Years ago, at an event attended by local political and business leaders, a major real estate developer expressed shock and disbelief that I, a professor who is not a Marxist, worked in academia. He declared to me in front of everyone at the table that “real power is in business,” to which I replied that real power is in ideas. While the table chuckled and he asked me why, I said I could spend a career indoctrinating thousands of students so that they could vote to take his wealth away. Visibly unnerved, that conversation ended. Of course, the state confiscating private property is an abhorrent idea, but that is beside the point. An equally utilitarian response matched the purely utilitarian view of power held by the developer. Such power-for-power debates are the thing of psychopathy, but this is ultimately what a society devolves towards without the liberal arts infused into its culture. Avoiding a civilization collapse means bringing them back into every level of education. This is a sentiment echoed by many at the National Association of Scholars (NAS). What is often less said is why the liberal arts matter in the first place.
Today, the term “liberal arts” is more likely to conjure images of debt-ridden baristas with degrees in literature, philosophy, or “grievance studies”—angry at their stalled prospects and eager to channel that frustration into radical politics like Antifa. Such an image may reflect the bastardized “liberal arts” of the modern left, but it neglects what the liberal arts have given the modern West. America’s founding ideas, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” or that “all men are created equal,” did not come from a utilitarian mindset, but rather ideas with deep roots in the liberal arts of the Western tradition.
Languages, literature, and philosophy might seem to be the least valuable liberal arts fields to the modern conservative-minded utilitarian seeking education reform. After all, what good is reading fiction, learning Greek, French, or Latin for modern technology or business? For one, languages and literature are still the primary means of understanding the ideas within a culture and its values. The stories we encounter as children in school shape not only what values we hold as individuals but also allow us to communicate morally with one another.
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The death of the Trojan warrior Hector in Homer’s Iliad and the desecration of his body still twinges the modern reader precisely because we can relate to losing the bodies of fallen GIs in Vietnam, or are revolted by the Hamas attack of October 7 in Israel. The vastness of the American wilderness of James Fenimore Cooper’s stories about Natty Bumppo still reminds us of the possibility of liberty that today’s America is meant to offer, and yet no longer seems to. The late-19th-century American folktale of John Henry working valiantly, if mortally, against the onslaught of the “machine” of industry tugs at the fear of everyone today about the value of labor in an era of growing artificial intelligence. These stories may be more or less fiction; however, they remind us that our fears and struggles are not unique to us, but rather part of a shared humanity that connects us to our fellow citizens.
For its part, language shapes how we view the world itself. Language shapes how we view time, space, love, and the future. Aristotle’s philosophy of politics and metaphysics, which went on to help inform our own ideas of Natural Rights that we try to uphold in the Constitution, cannot be divorced from how he perceived the human being in relation to the cosmos. The link between the human being and the universe comes from Greek itself, where kosmos does not just mean the universe, but the sum of humanity within it. The businessman I encountered at that event would be powerless in the courts without the Western legal tradition, the philosophy behind it, and the Latin concepts that survive today in every law school in the country.
Like law, math, and the science that relies upon it cannot be separated from philosophy either. Philosophy is not, as the legitimately ignorant would assert, simply the opinions of people who think too much. Philosophy, or the study of wisdom, involves the rigorous use of reason to test for that which is both valid and real.
The liberal arts offer to the mind what the right to bear arms offers physical safety.
The Socratic logic found in classical education examines the essences of things to ensure a sound understanding of the world around us. For those who doubt the value of Socratic reasoning, look no further than how the left attempts to change language to suit its interests. Illegal alien criminals become undocumented immigrants who cannot be deported, unborn babies are reduced to a clump of cells and ready for abortion without apology and upon demand, and the homeless devolve into the “unhoused,” as opposed to human beings who need treatment for addiction and mental health. A society well-versed in Socratic reasoning would never have let language get this warped, let alone allow this warped language entrance into policy or law. Philosophy’s more formal reasoning involves logic that is close to pure math, translating ideas and statements into mathematical functions to seek their validity. Lacking this knowledge, one is left in a forest of fallacies that have very real-world implications in society and civic life.
Philosophy, history, and theology are not just liberal arts, but are related to life and death policy struggles playing out across the Western world today. The Biden administration saw perhaps 10 million illegal aliens enter the United States. For the Marxist left, which envisions a borderless world made up of class distinctions, this is both fine and a natural progression towards socialism. For those with any knowledge of history, another liberal art, this is a crisis of citizenship and civilizational survival. Understanding why borders matter, how unique American republicanism is, and why citizenship matters requires a common knowledge of history and philosophy. Why do borders or citizenship matter? The answers may be instinctual, but the truth is not self-evident. If truth was self-evident, America’s Founders would not have had to declare it and fight for it publicly. If truth cannot be articulated across society, that society will not empathize, think critically, or think coherently. That may seem trivial until a national crisis emerges when those common bonds and that common understanding matter most. You need the liberal arts to make this happen.
The erosion of citizenship and its meaning is one recent example of the real-world implications of the death of the liberal arts. Knowledge of America’s common history, solidarity based on a commitment to Constitutional rights, and the hell that Americans in past ages had to face are only communicated through history, civics, and philosophy. Citizens armed with a good liberal arts education safeguard each other against predatory government and rally together when attacked. The response of Americans after Pearl Harbor in 1941 and after 9/11 is a natural response for an educated citizenry. Loose borders and immigration, without controlled assimilation, erode this common knowledge. The warped tribalism and Marxism offered by the left are intentional assaults on social and spiritual DNA that good liberal arts are meant to cultivate.
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Even in economics, seemingly the most utilitarian of the humanities, philosophy and history cannot be escaped. Marxism is based on an idea of a historical trajectory powered by materialistic causes alone. It’s not hard to see where the soullessness of this ideology leads, as all one has to do to get a taste is to read history or talk to its survivors. At the same time, pure capitalism is just as dangerous as it reduces everyone to units of labor. The coarseness of these debates could be avoided by reading Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, and its explanation of how a strong social fabric allows capitalism to work in the first place.
The liberal arts offer to the mind what the right to bear arms offers physical safety. A good liberal arts background, whatever one’s profession, safeguards the individual intellect from what is false and malignant. Without philosophy and theology, another liberal art, dictatorship is warranted, and religious sensibilities devolve to fundamentalism.
Simply put, the liberal arts allow a society to understand itself and the individuals within it to communicate as a whole. That leads to self-awareness, self-respect, and self-preservation. It is what allows civilization to function. So, long live the liberal arts.
Image: “The School of Athens by Raphael” by Maksim Sokolov on Wikimedia Commons
