Opening Lecture: Liberal Education and its Rivals

 

Dr. Sean Cunningham
Tutor
Thomas Aquinas College
St. Vincent de Paul Lecture & Concert Series
August 29, 2025
Audio

 

Liberal Education and its Rivals

 

Introduction

 

Twenty-Seven Career Paths

A few years ago, I gave a talk (to some students) called “Life After TAC: Get a Job!” It was not a how-to talk. The “Get a Job” part was an actual command: “Get a Job!”

But I was worried that this approach was too determinate. So the next time I gave the talk I changed the title to “Life After TAC: Do Something!”  —  to include graduate school and other noble pursuits. The talk included 27 different career paths for our graduates; the list continues to grow, but a few examples of the more likely careers are: teaching, law, medicine, religious vocations, sales and marketing, and hereditary monarchy. 

 

What is Liberal Education For?

Now, that talk had certain goals, which are not my primary concern this evening. But the mention of careers in relation to the education we pursue here at the College raises a serious question: What is Liberal Education for? It’s expensive; it takes years.

In his book The Idea of a University, St. John Henry Newman puts the question this way: “Cautious and practical thinkers … will ask of me … What does it do? How does it profit?” “What is the use of it?” 

 

In-credibly Practical

To this question, most self-described Liberal Arts colleges today respond in the same terms. They say: oh, but it’s actually very useful. One prominent college’s Philosophy department advertizes that philosophy is “awesome” — indeed it is — but then hastens to add that the major is also “incredibly practical,” which might seem in-credible, except that they provide the latest data proving that philosophy majors actually make a lot of money in careers “from Silicon Valley to Wall Street and beyond.” Well, there is some comfort in that.

 

Learning for its Own Sake

At Thomas Aquinas College, we speak directly: of learning for its own sake, not as a means to some further end. We study the liberal arts (including a great deal of mathematics as you know); we study natural science, and philosophy, but also the highest discipline, Sacred Theology. All of this, we say, is a “speculative” pursuit, as distinguished from the practical or “servile.” And we call the whole endeavor “Liberal” Education.

This lecture is about “Liberal Education” — and its Rivals.

It is divided into two parts.

The FIRST PART examines the purpose of Liberal Education. What is it for? If the goal is knowledge “for its own sake,” what does that mean? Why do we call it “liberal” and “speculative”? Also, how can this education pursued “for its own sake” be compatible with the ordinary Christian life, a life lived for God and neighbor?

In the SECOND PART, I shall examine some of Liberal Education’s “Rivals.” By “Rivals,” I don’t mean equals. I mean competitors. Some are different approaches to College Education, which I shall briefly survey. But I will then will turn, with no small trepidation, to a different sort of Rival. It is what I call “The Perpetual Spectacle” — more about that shortly. 

 

PART ONE: What is Liberal Education for?

 

All Men By Nature Desire to Know

Let us consider the first words of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know.” 

For these words give us the answer to our question. Why do we do what we do here at the College for four years? Why study, why pursue knowledge? 

“To know.”

Aristotle does not say here that we desire to know … how to survive, or which foods taste best, or how to cure dread diseases. To be sure, we need — or want — to know many such things; and it will very often be God’s will that we pursue useful knowledge. 

But Aristotle’s point is more direct. He simply says, “All men by nature desire to know.” 

To know what? Everything that is: visible and invisible. From the humblest creatures to the un-caused Cause of all things, God. Everything, but not just anything (not every particular thing). We want to know universals. We want to know why things are as they are. We want to know the causes.

We desire most to learn the highest things, which can only be known through an order of learning that begins, but does not rest, in sense experience. The goal is what we call Wisdom, a knowledge of the first causes of all things.

The Founders of Thomas Aquinas College in 1969 published “A Proposal for the Fulfilment of Catholic Liberal Education,” which tells us that Liberal Education is “for the sake of the knower as such.” The knower, considered as a knower, seeks not practical knowledge, which is “desirable exclusively or at least chiefly for the sake of action”; instead, he seeks “theoretical” knowledge, which is “desirable in itself.” “Therefore, [his] education must concentrate upon [this] theoretical knowledge.” 

 

Knowledge “For its Own Sake”

Our “opening question” was “What is Liberal Education for?” We already have the answer: Liberal Education is for the Knowledge that “desirable in itself,” that is, theoretical knowledge, or as we often call it, “speculative” knowledge. 

To use the humble Anglo-Saxon term, this is “Knowledge for its own sake.”

Think about this: Liberal Education promises to separate knowledge as an end in itself from whatever further benefit it may bring to the knower (such as, wealth, power, pleasure). 

But as Newman points out, this separation may seem to be a “strange… procedure… to those who live after the rise of the Baconian philosophy.” He is referring to the philosopher Francis Bacon, who declared that “Knowledge is power.”

Given the long shadow cast by Bacon, the proposition that the purpose of our education should be knowledge for its own sake calls for further explanation.

In the modern world, we do still distinguish between so-called “pure” and “applied” sciences. The science of growing potatos is not for the sake of just knowing how potatos grow. It is for the sake of eating potatos. But the study of, say, the structure and properties of the potato plant — putting aside its agricultural “application” — is a pursuit the botanist might relish for its own sake. 

And all the more so does man relish what St. Thomas calls the science of Wisdom, which has no “application.” (There is no “Wisdom Engineering.”) The science of Wisdom, “willed for the sake of the knowledge itself,” St. Thomas writes, is more choiceworthy and voluntary than any science “which is for the sake of any of the other contingent effects which can be caused by knowledge, such as the necessities of life, pleasure, and so forth.”

