  It means, in other words, expanding eyes. 

There are students who resent having liberal education forced on them, like the fellow who once said to me, “I’m only here to play football, you know.”  But such students are in fact not the majority.  Many college students, including many football players, appreciate having their horizons expanded, but are prevented from taking more liberal arts courses by social and parental pressure to fill their schedules with something supposedly practical, which means either business or STEM subjects.  The second argument for liberal education is that democracy depends on informed voters, who possess information about the real world and the critical thinking skills to evaluate and decide what is real and what is ideological manipulation.   We are largely unable to restrain the mass media, so the only hope is to develop a population capable of resisting its tendency to collectivize people, to reduce them to the level of a mob driven by herd instinct.  Liberal education is the only effective vaccine against the influence of social media.  Like medical vaccines, it is imperfect, yet its effects are real, which is why the forces who want an ignorant population easy to manipulate through applied mob psychology always attack liberal education.  It is said to be a useless waste of time (even though the politicians attacking it all have degrees from the likes of Harvard or Yale), it is woke, and so on.  Even some academics (as a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times illustrated) are tempted to fall for the bogus argument that liberal education, the humanities in particular, can’t be defended because the liberally educated are not necessarily turned into better people—the old “Nazis who wept at symphonies” argument.  The answer is that education can be transformative, but people have to choose to be transformed, and some don’t.  The temptation in Eden took place because human beings have to be free to choose what they become. 

The reflex of liberal education is to situate a current controversy within a larger perspective, to see it as part of a Big Picture.  A quick sketch of the history of education before the rise of democracy in the 18^th and 19^th centuries may help us understand present controversies over education more deeply.  In ancient Greece, the three most famous philosophers—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—were all teachers, and in fact Plato was the former student of Socrates and Aristotle of Plato.  Their schools consisted of small groups of young, well-born Athenian males, and the teaching was motivated by the twin goals of liberal education, personal and civic.  The young men wanted to know how to understand and live the ”good life,” and their teachers wanted them to be fit rulers. Plato, no democrat, spoke of the need for “philosopher kings.” 

Socrates’ notorious expulsion of the poets from his ideal state in the 10^th book of Plato’s Republic, because the poets lie while philosophers seek the truth, misunderstands the real nature of truth’s enemy.  What Plato was attacking—for it is his argument put in the mouth of Socrates—was exemplified less by Homer than by the other epic poet, Hesiod, in his Theogony, a catalogue of the genesis and early exploits of the gods, culminating in praise of the power and wisdom of Zeus.  Socrates is pitting philosophical argument against the supposed will of the gods, as known either by what the bird entrails announced at the augury last Tuesday or by what the Muses say through the poets—and in the opening of the Theogony, the Muses blatantly admit to Hesiod that they lie.  In other words, it is a contest of reason versus superstition, and it is true that the charge against Socrates was that he taught young people to doubt the gods.  But the attack on the poets was misguided.  The secularism of a younger generation was growing on its own, as it is in our time, and Socrates and Plato were trying to guide it through the power of reason.   Socrates’ real opponents were not the poets and their gods but the Sophists.   The Sophists were also teachers, but what they taught was “practical” education—in a world not guided by religious piety or lofty reason, they taught persuasive rhetoric, a training in language used to make friends and influence people and thereby get ahead.  Even in a world before capitalism, the implicit message was that greed is good, and that message led young idiots like Alcibiades where it so often does: into wars intended to establish a wealthy and powerful Athenian empire.  Instead, the Peloponnesian Wars crippled Athens and led to its decline.  An all-too-familiar story. 

Modern liberal education, especially at small institutions like my own, mimics the pattern of the Athenian schools:  small classes with discussion and a personal relation to the teacher.  The decline and fall of the Classical world led to the early Middle Ages, the part it is no longer politically correct to call the Dark Ages, dark because the light of learning was, if not extinguished, at least greatly dimmed.  Formal education was reborn sometime around the 12^th and 13^th centuries in the form of the first universities in Europe.  Like modern universities, they had both a practical and a liberal arts aspect.  Their practical task was to train and credential the learned professions:  to produce the clerics and theologians who would run the Church and the lawyers who would advise medieval kings who often could not even read.   But they were also centers of learning for its own sake: in fact, we get the term “liberal arts” from them.  When in the Inferno Dante visits Limbo, in his system the first circle of hell, he finds all the great Classical lovers of wisdom there because they were not baptized.  They dwell in a castle with 7 gates, standing for the 7 liberal arts.  These are subdivided into those arts whose vehicle is words, the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and those whose vehicle is numbers, the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.  The great poets and philosophers are there, the latter led by Aristotle, “master of those who know,” who began his Metaphysics with the famous sentence, “All human beings desire by nature to know.”  Yet Limbo is a place of “untormented grief,” and the grief of the philosophers is that they will never know the truth they value so much.   They know that their 7fold structure of learning, the knowledge available to unaided natural reason, is part of a much larger vision, but they are damned by original sin never to see that larger picture, which is only available through Christian revelation. 

