I remember when I was much younger I attended the college graduation of a family member. As the dean read the names of the graduates and their majors I remember hearing him say numerous times “in Liberal Arts.” I knew what he meant when he said “Mathematics” and I knew what he meant when he said “History” and other disciplines such as those but I did not know what “Liberal Arts” meant. I asked someone, I don’t remember who, what Liberal Arts meant and I recall getting an answer to the effect of “that is what people get when they don’t know what they want to be.”
For a very long time after that I had adopted that as my own view (do you see how formative a simple conversation can be, for good or ill, in a young boy’s life?). Liberal Arts, or sometimes referred to as “the Humanities” to many people is perceived as little more than taking a bunch of different kinds of classes because you don’t really know what you want to do with your life or who you want to be. It’s no small wonder, really, why people have come to think that because on a practical level it is true in one sense.
The sense in which this is true is that because a Humanities program is intentionally interdisciplinary and many people who don’t have a clue what they want to learn about in college end up graduating with a major in “Liberal Arts” or “Humanities”. Their friend who knew he wanted to be a scientist majored in biology, their other friend who knew she wanted to be a sports therapist pursued Anatomy and physiology, but they did not know what they wanted to do and so they took a class with this friend and that friend and that other friend too. Then came their junior year of college and they had a conversation with their academic adviser who told them “You’re well on your way to a degree in Liberal Arts already and you have take too many different classes now that you will not have any other major unless you want to be a fifth year senior.”
So the poor fool who did not know what he wanted to do and bounced around from class to class sampling all kinds of different disciplines gets stuck with a “useless” degree in the Humanities. He went to college not knowing what he wanted to do and suddenly he is graduating with a degree that says to the whole world that he wandered aimlessly through college. Or, at least, that is how it appears to many. I would say, however, that there remains a possibility that that poor fool ended up with a better education than the math, history, or biology major did. Let me tell you why.
I do not think the above scenario I described is ideal. An accidental Humanities education is not as good as an intentional one. But the reason I argue that it might, even accidentally, be a better education than the others is because of what the Humanities by their very nature are and do. Biology majors produce biologists, Math majors produce Mathematicians but Humanities majors produce humans. The purpose of the Liberal Arts is to train the mind, body and soul towards embracing what it really is to be a human being. Specializations certainly have their place (we need people who really know their stuff in a given discipline) but the Humanities ought to underlie or be the foundation upon which any specialization springs from.
Essentially what the Liberal Arts do is recognize that man is a multifaceted being and that no one subject is sufficient to train all that makes him human. Another way to put it would be to say that no one is only a carpenter or a stock trader or a philosopher or a mathematician, we are all so much more than just that. The truly human man or woman has more to them than to be pigeonholed into a single discipline to the extent that they cannot interact meaningfully with other disciplines. The Humanities tell us that we should not be enslaved to only one area of knowledge or practice but that we should be conversant with other areas of life and disciplines of work and thought no matter what area we personally excel in or earn a living by.
It is the lack of a Humanities education and foundation that allows people like Richard Dawkins, who is an otherwise brilliant guy, to make an argument in The God Delusion such as “Who made God?” and to then think he has profoundly defeated theism. Only a smidgen of good philosophy would have held this brilliant scientist back from uttering such nonsense as that but, let’s face it, he did not know better.
But it is not just poor Richard Dawkins who makes these kind of errors. The same can woefully be said of many seminarians and pastors who know the Bible backwards and forwards but no nothing of biology, philosophy or non-biblical history. The same can be said about the medical practitioner who knows nothing of religion. The same can be said about any number of people in one discipline or another who says “Why do we really need math when we have calculators?” The unfortunate reality of any specialist who was not first grounded in the Liberal Arts is that they too often only see the value of their own discipline and marginalize the value of others. Their ignorance leads to a depreciation of other disciplines and the disproportionate exaltation of their own.
But the truth is that man is a rational, spiritual, biological, social, musical, and entrepreneurial being. We are not any one of those things to the exclusion of the others. To close ourselves off into one corner of human experience is to behave explicitly less human than we are. It is inhumane to be so highly disciplined in one field that we cannot meaningfully interact or appreciate the other “subjects” that are out there. In so doing we guarantee that we will misunderstand and falsely accuse other disciplines of things they do not think or practice and we become snobs of one sort or another and falsely elevate our own discipline to the highest place of glory.
So that poor fool who fumbled around from class to class in college, trying a little of this and that, may just have ended up with a greater understanding of the interconnectedness of the various disciplines than did the person who knew who they wanted to be. That fool might just see right through other people later in life when they make unbalanced statements about the superiority of this or that, or how unnecessary or unimportant other fields of study are. That person might understand why math is more than calculators and men are more than atoms, and why God does not need a maker.
It’s definitely best to approach the humanities intentionally. It’s good to go in knowing that you are learning to be more human and are intentionally seeing how all of human knowledge, practice and experience works together. But even the fool who fumbled into it might end up better off than those who declare a major their freshmen year and never took a class outside of it. So the Liberal Arts are what people get when they don’t know what they want to do? Perhaps so. But the Liberal Arts are for people who want to know who they are.