 

Human Nature and Causes

 What sort of creature is man that he, among all embodied creatures, wonders, asks why, pursues knowledge just to know — "for its own sake”?

I recently talked to a beekeeper. She is a winner of awards for the honey her bees produce. But when asked, what, for her, was the greatest joy of keeping bees, without hesitation, she replied: “Second guessing what they’re doing. You expect them to do one thing, and they do something different. I want to know why.”

This knowledge may well in turn yield better honey, but the primary motive in this case is to know why: the characteristically human motive of wonder, as we see in Fabre’s studies of insects. 

That we wonder about all of these things is itself a wonder. 

 

Why do we wonder?

“All men by nature desire to know,” as we began. By “nature,” Aristotle says. St. Thomas gives some reasons for this.

FIRST: “every thing naturally seeks its own perfection.” Even “matter is said to desire form, as the imperfect seeks its own perfection.” Man desires form as well, but in an astonishing way: The soul is in a way all things, as Aristotle says in the De Anima. That is, by knowing, the soul is informed by, and so becomes, the things it knows. The propositions of Euclid book one; Maple tree leaf. Your soul in a way, immaterially, becomes those things by knowing them.

The SECOND reason is that “every natural thing has a natural inclination to its proper operation.” For man, what is “proper” here, means what is characteristically human as opposed to merely animal. Many of our natural inclinations are to the same operations as those of the animals, because we are animals. But our proper operation is not mere survival, nor is it eating or mating. Ours is the operation proper to the rational animal: to understand, to know. We can add that, by his nature, man’s true happiness lies in knowing:  St. Thomas writes: “it is a natural desire that a man, seeing an effect, inquires about the cause; hence also the philosophers’ wonder was the origin of philosophy, because when they saw effects, they wondered and sought the cause … . [And] that desire will not be set to rest until it arrives at the first cause, which is God … .”

 

What Sort of Knowledge?

To sum up: The knowledge man seeks, by nature, is the knowledge that is for the sake of knowing. It is theoretical. It is the goal of liberal education.

But this may still sound a little strange, a little hazy, again in a world somewhat darkened by the shadow of Francis Bacon. It is our “intellectual custom” (as our founder Ronald McArthur would call it) to be suspicious of mere knowing, mere theory. Where’s the application?

I shall take a few minutes to examine and hopefully clear away some of the “underbrush” of this intellectual custom.

 

“Dangerous” Words

For this purpose, a “Public Service Announcement” is in order — and it is this: Many of the words we use here at the College to talk about Liberal Education don’t always mean what nearly everyone everywhere else thinks they mean. The problem words are these: “liberal,” “leisure,” “speculative,” “theoretical,” “science,” “philosophy,” and “wisdom.” These words, in ordinary English, don’t mean what they used to mean. Each of them has what C. S. Lewis calls in his book, Studies in Words, a “dangerous sense.” The “dangerous sense” of a word is the meaning that “lies uppermost in our minds” when we hear the word. The danger is that when we hear it, we might assume it has the ordinary sense which comes to mind; but if the author or speaker had a different, older meaning in mind, then we are not hearing what he intended. There are many examples in English, the best one is in German: the word das Gift, which originally had the same meaning as the English word “gift,” but it now means, exclusively, “poison.”

 

“Liberal”

Let’s focus first on the word “Liberal.” What is “liberal” about “liberal education”? As opposed to what? “Conservative”? “Moderate”? No.

The adjective “liberal,” applied to education, describes the character of the learning, the knowledge it pursues. It is, as C.S. Lewis points out, a “free knowledge,” from the Latin liber [long-i], “free.” This is not to say free of cost, or free for the taking, but, rather, free as in not necessitated by, or used in the service of, any further end. “Liberal learning,” Lewis writes, is the “free study,” which “holds among other studies the same privileged position which the freeman holds among other men … . The free study seeks nothing beyond itself and desires the activity of knowing for that activity’s own sake.” Writing some seventy years ago, Lewis lamented that “Unless followed by the word ‘education’, ‘liberal’ has now lost this meaning. For that loss, so damaging to the whole of our cultural outlook, we must thank those who made it the name, first of a political, and then of a theological party.” The word liberal is “spoiled for its original purpose”; it is a “verbicide.” 

We could add that the term “liberal,” even when followed by “education,” has fallen into deeper confusion today. Consider that, in English today, certainly in America of course, the word “liberal” almost always means politically liberal and, more specifically, on “the Left.” I hasten to add, however, that much of what is called “conservative” in the U.S. is what used to be called “Classical Liberalism with a capital ‘L’,” referring not to ancient times, but to 19^th century doctrines of political economy. What these now opposite senses of “liberal” have in common is to signify that political order is somehow resolvable into the free will and desire of individuals.

Is Liberal Education, then, called liberal because it prepares us for a political order based on nothing but the free will and private desires of its constituent individuals? This is absurd. As Fr. McGovern says in the Orientation essay, “Liberal Education and Freedom,” this education is “not … denominated liberal because it flows from a spirit that is free in the sense of uncommitted, unbound to principle … .”

A better approach is to say that Liberal Education is liberal in that it brings about the “true liberty” of the individual, the liberty of the virtuous free citizen, and of the Christian whom the truth has set free. It produces the “genuinely free person.” This approach has great merit. Studying the free knowledge makes you more free.

But I would like to focus a bit on why we call the knowledge “free.” The “free study,” as Lewis tells, us, is called free by analogy to the free man. For the Latin word līber [long i], “free,” when applied to persons, meant: not a slave: either free born or a freedman. It is a legal condition, a status. The free man is not under servitude. As a good Latin dictionary has it: the free man (līber) is the one who “acts according to his own will and pleasure, [and] is his own master.” This was long the primary meaning of the word “free” in English. Johnson defined it as “At liberty … not enslaved … .”