Aided by grace, however, theologians, working from Scripture and the teachings revealed to the Church, aspired to construct a total mythological structure that fulfilled Joseph Campbell’s four functions of mythology.  It provided a cosmology, a social and political hierarchy said to be ordained by God, a psychological grounding of human life through teaching and ritual, and, not least, a vision of God, the universe, and humanity united as a total identity that Dante glimpses in the final cantos of the Paradiso, fulfilling what Campbell calls the mystical function.  Theology was “systematic”:  its goal was the form of the summa, which is what Frye called an “encyclopedic” form, deducing the total Big Picture from first principles.  It was a magnificent vision, expressed not only in theology but in such literature as the Divine Comedy and in the iconography of the art of the great cathedrals.  Moreover, the vision was expansive, incorporating over time, with adaptations, more and more elements from outside the core revelation of the Bible.  First there were non-Biblical Christian myths and legends, including Purgatory,  saints’ lives, the Grail story, and so on.  Medieval Thomistic theology incorporated a version of Aristotelian metaphysics.  The process accelerated during the Renaissance with the rebirth of humanistic learning.  Pagan mythology and literature were regarded as having a dim intuition of Christian truth, so that Classical and Christian images were sometimes put in a contrapuntal relationship, as in Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, where the 12 Sibyls are juxtaposed with the 12 Old Testament prophets.  Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue was called the “Messianic eclogue” because it speaks of a miraculous child who shall be born of a virgin and return the world to the age of gold.  Platonism was reborn in a quasi-mystical form as Neoplatonism and became a huge influence on Christian theologians like Augustine and artists like Michelangelo and Botticelli. 

After a time, vernacular literature was added to Classical as part of the total repository of stories and symbols.  In this way, encyclopedic poets like Dante, Spenser, and Milton were able to regard themselves as teachers as well as artists.  Milton spoke of aspiring to write a poem that was “doctrinal to a nation.”  Blake said that “All Religions Are One,” meaning that every true religion (there are false religions like Nazism) teaches a culturally adapted version of the one great story, and that included non-Western religions:  Blake was acquainted with the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gita.  For the past 60 years, literary and cultural theory have been unremittingly hostile to the idea of a Big Picture, regarding the idea as “totalizing,” with a secondary meaning of totalitarian.  That has not for one minute stopped writers from attempting to express it, often in the form of a modern epic, from Pound’s Cantos to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover.  There are also developments of what Milton called the “brief epic,” such as his own Paradise Regained.  Modern versions include Eliot’s Waste Land and Four Quartets and the long meditative poems of Wallace Stevens such as “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.”  Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism is based on the premise that there is a total “order of words,” and his classic The Educated Imagination is an accessible demonstration to an intelligent general public that this sense of total pattern should form the basis of literary education.  In itself, the order of words is secular, but of course Frye went on to write two books on the Bible and literature.  The first is called The Great Code, an allusion to Blake’s aphorism that “The Bible is the great code of art.”  This is not an attempt to kidnap all literature into serving Christian ideology.  It means that there is a common pattern beneath ideology, and that the Bible and literature serve as keys to each other on a deeper level than religious or political commitments. 

