This essay is part of a RealClearPolicy series centered on the American Project, an initiative of the Pepperdine School of Public Policy. The project looks to the country’s founding principles to respond to our current cultural and political upheaval.
It is deeply consequential, even emblematic, that one of the greatest American defenders of the Western idea of liberal education was a former slave. The author of three (or four, depending on how one counts) autobiographies, Frederick Douglass explored not only the profound questions of self-hood and identity, but also the role of one’s public persona in a self-governing republic. In every way imaginable, his inquiry and advice offer a sharp contrast to contemporary conceptions of race, identity, human nature, and the role of education. Douglass points us to our deepest selves, to our shared humanity, and to the essential role of education in the fulfillment of our highest ideals.
Frederick Douglass was, in a phrase he used constantly on the lecture circuit, a “self-made man.” A self-made man is neither “natural” nor the product of willful caprice — neither an individualist, separate from society and history, nor a conformist, blindly following the majority. Rather, as Douglass shows, the self-made man is an achievement, the accomplishment of self-cultivation of one’s most defining human capacities.
For Douglass, to be self-made was not about the bourgeois ideal of material success. Rather, a self-made man was someone who, by one’s own effort, had crafted something called “character.” This meant holding firmly to the right principles. Douglass’s autobiographies and lectures placed his life struggle not only in racial terms but also, more fundamentally, in spiritual terms. To achieve the goal of being a truly “good” man requires a struggle with one’s self.
Douglass’s first primer, which he absorbed thoroughly, was a collection of speeches called “The Columbian Orator.” Stressing classical virtues in tandem with the Enlightenment principles expressed by the Scottish Common Sense school, the speeches collected in this volume shaped Douglass’s understanding of one liberal art, in particular: rhetoric. For the rest of his life, he would tout the power of persuasion in moral matters such as abolitionism.
Over time, Douglass became a model autodidact, drawing deeply from the intellectual sources of Western civilization, in general, and the American tradition, in particular. For Douglass these were a great storehouse of wisdom and knowledge to which he, as a human, had equal claim. To these intellectual sources, Douglass wedded his own devotion to the virtues of hard work, self-discipline and honesty. These were, for Douglass, essential to the person of character — the man whose reason masters his passions, who proves that mind is higher than matter.
Rejecting both racist assumptions about innate human differences and historicist claims about the relativity of truth, Douglass presented himself as a model for self-empowerment, true for any human of any race. “Give the Negro fair play,” he said, “and let him alone.” But what does it mean to give someone “fair play”? Douglass meant something akin to what we typically mean by equality, rather than equity. Give people the resources from which to make their lives, give them the opportunity to employ their efforts, to show their drive and persistence, and they will be given an “equal” chance at life, whatever their other disadvantages. The opportunity Douglass offers is for the creation of the “self-made man” — both free and governed by right principles, liberated from narrow prejudice and from low passions, flourishing in the pursuit of our highest ends.
The idea of “fair play” recognizes the right of every human, regardless of social status or race, to have access to the great storehouse of civilization, to learn from the best that has been handed down. This means acquiring not only the principles of a good life but also the skills needed to embody those principles and defend them. Real freedom does not come automatically from ending slavery, according to Douglass. As he stressed, even white slave holders had long been enslaved by prejudice, ignorance, and their own lack of character. As for former slaves, Douglass argued that freedom requires that one take the initiative to be free truly. In particular, the path to freedom was opened by education — by which he meant access to the best and most enduring sources of all human civilizations, beginning with the root of that particular culture to which one belongs.
Douglass emphatically claimed his right to such sources of the Western tradition as the King James Bible and Aristotle — or any work of genius, produced in any time and by any culture. For Douglass, freedom and self-rule are both products of a cultivated human nature, which is itself the result and aim of a liberal education. Access to the sources of that education is therefore necessary for a free people to remain free and — and therefore a right for all humans, regardless of race.