This meaning of “free” (not enslaved) may seem obvious, but Aristotle’s description illuminates the distinction between the man who is free, and the slave. He says: “We call a man free whose life is lived for his own sake not for that of others.” As St. Thomas explains, “slaves exist for their masters, work for them, and acquire for them (i.e., for the lords) whatever they acquire. But free men exist for themselves inasmuch as they acquire things for themselves and work for themselves.” It’s that simple. 

Now, all such talk of slaves and masters makes us uncomfortable — and as well it should. But it is precisely because we understand that slavery is something undesirable that the distinction between free and slave helps us to see what “liberal” means. Just as the free man exists for himself, not compelled to serve the master’s purpose, so likewise free or liberal learning, exists for itself — it need not serve any other purpose or “use.” The analogy is from Aristotle, who says of philosophy: “just as we say that a man is free who exists for himself and not for another, in a similar fashion this is the only free science, because it alone exists for itself.”

 

“LEISURE”

Next is “Leisure,” which in English suggests recreation, rest, pleasure-seeking activities. Sipping a drink in a lounge chair at the beach. 

This is not the leisure we are talking about. It is a freedom, and “free time,” but not for mere pleasure or for resting up for the next shift at work. For Aristotle, recreation is for the sake of work (it restores us for work); work, in turn, is for the sake of leisure, and leisure is for contemplation.

And so, Aristotle tells us that when the useful arts had sufficiently developed to provide for the necessities of life, men used their leisure to pursue philosophical knowledge, “though it had no further use.” “Hence,” he notes, “the mathematical arts originated in Egypt, for there the priestly class was permitted leisure.”

“Leisure” translates the Latin term otium, but also “to have leisure” is a good proxy for the Latin verb vacare and its noun, vacatio. Vacatio is not quite the same as “vacation.” The Greek term for leisure, σχολή, is the better starting point, from which we get “scholar” and “school.” Your summer vacation is over, but your vacatio, true leisure, begins anew here at school.

 

“SPECULATIVE” and “THEORETICAL”

The College’s Founders prized (above all) “theoretical” knowledge, and when we say that something is “speculative,” we mean it is worthwhile in itself, not merely for some further end. The two words mean the same thing, one is Greek, the other Latin. St. Thomas comments on Aristotle’s word θεωρία, calling it “consideration or speculation of truth.”

It was Chaucer who gave us the English word “speculation” (from Latin speculatio). He uses it in its original sense when he writes, “the soules of men have become more free in the speculation of divine things.”

Sadly, by the 19^th century both these words came to mean conjecture, as in “mere speculation,” or “merely theoretical,” as opposed to proven fact. Charles Dickens has a character, Silas Wegg, a one-legged errand runner, whose knowledge about certain matters was “mostly speculative and all wrong.” That’s not what we mean by “speculative.”

We are using these words in the same sense in which St. Thomas says that philosophy is speculativa — characterized by seeing, contemplating reality. 

 

“SCIENCE” and “PHILOSOPHY”

With the words “science” and “philosophy,” the difficulty is to know what counts as science, and what philosophy. These two words, once nearly synonymous, have been shrunken to the point that they hardly overlap. Science, today, usually means the natural (or “physical”) sciences, with the mathematical rigor of Newtonian physics taken as the model; the so-called “social sciences” are damned with the faint praise of being called “soft sciences.” Philosophy and theology? Not sciences at all. They’re called “humanities.” Such is the custom. 

But this is not at all what we mean by science or philosophy. Indeed, in the tradition of the perennial philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas, philosophy and theology (both natural and revealed), are sciences, indeed, they are the highest and most certain of the sciences. And philosophy, broadly considered, includes three distinct sciences: first, metaphysics or divine science; second, natural philosophy, which extends even to the particular inquiries of what we call the “natural sciences” (such biology, chemistry, physics in the modern sense); and third, mathematics. 

For time’s sake, I will forgo further attempts at taxonomy here, though the practical sciences (ethics and politics) and what St. Thomas sometimes calls “rational philosophy” (logic and grammar) would be worthy of discussion.

 

“Wisdom”

For our purposes “Wisdom,” to be clear, does not mean a merely practical wisdom, the skill of choosing well to achieve a desired end. 

We mean, as St. Thomas tells us, “that science which is wisdom (sapientia), or philosophy (philo-sophia) as it is called, [which] exists for the sake of knowledge itself.”

 

Words Severed From Reality

Why have all these words shifted in meaning? Language works this way, as St. Thomas was well aware: “words are usually twisted away (detorqueantur) from their original meaning to signify something else.” But there is more going on here. The common thread is this: all seven of these words have been severed from reality.

This is the work of bad philosophy. Pick your poison: Descartes’ universal doubt. David Hume’s skepticism: a despair about knowing causes. Or Immanuel Kant’s retreat from any attempt to know the thing in itself. Hobbes tells us there is no “Summum bonum,” nor “Utmost Ayme” of man, only the “continuall Progresse of the Desire.” For the Utilitarians, pleasure is the only measure. What formerly was the mind’s viewing of reality, has degenerated into merely subjective point of view.