The “liberal arts” in the Middle Ages were a total structure of secular knowledge.  In modern times, liberal arts subjects have had a threefold structure, reflected in the divisions or schools of colleges and universities:  the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.  But since the attractiveness of a “liberal arts degree” has faded, the natural and social sciences have survived by becoming more thoroughly what they had always been in part, namely, pre-professional degrees.  When you teach, you tentatively assume that a biology major is most likely pre-med; a psychology major is headed either for counseling or neuroscience; political science majors are likely pre-law.  Disciplines unable to re-invent themselves may be in trouble: our school no longer offers a major in economics, for want of students.  This means in practice that “liberal education” has a tendency to shrink to mean the humanities, and all humanities majors are suffering massive and progressive enrollment declines, and have been doing so for 15-20 years.  The demand is to satisfy the question “What is it good for?”  Sometimes what is meant is strictly utilitarian:  what kind of job does this lead to, what kind of financial security and social status.  The skepticism is not necessarily always Philistinism: in a society of huge income inequality, the world of the middle class has become increasingly Social Darwinist.  We used to say to students, you are young and can afford to be idealistic and get a liberal arts degree, studying knowledge that is good for its own sake rather than for something you can do with it.  If you reach the ripe old age of 30 and crave more financial success, you can always go back and pick up that law degree.  To English majors we’d say, “You can always teach.”  But both salary and working conditions in high schools are so deplorable that secondary education no longer even draws the mediocre, let alone the best and brightest. 

The advice to get a liberal arts degree now and do something practical later becomes unthinkable when the liberal arts degree leaves the student $30,000 in debt.  The exceptions in my school are the theatre and musical theatre students who are driven by a passion that they are going to pursue no matter what, security be damned, for which I bless them.  But I do not look down on students who feel they must major in something that promises security if they are to acquire a debt so large they will be paying it off for much of their lives.  They look very depressed, as well they might, when I tell them that in my day just about no one graduated with much college debt at all.  Why has this changed?  For two reasons.  One is the withdrawal of support, especially by state governments, for higher education.  The public remains largely unaware of this, and often blames a combination of greed and administrative bloat for the relentless tuition raises.  But it is rarely true, at least in the small colleges and universities.  Like most small schools, Baldwin Wallace is almost entirely tuition-driven, its endowment being too small to be of much use.  Where does the tuition money go?  A huge amount of it goes right back to the students in the form of financial aid.  Almost no one pays the sticker price:  there are always scholarships, loans, and other forms of academic welfare, without which many students would not be able to attend at all. 

The second reason for the crisis not only of the liberal arts but of higher education altogether is the slow but relentless decline in enrollment.  The number of college students swelled dramatically after World War II, first with returning GI’s, then with the children of those GI’s, us Baby Boomers.  But there has been a slow decline ever since.  No matter how creative and aggressive our recruiting practices, the pool of high school graduates is dwindling and is going to continue to dwindle for at least the next 15-20 years, especially in a Rust Belt area that is losing population overall.  Cleveland lost more population last year than any other major city in the United States.  We were told that close to half the small institutions in our area will probably shut their doors entirely within that period of time.  I am fairly confident we will survive, if only because of the professional programs that have been added and which float the rest:   engineering, nursing and physicians’ assistant programs, in addition to the various types of business degree.  We also have a high-reputation musical theatre program.  But whether the humanities will survive as majors, as opposed to service departments offering a few low-level non-major enrichment courses, is a real question.  I think the administration genuinely values the humanities, but it is ruled by the bottom line.   We are facing a multi-million-dollar budget deficit for this year alone.  Faculty of humanities departments are retiring or leaving and not being replaced.  It is my understanding that just about all the small private institutions like us are facing a similar crisis. 

Studies have proved that liberal arts majors actually do fairly well on the job market, although it takes them longer to establish themselves than their peers who have business or professional degrees.  But students are understandably loath to take the risk.  What might help persuade them is an answer to the question “What is it good for?” that inspires passion of the sort that drives our theatre, musical theatre, and Conservatory students, a vision that could inspire them and give them faith that they are dedicating themselves to something that is not only personally transformational, at least potentially, but which could help to change the world for the better.  Students usually say they are majoring in English because they love it, but we have not helped them to understand why they love it, much less given them the language to defend their passion to others.  The economic reasons for the decline of the humanities have been external and beyond their control, but, sad to say, the humanities have in some ways betrayed themselves from within, and are partly responsible for their own obsolescence.  For decades beginning in the 60’s, most of the high-profile theorists in the humanities, especially English and philosophy, were caught up in the academic version of the culture wars, which meant that texts were read according to their ideological content, whether overt or latent. 

