What Exactly is the Function of Liberal Arts in Modern Society?

        Throughout the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance, the seven liberal arts (or the spheres of secular education) were diligently attended to by all who sought to plant their flag in any unmapped territory of human discourse. Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric, which had been around for quite some time, acted as the fundamentals by which to approach the realms of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. As the world has transformed over the last several centuries, however, the utilization of arithmetic and geometry have become more and more integral to a functioning society.

        Nowadays, the infrastructure that serves as the pillar for our modern society is so dependent upon the fields of engineering, programming, construction, etc…that the field and study of pure mathematics is becoming rapidly historical (or educational). One would not have to argue long to prove that every other field of biology, physics, chemistry, or engineering are  merely applied mathematics, yet the cornerstone is seeing diminishing returns.        

The liberal arts have transformed from their overarching, generalized approach to understanding the universe and its complexity, to a niche field of academic rigor with unpropitious fiscal return. History, literature, philosophy, religious studies: all of these fields may have their practical elements…leading to law, or education, or the political scene; yet for the majority, they are merely a stepping stone towards the specialization necessary to acquire the financially lucrative positions…ie, those that proffer an indisputable guarantee of fiscal security in a world with a rapidly rising cost of living.

        Unless there are clear means by which one of these fields of study can place a student on the path to financial success, they are not likely to be pursued…nor should they. Literature is replaced by Communications, History is replaced by Political Science or Cultural Studies, and Philosophy is replaced by Sociology or Psychology. I am not denying that each of these alternatives ultimately finds their root in the core of the pure liberal arts. Rather, I am merely recognizing that the foundational studies are lacking in the experiential specialization that so many employers have become exceedingly concerned with in an increasingly competitive job market.

Why then should students waste their time with these studies? The absolute necessity for literature, philosophy, and the rest of the humanities is automatically superseded by the need to make provision for one’s immediate, tangible needs. Yet the need to provide for basic needs does not quell the yearning of the soul for those intellectual aspirations which find their home in the liberal arts. Mankind is a creature with a roving mind, and we will not remain content merely within our work. Where then do the arts find their place?

The skyrocketing popularity of clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson is a testimony to a facet of this particular phenomenon. Enrollment in pure liberal arts degrees is still declining, but Peterson receives millions of views on his YouTube channel each week, with many viewers tuning in simply to listen to his weighty intellectual conversations. It has become readily apparent that we are experiencing a tremendous cultural craving for a life of meaning, and one that perhaps finds its derivative in a guilt response, triggered by the inordinate amount of excessive entertainment that many individuals partook of throughout the duration of quarantine, yet it is a pining desire that still struggles to compel the soul to such lengths that it will shake off the practical incentive to follow a career path with more stability. This is all the more difficult when we assess the depths of the hold that much of the consumerism-driven entertainment scene has (not simply on our shallow mental affections), but on the physical chemistry of our brain’s function…ie, dopamine addiction, serotonin release…etc.

Despite the appearance of a resurgence in a cultural inclination towards meaning, life has become remarkably shallow for many western minds. In recent decades, the unalienable rights that were fought for so vehemently in our nation’s history have become as commonplace as dead leaves in the bounds of winter. Yet freedom, that fickle thing, is never what it appears. It will never be valued by those who did not have to acquire it with blood, and will always be demanded by those who have not tasted its true colors. Freedom is a state, a liberality of the faculties, and one that inadvertently presupposes a behavioral tendency at its own arrival. Those that stand to advocate for freedom tend to assume that, once it is acquired, the subsequent state of liberation will mend all wrongs and remedy all ills…but history does not provide us with this narrative. History tells us that those of virtue, those that nourished the immortal soul with wisdom and diligence, beheld such attributes as pouring amiably from a body that was enslaved, or impoverished, or in great physical calamity…but never from within a state of complacency, comfort, or material excess.

I do not have to argue this point, as there is enough good literature in our species’ history depicting this tendency to make redundant my present emphasis. However, the problem of action is not a mere slight discrepancy. After all, who amongst the free would wish themselves a slave?

In A World Split Apart, Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes of the inevitable tilt of the society that has made freedom its overarching mantra:

“This tilt of freedom towards evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man—the master of this world—does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected.”                

The pursuit of happiness is inevitable. It becomes in time the mental neglect of the void, the momentary quelling of a contradictory conscience, and the transformation of hope into base satisfaction. It is our lusting in every waking hour, and it so drives and compels us that it no longer takes on a conscious appearance, but is a wholly unconscious force in its instinctual compulsion. The desire of the enslaved is to be free… to break the physical bonds which hold them captive, and to enjoy the pleasures of beauty, simplicity, and curiosity. Yet the free have in themselves perhaps a greater bind, for, although remaining free from the persecution of their physical being by another, they have found themselves enslaved to their own desires (and unable to construct barriers which will prevent their own depravity from operating a rapidly expanding regime within the mind, in which virtue slinks back into the shadows).

Solzhenitsyn then writes:

“Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept.”

Indeed this is the great conundrum, for no sooner have the slave chains been loosened than our liberated selves harken straight to the call of utter moral depravity. If the liberal arts are free… the arts without the shackles of predisposed formulas or presuppositions of structure, then where is their room to grow and flourish in either place? In the one, the chains restrict the body from living out the pure maturity of the internal soul, and in the other, the weakened spirit does not dare to usurp the body from its paramount aim of pleasure-pursuit.

Allan Bloom, in his brilliant book The Closing of the American Mind, writes:

“Students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.”

        There are those who now remain as living shells, engineered by Big Tech and their own perverted desires to live a rudimentary life of aimless intent, whilst remaining nihilistic in every sense of the word…they are nothing.

        The liberal arts have been reduced to the fringes. Our study of history is dying a painful death: why learn about the past when it can be googled? Our minds have been so engorged with useless and gossipy information that our ability to philosophize or romanticize has been severely, traumatically crippled. In a bygone world, community was central to the health and well-being of the individual, and even something as simple as family prayer was not simply a spiritual exercise with individual benefits…but a communal yearning of the human spirit towards the unknowable mysteries of infinity. Yet Bloom, when recounting the modern shift away from any such foolish enterprises as family prayer, declares:

“Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois, meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life.”

        Where is the eternal in our lives? Has it scuttled to the fringes? Or perhaps, in our stifled rage to demolish silence, we have thrust it out the door completely?

May we rekindle a sense of awe, realign our hearts with the moral imperative of selflessness, and may we find the time amidst our labors to devote the fringes to the excellent study of the free arts.

Christian