For Aristotle, work was subordinate to contemplation. But with the rise of modern philosophy, the order is reversed: reason becomes the servant of work, that is, of the mastery of nature to better serve the lower ends of survival and bodily convenience. Thus, as Romano Amerio explains, “[W]hen one takes the transforming of this world as the goal of human existence, contemplative activity will lose its meaning.” And with contemplation thus suppressed, “liberal” comes to describe the man who is “liberated”: not free to see something outside himself, but only to pursue his own desires. “Leisure” becomes mere pleasure-seeking. The “Speculative” and “theoretical” become contemptible guesswork. “Philosophy” is reduced to an obscure specialty pursued by those who happen to like it. “Science” is reduced to natural science, preferably in a form which can be readily applied to the problems of the body. And “wisdom” too is cut down to size: it can only be a worldly, practical wisdom.

Words signify the truth of things. We should make note of how the best words can be truncated, distorted, and then do our best to restore those words to their former glory, for the sake of better understanding the truth.

 

Natural Wisdom and Christian life: Through a Glass Darkly

Liberal Education is for the knowledge that is for its own sake; for the knower who is his own master. But is it not also for God? 

As a practical matter, as C.S. Lewis writes in “Learning in Wartime,” the Christian must ask himself “how is it right … for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or hell, to spend any fraction of the time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature … mathematics or biology … .” And we could add Philosophy.

To this question, for the moment, let a few good words from Newman suffice:

“[W]e sometimes forget that we shall please Him best … [when] we use what we have by nature to the utmost, at the same time that we look out for what is beyond nature in the confidence of faith and hope.”

 

God’s Will, Our Duty

A related question that occurs to many of our students, especially in our Junior Philosophy class, is this: How can we reconcile the life of contemplation (for its own sake) with the life of ordinary activity for the sake of the body, or for the sake of the family and our neighbor: eating and sleeping, caring for parents and children, doing your job, work-study (the work part). 

For the Christian, the simple answer is that, in all things, we must do God’s will according to our circumstances. And this is, for human beings, supremely rational.

By our rational nature, we seek knowledge above all else, but we also seek to do so in an orderly manner, attending to the requirements of our nature as a bodily creature and our obligations towards other people. We must eat and drink to remain alive; we must take care of our children. Reason serves these non-speculative ends so far as it is reasonable to do so — which is very far indeed. 

In purely natural terms, the ancient sages understood this tension. 

Cicero says that it is by what is highest in our nature that we pursue knowledge, but we do so, he cautions, only “as soon as we escape from necessary cares,” including our duties to others. One might say that Cicero was too quick to sacrifice leisure for duty.

But Aristotle is more blunt: in the Topics, he says that “to be a philosopher is better than to make money, yet, for a man who lacks the necessities of life, it may be more desirable [to make money].”

Many circumstances may require us to forego the leisure of contemplation; indeed, whenever the Will of God, as usually known by the natural law, requires: in every act of justice and charity; abiding by the Golden Rule; and it may come to pass that any of us may be called to lay down his life for another as a parent, a soldier, or a martyr.

So, when busied with the work of a St. Martha, or a St. Gianna, a St. George, or a Blessed Miguel Pro — possibly for the last time, take heart that the knowledge we have of God “through a glass darkly” now, will, in heaven, be “face to face.”

 

The learned life

How do you know whether the College’s life is God’s will is for you?

As Lewis puts, the student’s “circumstances, are usually a tolerable index of his vocation. If our parents have sent us to Oxford … this is prima facie evidence that the life which we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory of God at present is the learned life.” 

And so, I believe, it is for us at this College.

To conclude Part One: Liberal Education is for Knowing. Knowing for its own sake and, above, all knowing God. 

 

PART TWO: RIVALS

A Rival is a competitor. It need not be an equal. The rivalry might be a friendly rivalry, resulting in one of the rivals accepting a subordinate role. Or it can be a struggle to the death.

Liberal Education has many rivals, in the sense that it has many competitors — for our time, our attention, and our love.

Some of these rivals, if put into their proper order, can be effects of Liberal Learning, even though they are in fact rivals in the “marketplace,” so to speak, for higher education. 

 

Discovery

One is DISCOVERY, the advancement of human knowledge, that is, at least some of the “research” on which the modern Research University rests its case for attracting bright students. 

Three points about Discovery: One, it can be a very good thing. Aristotle spent decades investigating the causes of every sort of creature: fish, earthquakes, winds, stars, to name just few; St. Thomas in his commentary on Aristotle’s Meteorology says that detailed investigations into the species of things is necessary for the perfection or filling out of knowledge (the complementum scientiae). Two: Newman observes that “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts … .” “The great discoveries in chemistry and electricity were not made in Universities,” he notes. Today, we need not quarrel with having Discovery under the same institutional roof as Liberal Education, that is, in a University, so long as Discovery does not take the place of Liberal Education. Three: Liberal Education may be a beginning that proceeds later into scientific discovery for someone whose talents lie in that direction, but it must be a beginning, and it must be a good one, for as St. Thomas says, “A small error in the beginning is a [great] one in the end.”

 

(Major) Curiosity

Another rival is mere curiosity — the potential pitfall of the conventional system of having undergraduate departments and “majors.” At its worst, as Mr. Marcus Berquist described it in a lecture on the order of learning, “each man orders his education by his own particular taste or by what is currently fashionable, for he can no longer find any reasons for preference in the natures of the objects he studies.” Where that is the case, “The wonder which characterizes the philosopher has been replaced by curiosity.”

 

Utilitarian Education

Among the different approaches to “College education,” Liberal Education’s pre-eminent Rival in the marketplace is what I will call “Utilitarian” Education. No one calls it that, because it sounds bad. The more salable approach is to talk about career preparation, “success metrics,” “outcomes,” cash value. It includes technical, professional, and business education; or any other study considered in light of what value it has in the “job market.” It is for the payoff; it is the opposite of learning for its own sake.

 

The Utility Objection: “Bunk!”