Ideological analysis is necessary and important—it is mainly what we mean by “critical thinking,” which we tell students is not just an academic but a primary life skill.  But the critics seemed unaware how far they were caught up in their own ideology, which was left-wing and regarded most of Western civilization as a structure of oppression.  The task of the critic was to deconstruct, to demystify, to dis-illusion.  The attitude behind much often-brilliant work ranged from ironic detachment to near-total skepticism to borderline nihilism.  Any attempt at articulating the idea that the human imagination is trying to awaken by building up through history a vision of a reality that exceeds the illusions of ideology was dismissed as just another “totalizing” rationalization of the structure of oppression.  The humanities could not be defended because they are based on concepts of “humanism” and the “human” that were bitterly contested since they had so often been used to marginalize women, gays and lesbians, Indigenous peoples, working class people, non-Europeans, and in fact everybody but Western white males.  Humanities disciplines were accused of being nothing but bastions of privilege providing an education that indoctrinated its victims with the ideology of domestic and colonialist domination. 

But the Big Picture, the encyclopedic vision, is not just an intellectual construct, though it informs all true intellectual constructs.  It is, to adapt a phrase from Wallace Stevens, not just ideas about a greater reality but the reality itself.  In chapter 12 of Walden, Thoreau compares the wars of human history, starting with the Trojan War, to a war he witnessed between red and black ants.  No doubt in the minds of the ants, he says, the causes—the ideologies—they are dying for are noble.  But to us, an ant war is frightening in its senseless ferocity and irrationality.  I know because one is fought every summer in the back study of my house.  Who needs Thoreau?  Every night for several weeks I have to clean up dismembered corpses of not just dozens but hundreds of ants.  I see living ants carrying dead ones somewhere, not knowing whether they are gathering fallen comrades, taking home trophies of defeated enemies, or, for all I know, eating take-out at home that night.  They do this every year, year after year. In “Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold spoke of ignorant armies clashing by night, and said that we must be true to one another because that is all we have in a world of ants decapitating one another for the sake of nothing we understand.  That “there is nothing beyond ideology” was chanted like a mantra during the “theory wars.”  It is no wonder if the despair inspired by such a hopeless conclusion sometimes drives people to say, like Conrad’s Kurtz, “Exterminate all the brutes!”  Putin is crazed by ideology, obsessed with the notion of a new Russian empire.  Hamas and the Israeli far right are both crazed by ideology, and are presently conducting an ant war of unspeakable ferocity and cruelty, with innocent Palestinian and Israeli people in the middle of it.   

What good is liberal education?  It gives us, at its best, a vision of a reality beyond the wars of the ants, and also gives us the means of living in it inwardly right now, even if imperfectly, and of working towards its fuller realization outwardly through time.  It is true, however, that all texts whatsoever, whether mythological, literary, or discursive, are carriers of ideologies the way the human body carries various parasites.  In Northrop Frye’s terminology, ideologies express “secondary concerns,” which are the self-interested, self-seeking concerns of an individual or group, whereas the deeper, imaginative level of a text expresses “primary concerns” which are primary because they are universal to the human race—concerns of food and drink, of safety, of power in the sense of freedom and autonomy, of love and the need for connection, of a sense of order that is the opposite of chaos, of the value of life itself.  Secondary concerns easily lead to aggression because they are zero sum:  if I possess it, then you don’t; competition is inevitable and if I win, then you lose.  Whereas primary concerns make empathy possible because they are trans-individual and cross-cultural, and therefore naturally lead to connections.  Liberal education could be defined as training the imagination to discern between primary and secondary concerns in any text, judging it according to how well its ideology—its secondary concerns—are subordinated to the vision of primary concerns.  Such judgment is never easy, because readers bring with them their own ideologies to the act of interpretation.  Liberal education properly teaches us to be wary of our own conditioning and bias. 

