This week’s topic – occasioned by a recent evening at a Broadway theater  -- is the (often blurry) boundaries of art.  More specifically, it’s the Broadway musical, a genre notorious for sometimes straddling that boundary. The show in question was a production of “Merrily We Roll Along,” with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The great Stephen Sondheim, whose career began with his lyrics for one of greatest of all musicals, “West Side Story” (1957), with music by Leonard Bernstein. Now that was a work of art. 

Early sailors used maps of the night sky and the known world to find their way, along with other navigational devices: compasses for direction, astrolabes, and later sextants, to determine latitude. While crude or inaccurate by modern standards, those instruments worked well enough for millennia, enabling navigators to guide their ships at sea. (And navigators on American bombers used sextants to cross the Atlantic as recently as World War II). Similarly, the tools of critical inquiry enable us to navigate the natural and symbolic worlds with greater precision and success until better ones come along. And most of the ones we use have served for thousands of years. 

I’ve recently had the pleasure of re-reading two of Plato’s dialogues, the Phaedrus and the Sophist. Reading Plato is always a pleasure. Even when he’s wrong, i.e., when his philosophy is inadequate, he’s never wholly wrong. 

I’ve argued here (see, for example, my June 20, 2023 post “Joined at the Hip”) that liberal learning isn’t just a nice thing; it’s essential to democracy. CHANGE MAG. But such high-minded scribblings beg certain practical questions about how exactly we can achieve the parallel goals of more liberal arts and more democracy. And while we’re at it, let’s add another key ingredient: better media. It takes all three to make the soufflé of democratic culture rise. (As they say at The New Yorker: Block that metaphor!).

There’s a reason why I devote an entire chapter of Inside the Liberal Arts to the idea of complexity. I argue that complexity is one of the foundational “gateway concepts” of liberal learning: an intellectual driver that (as part of the simple-complex axis) explains a lot about how we explain things to ourselves and one another. And it’s hidden in plain sight, so to speak. We can choose to recognize and use it, or not. 

“America, at this moment, is more politically polarized than it has been since the Civil War.”  By and large, I agree with that widespread assumption. But as Mark Twain supposedly said of the weather: everyone complains about it, but no one does anything about it. The questions I have regarding polarization are what it really signifies, whether it’s really polarization, and what we can do about it.  

On April 14th, the New York Mets honored their former pitching star Dwight Gooden by retiring his number 16 in a ceremony at Citi Field.  Gooden’s teammate, outfielder Darryl Strawberry, also had his number 18 retired, in a similar ceremony on June 1st.  Met fans greet these events with joy, appreciation, and a big sigh. 

My floundering baseball team had the night off; but I’m also a fan of the Vineyard Conservation Society, and a film buff, so I had multiple reasons to be at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center on a recent May night to watch the Norwegian documentary “Songs of Earth.”  The screening was part of the 10th annual Environmental Film Festival, co-sponsored by VCS and the Film Center. 

I've been thinking a lot about a recent conversation with a friend about life in general and its meaning. The morning after our conversation, I was listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC - the best news and talk show in New York - and he was talking to someone who had written a book about spirituality and "seeking," which again brought the question to the fore.

It has sometimes been argued that philosophy has run its course; yet philosophy continues. They even teach the stuff. It’s an interesting conundrum to reflect upon.  

Marshall McLuhan used to say, in various iterations, that “Whoever invented water wasn’t a fish.”  In other words, it’s hard for us to perceive immersive environments when we exist within them. Melville said something similar about oysters. And the current environment of American discourse is, in some ways, a case in point. We are immersed in the abnormal, and it therefore seems normal.

I’m fascinated by historical quirks and mysteries – and who isn’t?  A touch of geographical obscurity only adds spice to the mix.  I have two such events on my mind, but one of them can wait. Both relate to World War II in the Pacific. And I like to think both would have intrigued my father, who served in the Pacific (although he had definite ideas about one of them, and probably didn’t know about the other). 

It began with a chance (and joking) remark I heard over a card game: “There’s no justice in the world.” And all because I got dealt the better hand in a game of Canasta. If you’re looking for justice in the world, card games might not be your first stop. 

Those of us who like to bask in the sunlight of the liberal arts – students, educators, writers, researchers, journalists, other knowledge-workers – seldom do it for the money. But whatever our motives for thinking, writing, teaching, and communicating, once in a while we get sucked into a quixotic or risky, but not hopeless, project: one that is a pure labor of love. 

Some thirty years ago, I wrote an op-ed piece on Memorial Day about one Alvah Kirk, a Civil War soldier whose letters I had discovered.

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.