For C.S. Lewis, the Utilitarian is the one who asks “‘But what use is it?’ And finding that it cannot be eaten or drunk … nor made an instrument for increasing his income or his power, he will pronounce it … to be ‘bunk’.”

Today, this objection is shouted more loudly than ever, and widely granted. Even as this College grows, many self-described liberal arts colleges across the country are in crisis. Some are closing their doors. To “stay in business,” as it were, most colleges are moving further away from anything resembling the liberal arts towards new career-focused majors. Some of them make sense. Health care disciplines. Fair enough. One school offers “Motorsports Management” (I get it). Others I find confusing. For example, “Leisure Studies” (I would have thought that would just be philosophy, but it seems to have something to do with going to the beach).

 

Replies to the Utility Objection:

 

Practical Education: the Duty of Many

Now, I want to stress that practical and professional education are not bad things. Not at all. They have their time and place. For many people, it may be God’s will for them. Some of you may later — after graduation I hope — study nursing, or engineering, or law. Very well!

Newman distinguishes between two types of education. One is the Philosophical: Liberal Learning; it “rises towards general ideas”; it is for its own sake. The Second is “Mechanical” it is exhausted upon what is particular and external. But he adds: “Let me not be thought to deny the necessity, or to decry the benefit, of such attention to what is particular and practical, as belongs to the useful or mechanical arts … . their exercise is the duty of the many, and we owe to the many a debt of gratitude for fulfilling that duty.”

But is there any sense in which we can say that Liberal Education is itself useful — for the particular and external?

With Newman, we can respond to this question in two ways:

 

Knowledge is its own reward

In the face of such questions, Newman stays the course: “Knowledge is its own reward.” 

Knowledge is certainly good, but we must distinguish between the good and the useful.

To ask whether Liberal Education is useful is akin to asking whether happiness is useful. 

As Glen Coughlin of our California campus writes, “Happiness itself is not useful, yet no one would deny that it is good. So too, liberal education is not primarily for the sake of any good other than speculative knowledge.” He continues, “[L]iberal education’ is the education undertaken when one is not forced by the press of events to study something profitable. As such, liberal education will be the education most worthy of choice.”

 

Incidental usefulness

But isn’t it fair to consider whether Liberal Education might also be useful for other things? Incidentally useful? Are we wrong to hope that it might make us better statesmen, or businessmen, or parents?

Newman does not disdain to consider this further question, which was so much on the minds of the practical men in his day, as it is today.

Today we say, true enough, that Liberal Education gives you “critical thinking” and “communications skills.” 

Newman puts it in rather more glorious English:

“It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility … . he knows when to speak and when to be silent; he is able to converse, he is able to listen … .”

 

An American Apologia

Some say that it is the American way to favor practical education. A very good Catholic said to me once that liberal education is an “impractical luxury.” We need to focus on the family, political battles, building wealth for good purposes. As well we should. 

But if liberal education is a “luxury,” one might wonder: Is it a luxury we can afford to do without? 

Consider that the Founders of our Country were, for the most part, liberally educated. They learned Latin. This study — so obviously “useless,” some would say today — formed well the minds of those who would draft the United States Constitution.

Surely there were gaps in their learning. But it is no small thing that these men were steeped in Greek and Roman literature. Many could read at least the Gospel of John in Greek. And they studied … geometry.

Fifty years on, Abraham Lincoln, as a young lawyer, took time to study and memorize the first six books of Euclid. The winning generals of the Civil War had all spent a year reading Euclid at the academy.

In the twentieth century, the Great leaders of the West, schooled in classical literature, waged successful wars against the enemies of reason and Christianity.

There was Churchill of course, but one you might not think of was General George Patton, who as a young man was wont to recite passages from the Iliad for hours on end. Later, he carried his library of classics into battle: when his flagship was struck by enemy fire off the coast of North Africa, his books were lost. A fitting scene: an enemy bent on carrying out Francis Bacon’s project of mastering nature to its logical conclusion: the Will to Power. 

Also well educated were many a Cold Warrior, who defended the primacy of spiritual things against an enemy crudely devoted to the proposition that, as Marx wrote, “the point of philosophy is not to understand the world, but to change it.” 

And so, for the record: Country founded, wars won, by leaders liberally educated.

 

The Perpetual Spectacle

One Rival remains to be dealt with — the one most directly and urgently opposed to Liberal Education. I call it the Perpetual Spectacle. 

But first: Cicero tells us that “when the audience is weary, it will be useful for the speaker to try something novel or amusing, provided that joking be not incompatible with the gravity of the subject.” But the last part of this Lecture deals with a very grave subject I’m afraid. So grave, in fact, that it comes with a Warning Label — which I think I am supposed to read to you first, so here it is:

Warning: Experts report that there are dangerous Luddites among you, who want to deprive you of the benefits of Modern Online Communications Technology (that’s “M.O.C.T.”). They say ‘the sky is falling,’ but that’s Misinformation. M.O.C.T. allows us to do good things. You can buy cheaper stuff more quickly (from countries that still have slavery). You don’t need to walk to a payphone when your car breaks down (assuming you haven’t been using your phone as a flashlight, making the battery run down). Everyone knows that this Technology is a “Neutral Tool.” Just don’t use it for bad things. Anyway, we all use M.O.C.T., we all benefit from it, we all like it, so it’s too late: nothing can be done about it. And anyone who questions any of this is the most contemptible being imaginable: a Hypocrite. And one more thing: You can’t turn the clock back!

(Sorry, regulations.)

 

“Houston: we have a problem!”