Frederick Douglass and his self-made men have been on my mind as I’ve worked through Margarita Mooney’s “The Love of Learning: Seven Dialogues on the Liberal Arts.” Both Douglass’ life and work and Mooney’s book belong to a deep but currently repressed part of the American tradition. The importance of Mooney’s book with regard to the American project must be understood in America’s dominant traditions with regard to human nature, education, and the virtues.
Frederick Douglass belonged to what we might call the Whig (and later Republican) tradition of the cultivated human. It was a tradition to which Abraham Lincoln, too, both belonged and contributed. The cultivation of one’s self, in this school of thought, amounted to a moral and civic duty. Humans are born with capacities and potentials that cannot be realized outside of both the right habits (hard work, self-discipline) and access to the resources of a proper education. What had been, before the rise of modern republicanism, the duty only of the privileged classes, became the obligation of all people — to realize through liberal education, both formal and personal, the highest human potential that were built into human nature itself. Such a view requires that individuals develop the virtues appropriate to a free life — virtues that are only possible by way of conscious cultivation.
A competing American tradition stresses not cultivation but the natural or untutored characteristics of human beings. This tradition I’ll call democratic because of its association both with the Democratic Party of the 19th century and the idea that democracy is the natural human state. This is the tradition that valorizes the frontier “virtue” and “honor” of an Andrew Jackson, who knew in his bones what to do. And it is the stream of thought that today stresses “lived experiences” and authenticity — with its implicit trust in who we think we are independently of any socializing pressures.
Although educational theories, techniques, and fads have tended, over time, toward this democratic American tradition, it is the Republican tradition that is most associated with the concept of self-rule. It is my view that without a conception of education that seeks to form people — self-cultivation in the language of Lincoln and Douglass — into principled people, free from the enslavement to passion, we will not have the resources to understand, much less cultivate, the virtues needed for self-government. And as the ancients taught us, and America’s founders well knew, without the bulwark of these virtues, democracy slides naturally into tyranny.
None of these concerns about the fate of self-rule are explicit in Mooney’s fine book, which is part examination and part celebration of the liberal arts. But they show us what is at stake in her defense of the liberal arts. The contrast between Mooney’s moderate, thoughtful, and unassuming book and the civilizational context in which it has appeared is striking, even jarring. Consider a few facts.
The institutions, especially universities, most responsible for preserving and handing down the best of civilization — whether ours or others’ — seem to have abandoned this task. Some even reject it outright, attacking on ideological grounds the very idea of historical memory, inherited knowledge, and the wisdom of tradition. The dominant “meritocratic” ethos places power and wealth above the formative virtues of Western civilization. The love of wisdom passed down to us by the ancients has been abandoned or rejected in favor of what St. Augustine called the libido dominandi, or will to power.
In such as high-tech, materialistic, and libidinous age as ours, “The Love of Learning” amounts to a powerful apologia for what is best in our civilization. Professor Mooney organized her book as seven dialogues between her and seven scholars about different aspects of the liberal arts, from our universal human nature to the need for order and beauty. The dialogue format well reveals the complexity and diversity of thought about the liberal arts in our time, even as it suggests something about the nature of education itself.
What Mooney shows by example is that true education is not technical training in preparation for the meritocratic war of all against all. Rather, it is an ongoing dialogue, based on argument and persuasion, with past cultures about the highest goods. And because the dialogues contained in Mooney’s book engage many of the most important educational thinkers of the last century, the book provides an invitation into a rich and nuanced conversation. It is an invitation because, ultimately, it is for the reader to wrestle these ideas, and not simply to receive them passively.
At the foundation of Professor Mooney’s book is the idea that we humans hunger to know, and that it is in our nature — our telos — to love Truth. Appropriately, the first dialogue of the book is with Princeton professor Robert P. George, whose work on the tradition of natural law supports an understanding of education that aims at moral laws as a constituent part of reality. These are moral laws that humans can grasp through reason, reason which requires cultivation through liberal education. But it is Mooney’s own emphasis on the “love” of learning that offers the most powerful case for the liberal arts to those who wish to be fully human.