There is, then, a genuine form of war:  what Blake called “intellectual war,” of which the culture wars are an ideologically-obsessed parody.  We are startled when Socrates excludes Homer from his ideal Republic, but Blake would exclude him too:  it is the Classics that devastate Europe with wars, he said.  The Iliad teaches men that the ultimate value is the “glory” to be found in war.  They have a point, and Virgil in the often-misunderstood Aeneid agrees with it.  Aeneas will establish what will become the Roman Empire, and Virgil, who had lived through years of civil war, believed, or tried to believe, in the Empire as a means of ending the cycle of tribalistic violence symbolized by the Trojan War.  Rome did establish the pax Romana, the Roman peace, but empires always turn eventually into tyrannies.  The ideological justification of Rome was empire not for the sake of power but for the sake of bringing peace and enlightened civilization to warlike barbarians.  But instead, the conquered lands were merely exploited for the sake of wealth that benefitted a decadent ruling elite, including emperors who were sometimes outright mad.  Despite that, the British Empire centuries later modeled itself on the Roman, as the name “Augustan” signifies.  Liberal education in the British universities of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries was in the Classics, and the Aeneid was taught as a manual of empire to the young aristocrats who would graduate to rule the various colonies.  Hence the recent backlash against the Classics as nothing more than handbooks of “white supremacy.”  Liberal education for modern democracy, however, would neither buy into the ideologies nor blindly reject them, but rather distinguish what is universal in “the classics” from various ideologies we no longer accept.  Believe me, students are often less ideologically-blinkered than some academics and can usually accept this distinction without turning it into an either-or. 

But Blake’s attack on the warmongering Classics was itself one-sided.  His defense that “monks” do not cause wars is remarkably shaky for someone who had one of the most powerful intellects of any poet in literary history.  No, no monk militia. 

But there was from the early Christian centuries a Church that perverted the universal vision, the Everlasting Gospel, into an ideological structure of authority that rationalized a hierarchy claiming all but total power:  “No salvation outside the Church.”  The attitude of that authority was, “We have the Truth and you don’t, so obey without question.  We will convert and subordinate the whole world to our authority, and those we do not convert, we will destroy.”  Blake knew of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the religious wars of the 17^th century that left all of Europe devastated.   There was a good reason that Enlightenment figures like Voltaire turned against religion in the Age of Reason—the same reason that a scientist like Richard Dawkins attacks it now.  “Christian nationalism” in the United States and Orbán’s allegedly Christian “illiberal democracy” in Hungary want to reduce the Biblical vision once again to a theocratic ideology of power.  Students coming to classes where I teach Dante, Milton, and Blake know very little of this, but once it is presented to them, they get it.  What they get is that there is a difference between the power claims and the universal vision—and that we can discern that difference and reject the ideologies without abandoning what is invaluable in literature and the other arts, without trying to save ourselves for works that are ideologically pure, which of course do not exist.  To say, “I can no longer respond to Bach’s Mass in B Minor because the Church is patriarchal and has been corrupt and militaristic” is ideological obsession in the reverse direction.  What is liberal education good for?   It is good for navigating this process of clarification, which Blake called the “consolidation of Error.”  And navigating it cannot remain a luxury of the elite.  This is not merely an academic controversy:  if we do not navigate it, it is going to tear our world apart. 

For decades, the academy was taken up with a battle over the “canon,” a list of works and authors deemed to be important and necessary to a literary education.  In Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, these were supposed to represent “the best that has been thought and said.”  Scholars of the time of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had to fight to get English literature included in the canon along with the Greek and Latin Classics.  When literature was studied, it was always by “dead white males,” never by women, people of color, people of differing gender identities, or people who were recently alive.  Nowadays, the canon simply refers to an English department’s requirements for the major, and what professors put on their syllabi.  I daresay that in most schools what results is a not-very-perfect attempt to be representative, an attempt at balance—between the “greats” and what won an award last week, between  dead white males and diverse voices, between high and popular culture, between Western and non-Western.  Teaching styles also vary, with some professors of “cultural studies” emphasizing ideological analysis while others focus on aesthetic,  psychological, historical, or mythological issues.  It is all an inconsistent mess, but that is okay, because it reflects the mess of our society, which is flooded with diversity of all kinds since the breakdown of the old repressive order.  Out of this deluge may rise some sort of new order, but it will be an order suited for a democracy, one that allows difference and disagreement on the ideological level because its citizens know they are united at the root—as Milton said centuries ago in Areopagitica.  Liberal education cannot be eradicated.  If capitalism and its illiberal opponents drive it out of the academy, it will survive on the Internet or wherever two or three people gather in its name.  Perhaps the best way we can fight for the continuance of liberal and especially humanities education in the universities, however, is to articulate in an accessible way what it is “good for,” what it can mean, for an individual, for a society, for the world, to have an educated imagination.