A philosophy professor at Catholic University who passed away recently, once told me that he had taught the same logic course for thirty years, during which time he observed a steady decline in the ability of his students to learn the same material. He couldn’t prove it, but he saw a direct correlation between this decline and the introduction of laptop computers with video capability. That was fifteen or so years ago, when smartphones were just getting started. 

Over this past summer, I’ve spoken with a classics professor and a chemistry professor at other colleges. They’ve seen a steep decline in their students’ ability and appetite for learning within just the past four years. They’ve stopped assigning papers because what they’ve been getting is “all AI junk,” as one of them said.

Scholars and journalists echo a number of related themes. Here’s just a sample: 

• Students at even the most prestigious universities “cannot, or will not, read books.”
• In high schools and middle schools, test scores are plummeting, while rates of diagnosed mental illness among young people are exploding.
• Internet addiction is real. In Japan, and probably here now, many young men never leave home, at all.
• The Big Tech Masters of the Universe know what they are doing, and some have admitted that they don’t let their own children have these devices.
• After years of inaction, the Public schools are scrambling to react: Schools in 37 states so far are banning cell phones in the classroom.

 

For decades now, the Tech people, our Very Smartest People we’re told, have promised us the Moon and the Stars: community, peace, knowledge, educational “empowerment.” 

But as the Astronaut put it: “Houston, we have a problem.” And suddenly the goal of the mission was to get the Astronauts back to Earth alive.

 

What is the Problem?

What exactly is the problem? Is it just the content — looking at bad things? 

I cannot emphasize enough that the problem is not solely, or even chiefly, about “content” — or particular uses of the Internet.

Yes, there is objectively immoral content — which alone threatens to render whole generations unfit for happy marriage.

Yes, there is academic dishonesty. If you don’t do your own work, you don’t learn. If you tell lies, you become a liar.

These problems alone justify grave concern.

 

DISTRACTION

But the bigger problem is something that subverts our highest natural desire, the desire to know. And it’s something simple: it is Distraction. 

St. Thomas considers why it is that, if every wants Wisdom, so many aren’t seeking it. It’s this: “those who desire some end are often prevented from pursuing it … because … they are held back by other things, either by pleasures or the needs of the present life … .”

This is, of course, common sense. The would-be learner, pre-occupied with other things, has no time to learn. It doesn’t have to be bad things. Often it is just “the needs of the present life”: eating, sleeping, and a lot of work. 

But the Internet is no ordinary pre-occupation.

It distracts us — occupies us — because it continuously presents us with things we want to see and to know about. 

Spending hours of the day scrolling and swiping, clicking and checking, video after video — it all takes time. The device itself demands your attention. It makes you crave to attend to it, to use it to solve every problem, to satisfy every curiosity. 

It is a phone, a TV, a library (in a way), it’s music (even a hymnal), a calculator, a stopwatch, a Latin dictionary, a recipe book, GPS, a flashlight. It is the ring of power in your pocket. The Palantir. The Ring of Gyges (it may seem), but also the eye of Sauron watching you. All in one device.

It offers the solution to many problems; it is a time-saver for some tasks, you may object, but at the cost of how much time wasted? There were no mobile phones when I was in college, no Google. Somehow we managed, and we read a lot. Whole books. And researched whatever needed researching in the library, where there were newspapers too. (And we had to walk six miles in the snow to get to school, uphill both ways.)

 

“The most interesting thing in the world”

Why is the smartphone such a distraction?

A growing body of evidence shows that when the phone beeps or buzzes, blood pressure spikes, pulse quickens; symptoms of hyperactivity and absentmindedness similar to Attention Deficit Disorder appear.

I’m told that after every interaction with a phone, it then takes time to re-focus. An average of twenty-three minutes, according to one study. I don’t know how accurate this is, but you get the idea. If you check your phone once or twice every hour, that alone may be putting you into a state of diminished capability the whole day, every day.

Even if you are not checking it, and even if it is turned off, the closer the phone is to you, the less clearly you are able to think, studies have shown. 

Now, I know that your own experience may be different. Some of you don’t have smart phones; or maybe you don’t use social media, or you just don’t find the phone distracting. Very well, then.

But in the world at large, the smart phone seems to be making a lot of people less smart.

 

Attention!

The common theme in all of these reports and studies is attention — these devices demand and get our attention.

I recommend a book by a journalist who lives not far from here, Nicholas Carr, called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Your Brain. Carr points out that all electronic media, including the old analog television, “[b]y design … seize and hold our attention in ways natural objects never could.” 

But the smartphone stands out: “It’s an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. It acts as … a ‘supernormal stimulus’ that is able to ‘hijack’ attention whenever it’s part of the surroundings — and it’s always part of the surroundings. With the smartphone, the human race has succeeded in creating the most interesting thing in the world. No wonder we can’t take our minds off it.”

Carr recounts that he was from the start an enthusiastic user of the Internet. It helped him with his journalism; it saved time. But a few years into the broadband era, he noticed that something had changed. He had been a great reader of books. But he could no longer focus long enough to get through a whole book.

He writes: “My brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the [Inter]Net fed it — and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check email, click links, do some Googling.”

That was twenty years ago, and since then a whole generation of young people (most of them) have grown up knowing nothing else.

But why is the distraction so continuous, and the craving so intense?

 

Addictive

Because it is addictive. It is designed that way. 

Any human being loves a spectacle. Samuel Johnson defines “spectacle” as “a gazing stock; any thing exhibited to the view as eminently remarkable.” It could be a show, an interesting film, a beautiful view, a strange image, a pretty face, a puzzle, a scene, a fight, a sight to behold, a surprise, useful news, or letter from a loved one. 

