The liberal arts, and the humanities, do not live only or even primarily in universities. They can, and they do, flourish elsewhere, among people who ain’t got time for academic bullshit.
I love this. And I hope it’s very true. But I don’t think it’s as true as I want it to be. I think there’s a circle that is just outside of “academic bullshit” but that still includes mostly “academics” talking to each other. People who are miles and miles from academia, the bullshit kind or otherwise, and who are thinking about the liberal arts and the humanities—where they is?
Unless, of course, what we’re talking about is the liberal arts and the humanities leaking out and bouncing around the culture but in a form not known or referred to as the liberal arts or the humanities.
I hope I’m not just being picky (or bullshitting) here. I really am interested in how “things” get passed around in their more subtle, even unnamed or nameless forms. In fact, these may be the most important forms they take, especially since, well, most people “ain’t got time for academic bullshit.”
In his essay “Self-Evident Truth and the Declaration of Independence,” Michael Zuckert makes the case that when Thomas Jefferson ultimately settled on the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he and the signers of the Declaration knew perfectly well that the truths themselves are not, strictly speaking, self-evident.
Zuckert argues that, rather than being self-evident by strict definition, the “political or practical status” of the truths listed is more the intention that Jefferson and others had in view. In their minds, since not all citizens could be scientists and philosophers, it would be necessary for many to hold such truths as if they were self-evident: “…healthy political life requires that the results of the most advanced philosophic and scientific speculation be ‘held’ in order to be effective by a community which was not itself philosophic or scientific.” The “truths” of the Declaration were not to be presented here as the result of hours, years, centuries of political insight to which anyone might dedicate himself in study.
They are rather to be held as if self-evident within the political community dedicated to making them effective. . . . While they stand as the conclusion of some (unspecified) chain of philosophical or scientific reasoning, they must stand at the beginning of all chains of political reasoning.
The benefit of this may be at least twofold. On the one hand, the actual nature of the truths themselves encourages a value for education, particularly civic education. On the other hand, the fact that they would be held in practice as though they were self-evident means that such education and proliferation of information and reason, important as they are, will not become a sine qua non for the success of that society. This is especially valuable since, as we should know quite well by now, even the learning of truth itself does not necessitate its being “held.” The emphasis in the end is on the importance that these truths be held by all, regardless of how they were arrived at by the individual.
As Jefferson put it: “He who made us would have been a pitiful burgher, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science there are thousands who are not.”
This brings to mind a famous quote from John Ruskin, perhaps one-upping the significance of widely held political truths with a version that we might apply to the liberal arts and the humanities:
Then, as touching the kind of work done by [painters and poets], the more I think of it I find this conclusion more impressed upon me,—that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion,—all in one.
I hope that the “elsewhere flourishing” of the liberal arts and the humanities that Jacobs has in mind is something like this. That, far from the towers and the bowels of academia, there are thousands thinking for one who can see. That, miles from the Land of Universities, there is a simple universitas accessing “the best that has been thought and known.” That, whatever grand total of human knowledge and goodness we mean when we talk about the liberal arts and the humanities, any one of us anywhere might see and be a part of that goodness—no matter what name it goes by.