According to Mooney, we are not creatures defined simply by base desires or passions, nor are we simply rational beings who calculate our way through life. We are loving beings who, out of our sense of incompleteness and out of our higher desire to encounter Truth, are made better — made more truly “ourselves” — by the pursuit of learning through the liberal arts. Mooney here shows herself to be an inheritor and defender of that Republican tradition exemplified and enriched by Frederick Douglass.
Yet, perhaps no chapter of Professor Money’s book is as beguiling or as illuminating as Mooney’s dialogue with George Harne. A musicologist, who is currently Executive Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Harne offers a compelling account of the liberal arts as a way of participating in the “divine life.” “The best forms of liberal learning,” he argues, “are about helping people to become fully human, and beauty is an essential part of that human development rooted in our anthropology, who we are as humans.” In this essential chapter, Harne and Mooney explore the relationship between beauty, discovered and experienced through the fine arts, as helping to complete and to amplify the liberal arts. If humans desire to know, as Aristotle insisted, it is also true that humans “desire to experience beauty.” Beauty is therefore a “fundamental human need.”
Harne’s point about our need for beauty is hardly incidental, as it penetrates to the core failure of modern education in both theory and in practice. Modern education rests on an impoverished understanding of the human person as a self-interested individual unencumbered by tradition. This results in a fragmentary curriculum that caters to the students’ preferences rather than a coherent whole that seeks to form their characters. In explaining the many ways that the study of music forms mind and spirit — including connecting mathematics with aesthetics — Harne stresses how listening the right way “helps us recover the classical vision of the human person that integrates body, mind, and spirit.”
“Today there is a temptation,” Harne says, “to fall into a reductive dualism in which our bodies are mere tools and our true selves are our minds, or our complete personhood is reduced to the materiality of our bodies.” Reclaiming the wholeness of the human persons as the proper object of liberal education requires showing students the complexity of life, and the way partial things belong to a whole. By ignoring or denying this integrative wholeness to which we belong — and which we naturally seek to know and experience — modern education does not simply fail to form students; it malforms them.
A truly liberal education requires that the otherwise discrete inquiries of the mind be put into conversation — that students experience the wholeness of that which they study. Essential to this, according to Mooney, is “poetic knowledge,” increasingly rare in the modern world. Poetic knowledge, drawn here from French philosopher Jacques Maritain, is a part of our practical intelligence, which seeks to integrate and express those experiences and truths which otherwise confront us as ineffable. In short, poetic knowledge helps us get beyond purely “conceptual knowledge” by connecting beauty with “our reason and practical ways of living.”
In this way, liberal education cultivates ways of seeing, expressing, and understanding the interrelated parts of our being — the physical, the intellectual and the spiritual. In so doing, we can integrate different kinds of knowledge and experience into a holistic grasp of human life and its purposes. “Poetic knowledge helps link our experiences in the world, whether in nature or liturgy, back to the spiritual preconscious, and that shapes our work, our everyday lives.”
Mooney’s book explores the complex ways that the liberal arts form us as humans, inspire our love of Truth, and engage with our experiences in a way that reveals the historically textured reality in which we live. But she also makes a compelling case for the liberal arts as the rightful inheritance for all of us, not simply the elite. (This comes out most clearly in her dialogue with Roosevelt Montás, a professor of American Studies and English at Columbia University.) And so, Professor Mooney leaves us with the same basic claim offered by Douglass about the empowering, liberating, and formative nature of a liberal education. Each of us has an equal right to the riches of all civilization, but particularly that civilization and its resources which has produced the culture in which we find ourselves.
Mooney’s hopeful defense of the liberal arts is needed now more than ever, when the virtues required for self-government — especially that virtue cultivated through and at the root of a liberal education, the love of wisdom — appear everywhere under threat. Mooney teaches us how to cherish what is best in our liberal inheritance, including those moral resources that empowered the great American abolitionist to fight for freedom in his own time and to remain an exemplar of virtue in our own.
Ted McAllister is the Edward L. Gaylord Chair and professor of public policy at Pepperdine School of Public Policy.