Not too long ago, the spectacle was prized, rare, an occasional lift from the workaday world. There was a natural distance, a time gap, between one spectacle and the next.

Modern Technology reduces distances, narrows gaps. Railroads drew distant places nearer. The telegram and telephone made speech possible across wide spaces. This is all well and good. 

The motion picture, as it was called, was a technology for reducing the gaps between one spectacle and another, for by-passing the “friction,” so to speak, of natural experience that slows our progress from one pleasure to another. It accelerates the path to pleasure.

 

De Cinematographicis Spectaculis 

Pope Pius XI, in 1936, saw this. In an encyclical subtitled, “On Cinematographic Spectacles” (De Cinematographicis Spectaculis), he observed:

“The art of cinematography speaks through those vivid species and forms, which are presented to the senses with great pleasure and without any difficulty … . [By contrast:] Reading … requires a certain amount of concentration and mental effort; which effort the cinematic vision removes, to the delight of the viewer, through successive images presented to the eyes in a continuous order.”

The Pope’s more urgent concern in 1936 was immoral movies, already a problem even then; he was not denouncing motion pictures as such; but he was on to something important.

Fast forward:

Today the Titans of Big Tech, too, know we love a spectacle, and that they stand to make a great deal of money by having us attend — for as much time as possible — to the ones they offer us, in rapid succession. 

And so they have had every incentive to devise for us what I call “The Perpetual Spectacle.” 

Perpetual because it doesn’t stop. This is the Internet: it is always on, and we: nearly always “online” — the very distinction between being online and offline itself is fading from our experience.

The Titans of Big Tech have exploited what was well known before: it is pleasant to see and to know new things. 

As we began, “All men by nature desire to know.” Aristotle adds, “a sign of this is the delight we take in perceiving things with the senses.” The Big Tech companies understand this, and it is why their devices are such a potent Rival.

 

The Spectacle Within

But the Spectacle is not just out there. Its growing power lies in what it is doing to our brains.

Neuroscientists tell us the brain has the property of “plasticity.” It is easily molded by experience. This is how we are able to form “habits” — good ones or bad ones. Certain stimuli cause the release of a pleasure-producing chemical in the brain called dopamine.

And the release of dopamine, when induced in an accelerated way, is apparently addictive.

In a book caled A Mind at Peace, theologians Christopher Blum and Joshua Hochschild note that “smartphone addiction is the coming to fruition of well over fifty years of deepening addiction to the lights and colors of screens.”

Indeed, by the 1970s, television addiction was a well documented problem. 

Oh, but TV is harmless, you might say. Aren’t smartphones just more of the same?

No.

Because they target us individually, and in a more accelerated and direct way.

Carr summarizes: the human brain “gives priority to four types of stimuli: [1] those that are novel or unexpected, [2] those that are pleasurable or otherwise rewarding, [3] those that are personally relevant, and [4] those that are emotionally engaging.” 

And this is why smartphones are addictive, because they are designed to supply exactly these kinds of stimuli “all the time.” 

“[T]hey flood us with information on the people, events, and subjects we care most about.”

 

“Time-on-Device”

The smartphone device itself, as well as its specific “apps,” so called, are designed to be “as addictive as possible.”

This is not conspiracy theory. The tech executives freely admit it. Take Facebook for example:

• Its first president said the company’s founding goal was “to consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible.”
• It was designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology.”
• Mark Zuckerberg added: “[we] understood this consciously, and we did it anyway.” 
• Another executive: “You don’t realize it, but you are being programmed … [to maximize] “time-on device.” (That’s a Las Vegas gambling industry term carried over to Silicon Valley).

As Carr summarizes: “Just as a potato chip or a cigarette is meticulously engineered to trigger certain biological reactions … in the human body and mind — pleasure and craving, notably — so communication is now engineered to trigger similar reactions … .”

We are kept “in a permanent state of anticipation, awaiting the next stimulus, craving the next glance at the screen.”

 

A Dark Mirror

The Internet is so compelling because “it gives us what we want.” How does it know what we want? Data. As one of Google’s founders boasted, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you are thinking about.” 

Google is boasting to do “more or less,” what St. Thomas says angels, or demons, can do only indirectly: which is to know our secret thoughts:

“A secret thought can be known in its effect.” A doctor, he says, for example, can “tell some passions of the soul by the mere pulse.” “Much more then can angels, or even demons … learn man’s dispositions, not only when expressed by speech, but even when conceived in thought, when the soul expresses them by certain signs in the body’.”

I am not saying that the Internet is in itself demonic; I’m certainly not saying it is a sin to use it. But it should make us recognize and think about its nature and power, and how it operates on us.

Everything we type on a keyboard, everywhere we drive, everything we say near any smartphone, our facial expressions caught on video, our very pulse on a smartwatch — all of this goes into the hopper, filling out a profile of each of us, which is then used to play upon, reinforce, and shape our particular desires.

It becomes a dark mirror which you can’t not look at — not one in which we see God as through a glass darkly, but more and more a digital self made in the distorted image of your own desires.

 

A New Slavery of the Mind

The Perpetual Spectacle is so powerful a Rival of Liberal Education because it diverts the student’s attention from the worthy life he has chosen. But it does something worse: it subjects him to a new kind of slavery, and to that extent, makes him less fit for the studies befitting a free man. 

Each of our natural desires can be disordered. The desires for self-preservation, food, progeny — all can turn to vice, and the slavery of the sins of the flesh.

Through the Perpetual Spectacle, the highest, the most human of our natural desires — the desire for knowledge — is being disordered … into a shallow ceaseless random buzzing from one interesting thing to another.

