The future may be hard to find, but the past is always out there if you bother to look for it.  Faulkner exaggerated only slightly when he said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past.”  All it takes is four wheels and a Rand McNally Road Atlas.

Some people don’t believe in heroes. I’m not one of them. In fact, I think it’s almost a kind of cowardice – but not quite.

As a student of liberal education, I have firmly embraced an idea that has become anathema in academic (and other) circles: the idea of the so-called “ivory tower.” In this post, I’ll explain why.

There are certain metaphysical assumptions (including assumptions about what the term “metaphysics” means) underlying the conceptual journey of Inside the Liberal Arts.

We can’t know everything. In fact, we necessarily can’t know everything. That is the key underlying point of a recent book by William Egginton titled The Rigor of Angels:  Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality.

We rightly expect the leaders of great American institutions to be unequivocal in their opposition to hatred and violence, including anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim sentiment, and genocide. Yet the furor caused by the recent Congressional testimony of the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT – who did not state their positions clearly enough – is nevertheless out of proportion. And it smacks of the sort of rush to condemnatory judgment typical of a political culture that cannot tolerate nuance.

The phrase comes from our greatest poet, Walt Whitman: “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads”. But who doesn’t look back once in a while? Without consulting our memories, we would not have the luxury of consciousness. My intention here is to talk about education, using my own circuitous but not extraordinary journey to try to sketch something more important.

Last winter, as Inside the Liberal Arts was about to debut, an unexpected detour caused by a California blizzard [see: “Tahoe Days”, June 24th] led me on a brief trip back in time to a place that I hadn’t seen in fifty years, and never in winter. It was a Nevada ranch where, in a sense at least, my liberal education began. The experience smacked of  “Brideshead Revisited”:  a slightly surreal journey back to a place that evoked mostly happy memories, yet the return was unexpectedly poignant.

A friend recently asked me to explain why I’m an anti-monotheist.  I have several answers (now that I’ve had some time to think about it). Most of them have to do with critical thinking, democracy, or both.

I recently finished reading a book (it was for my nonfiction book club – I didn’t choose it) titled Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought by Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black (Basic Books, 1995). I’m told they are considered leaders in the field. Our book group likes synoptic works that provide broad insight rather than depth or technical expertise, and Freud and Beyond is one such volume. (Another is Daniel Everett’s Language: the Cultural Tool, which does much the same for linguistics as Mitchell and Black do for psychoanalysis, although Everett’s work is arguably more controversial.)

I am both pleased and troubled by the political ferment on American college and university campuses. Pleased, because political expression is an essential part of citizenship – and citizenship (as I broadly define it) is the only reason to get an education.

I’m not a huge fan of “relevance” in the educational curriculum; there’s  a lot of essential liberal learning (to say nothing of STEM learning) that is not directly pertinent to unfolding events. But with the world on fire, unfolding developments (in the Middle East, Ukraine, and elsewhere) are relevant to the liberal arts through the nexus of citizenship. That’s the nexus where the news media meet higher education; where it’s the media’s business to determine and convey relevance and significance. Everything we learn is, in one way or another, for (political, cultural, or economic) citizenship.

Despite its low status in the American cultural firmament, philosophy, as thinking about thinking (and about the higher-order domains of knowledge, reality, and value) is important. As I argue in Inside the Liberal Arts, it’s the historic, and in many ways the conceptual, anchor of all systematic learning, and the wellspring of many of those other disciplines.  In recent centuries, for example, it has given birth (largely or wholly) to economics, political science, sociology, psychology, and linguistics. 

         In Part I of this post I talked about rationality in general, and why it’s generally considered  a good thing:  not the be-all-and-end-all of life, or even of learning, but an essential part of the mix. This was by way of a lead-in to the question of how we can teach people (young and not-so-young) to be better critical thinkers.  Which, unless you’re a latter-day member of a certain once-dignified political party, you will probably agree is a good thing.

Can we learn to be more rational? It’s hardly an idle question, although in posing it I feel compelled – in the name of reason – to add some immediate qualifications and caveats before trying to suggest an answer.

At about age seven, like many children of my generation and earlier, I suddenly became a stamp collector. For several years the hobby absorbed me, helping me to learn about the world. Most of the learning was geographic; but there were little cultural messages in the stamps, and even aesthetic ones. Parents: let your kids grow up to be stamp-collectors.

In the previous post, I set out some principles of what I call “ideological literacy.” Those ideas might serve as a kind of moral and conceptual gyroscope for navigating the rough and uncharted seas in which we Americans – we “dissatisfied fellow Americans,” in Lincoln’s words – now find ourselves. We are all lashed to the same mast, and our democracy is in shoal waters.

         In this post and the next one, I will talk about politics. More specifically, about political ideology, which is deeply related to both critical thinking and its joined-at-the-hip siblings, liberal education and democracy. In the second post, I’ll use that foundation to talk about the current moral crisis in America.

Having spent the better part of my career reading and writing, leading up to the publication of Inside the Liberal Arts, the question of how to spend this summer wasn’t a tough call: more reading and writing. Not because it’s the best thing to do, or for any elevated reasons. It’s just what I do best and enjoy most. Call it lifelong learning; one of the fatal byproducts of a liberal education is that you can never get enough of it.