As Aristotle tells us, the slave lives at random. The freeman, by contrast, has an ordered life.

The life of distraction in thrall to the Perpetual Spectacle seems to be the fruit of several centuries of the Utilitarian philosophy that makes pleasure the measure of life.

“Reason is an ought to be a slave of the passions,” as David Hume put it. 

 

“Perception Begins in Presence”

For Aristotle, the road to Wisdom begins with sense experience — of real things. Sense perception is the basis for experience, then art, science and ultimately Wisdom about things beyond the material world.

Without mentioning Aristotle, the journalist, Carr again, makes some observations, about how we know, that are admirably Aristotelian: “[B]eing in the world,” he writes, “is necessary to making sense of the world. Perception begins in presence.” Also, “You can only get beyond the material by going through the material, by suffering and surmounting its frictions.”

For Aristotle, the road to Wisdom begins in sense experience and proceeds into natural philosophy before reaching into the knowledge of divine things. But when our entire experience of created reality is mediated by a digital self-portrait, by an accelerated, compressed, ultra-processed stream of sensory stimuli, we lose connection with reality, cutting off the very starting point of the road to Wisdom.

What is the solution?

 

The Solution: Madness?

“You can’t turn the clock back” … to which G.K. Chesterton responded, why, yes, you can: “A clock,” he wrote, “being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour.”

Objection! Everything in our society depends on it: everyone’s job, the power grid, you name it. Rolling back any of this is irresponsible! It would be medieval (you know, in the bad sense). Everyone would starve! 

So let’s “hold our horses” for a minute and think about this. There is no easy or complete solution to this problem and, yes, we all use and need the Internet for many necessities, including duties to family. And we can and we will. I get it.

But a little push-back for the sake of our own mental freedom is not necessarily the end of sanity, or modernity, or electricity.

In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle gives a striking metaphor for how we form universals out of the swarm of our particular sensations: “It is like a rout in battle stopped by first one man making a stand and then another, until the original formation has been restored.” Today it is necessary for someone to take a stand: to re-establish the possibility of knowing at all, even of sense knowledge of real things.

Consider what this College has accomplished. Beginning in 1971, we were the first to go against every Rival of true Liberal Education. Against the hollowing out of the liberal arts, against the push for career education, against the secularization of the Catholic College, but also, at every juncture: against the distractions of electronic media. The College’s Founders were concerned about some of the growing distractions of modern life. They sought out a quiet, rural area mostly free from those distractions; they settled on the heights of Ojai, California. The dorms had telephones, that is, a single landline (a payphone) in each hallway. Students called home when they needed to. 

Early on, there was discussion of whether to have televisions in the dorms. Some students wanted them. But it was the judgment of the whole community — students included — that it would be a distraction from the College’s mission. Some provision was made for viewing televised sports events, or an occasional worthwhile film, in the Commons. Somehow it worked. Later it was Kindle book readers instead of printed books. No. Laptops in the classroom? No. Somehow students kept applying to the College — even more I think.

Before text messaging, those who sought the company of friends would go to the Commons in the evening, and meet with whomever else was there, to talk, to laugh, to engage in common recreation (that is, with other people, not mediated by a virtual world). Some of this has been lost even here.

Nevertheless, our students, our community, our approach to learning, our rules — such as they are — have dimmed the allure of the Perpetual Spectacle to some degree. A reporter for The Economist magazine recently visited our California Campus and was astonished (and delighted) to learn that there is “a college where students do, will, and can read,” as he said — a sad comment on the state of higher education, but it gives us real encouragement, and highlights our responsibility: to lead. 

We can congratulate ourselves, but we also all know, I think, that we are not immune. And it would be little consolation to have fallen only part way down the cliff. 

Technology can be a Servant, we know. But if we don’t continue to lead, or think we can’t, or say it is impossible, have we not accepted as our Master the promised Servant? Our most insistent Rival as our Better? 

 

CONCLUSION: The Groves of the Academus

Newman, you should know, was no stranger to the problem of distraction. (Quaintly enough, the problem in his day was the new flood of literary periodicals: newspapers and magazines!)

His remedy? “The common sense of mankind,” he writes, “has associated the search after truth with seclusion and quiet. The greatest thinkers have been too intent on their subject to admit of interruption … . Plato withdrew from Athens to the groves of the Academus. Aristotle gave twenty years to a studious discipleship under him.”

Aristotle, we can add, also spent many years in quiet investigation of natural things. He “invented science,” as a renowned biologist recently put it. He did this by looking at, listening to, thinking about reality. “Natural hearing” is the traditional subtitle of his Physics.

Has human nature changed since Newman’s day, or Aristotle’s, such that we no longer need quiet to be able to hear the voice of Nature and of God? 

Ahead of nearly every other College in the nation, we have preserved (on both campuses) much of the seclusion and quiet that our Founders sought, but our most jealous of Rivals, the Perpetual Spectacle, is thick among us: in hands, in pockets, in dorm rooms, and in our habits; useful, no one can deny, yet always clamoring for one of the most valuable possessions we have: our attention.

I have no easy solution. I’m not proposing that we all stop using the Internet any more than Chesterton was calling for the abolition of clocks.

 

I am proposing that you take charge of your own attention, your own imagination, your own time. 

Turn off the phone and leave it in a box somewhere; it will be there when you really need it; and, while it is in the box, think seriously about what your real needs are — and what inconvenience might be bearable for the reward of preserving, or regaining, your ability to learn. 

In conclusion: 

Newman writes that [Liberal Education] “is an object, in its own nature so really and undeniably good, as to be the compensation of … a great deal of trouble in the attaining.” 

And so it is. 

Thank you.

 

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