What Good is a Liberal Education?
A Radical Responds
[Remarks delivered October 6, 2017 at the Heyman Center of Columbia University]
It is a great pleasure to return to Columbia after an absence of forty-six years, and to speak in this lovely building, which did not exist when I lived just three blocks south of where we now sit. The Sixties were a good time for the Liberal Arts in America. The dramatic expansion of higher education after World War II created so many entry level Assistant Professorships across the curriculum that doctoral students were being offered teaching positions even before they had begun to write their dissertations. The Cold War prompted the Congress to pass the National Defense Education Act, and although most of the money went to military research and Area Studies, enough spilled over into the Humanities, and even into the Libraries, to create a seller’s market for Philosophers, Literary Critics, Historians, Classicists, and Comparative Linguists.
Alas, half a century later, the balloon has deflated. Teaching positions are scarce, commercial publishers no longer rush to sign up scholarly books, and a corporate model of management has taken over America’s college and university administration buildings. I have even been told by a Columbia friend that thirty percent of Columbia College’s graduating seniors, have been blessed by a truly remarkable liberal education, choose investment banking as their career. No longer do the Liberal Arts have the unquestioning support of alumni/ae and state legislatures. So this is perhaps a good time to ask, once again, an old and familiar question: What good is a Liberal Education?
In the next hour or so, I shall offer a new and rather unexpected answer to this question. But although what I have to say has never, to my, knowledge, been said in quite this way before, it is not at all entirely original with me. Rather, I shall be expanding on some deep insights offered more than half a century ago by my old friend and comrade and one-time co-author, Herbert Marcuse. I shall lay before you today a politically radical defense of Liberal Education. But Before turning to that defense, I thought it might be helpful to review briefly three familiar defenses of Liberal Education that have been offered by its champions.
The oldest is the claim, popular at Oxford and Cambridge four hundred years ago, that a little Greek and Latin, like a well turned leg and a well filled cold piece, is an appropriate accomplishment for a gentleman. I say “gentleman” because a gentle lady was expected to exhibit skill with the needle, perhaps to play a bit on the spinet, and of course to have mastered Oeconomics, which in those days meant the management of a household.
It might be thought that in these democratic times, when the rich masquerade in designer jeans and tie dyed skirts, this defense of liberal education has passed away, but it continues to crop up in unexpected places. My favorite example is the Massachusetts Institute of technology, or MIT, as it is know throughout the world. About sixty years ago or more, MIT was turning out class after class of superbly trained engineers, who secured good jobs in America’s great corporations, when the MIT deans discover ed that they had a problem. Their students rapidly climb the corporate ladder until, roughly ten years after graduation, they would become eligible for management positions in the higher reaches of their corporate employers. At that point, they would be expected to exhibit some fluency with the written word and an easy familiarity with the writers, poets, philosophers, and painters whose names were dropped at executive cocktail parties. MIT’s finest were losing out to competitors from Harvard, Columbia, Yale, or Princeton had conferred upon them the appropriate stigmata of a liberal education. The deans decided they had to go out and buy MIT some humanists and social scientists to prepare their students for corporate success. And, being MIT, they bought themselves Paul Samuelson, they bought themselves Noam Chomsky. In 1980, they even bought themselves my first wife, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, an accomplished literary scholar, who was offered a professorship in the Literature Section of the Humanities Department at MIT.
The second traditional justification of a Liberal Education is that, in the steeply pyramidal and profoundly unequal American economy, it separates the Suits from the Shirts, as we used to say. Without a liberal education, you can get a job that leaves you sweaty and tired at the end of the day, a job that pays a wage weekly, and which offers few benefits unless you are unionized. With a liberal education, you can secure a position in which you end each day neither tired nor sweaty, receive an annual salary disbursed monthly, and enjoy a variety of benefits, including a paid vacation. When I was a college Freshman in 1950, only 5% of American adults had a four year college degree. Sixty-seven years later, that number has climbed to 35%, which means that two out of three Americans are forever barred from being doctors, lawyers, professors, high school teachers, elementary school teachers, corporate executives, or FBI agents.
My description might suggest that I am scornful of this justification of liberal education, but I must not be too dismissive, for I am myself its very exemplar. My grandfather, Barnet Wolff, arrived in America as a babe in arms in 1880. He never finished elementary school and worked as a cigar salesman while devoting his life to the Socialist Party here in New York City. His oldest son, my father, graduated from Boy’s High School, got a free college education at C.C.N.Y., and went on to become a high school teacher and, eventually, high school principal. And here I am, the fulfilment of my family’s dream, a college professor who writes books.
I often think this must be what it is like for a young Catholic boy who honors his father and mother by becoming a priest. Except that I did not have to give up sex.
There is, third, the justification for liberal education which I have always associated most immediately with the University of Chicago under the guidance of Robert Maynard Hutchins, but which has been given expression, in one form or another, in Harvard's General Education and Core Curriculum programs, in Columbia's Contemporary Civilization course, in the Great Books curriculum of St. John's College, and in countless other curricula and institutions besides: the conception of liberal education as an initiation into the two millennia long Great Conversation.
When I was a boy, I found in my parents' attic, buried under a mound of ancient science textbooks, a slender volume entitled "Heavenly Discourses," by Charles Erskine Scott Wood. This consisted, as the title perhaps suggests, of a series of imaginary conversations in heaven among famous men and women of the western cultural tradition who could not, under normal historical circumstances, have encountered one another here on earth.
The book made an enormous impression on me - so much so that my very first college paper was an imaginary heavenly discourse, featuring John Stuart Mill, T. S. Eliot, Zarathustra, and Carl Sandburg, on the issues posed by Ortega y Gasset's REVOLT OF THE MASSES. [As you might perhaps guess, Sandburg won.]
The ideal of the Great Conversation is merely an elaborate formalization of Wood's charming conceit. Western Civilization is conceived as a perpetual debate about a number of timeless questions, conducted by the great minds of the Judeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman tradition, with its medieval Arabic variants, through the medium of a small, but continuously growing, library of great works of philosophy, tragedy, poetry, fiction, history, political theory - and, more recently, sociology, anthropology, economics, and anthropology. Homer and the nameless authors of the Old Testament, Sophocles and Euripides, Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, Cicero, Caesar, Paul and the Evangelists, Ovid, Sappho, Philo, Tertullian, Aquinas, Maimonides, Averroes, Avicenna, Erasmus, Luther, Chaucer, Calvin, John of Salisbury, Jean Bodin, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bacon, Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Locke, Galileo, Newton, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Herder, Marx, Smith, Bentham, Mill - on and on they come, quibbling, quarreling, drawing distinctions, splitting hairs, proving the existence of God, refuting the proofs for the existence of God, reading one another, referring to one another - a grand faculty seminar, captured for all time in no more than several hundred immortal books.
A liberal education - so this story has it - is a ticket of admission to the Conversation. Most of us are mere auditors, much as I was when, as a boy of ten, I sat on the steps of the staircase leading from my parents' living room and listened to my parents, my uncles and aunts, and the neighbors debating politics, literature, and the bureaucratic insanities of the New York City School System in which they worked. An inspired few actually enter the Conversation, and make to it contributions that will be taken up into the immortal lists of Great Books. But for the rest of us, it is enough that we have been initiated into its rituals and shibboleths. Throughout our lives, that eternal debate will be the intellectual accompaniment of our quotidien lives.
And so we come, at last, to the real subject of this lecture, a new, radical, and thoroughly unexpected defense of Liberal Education. I take as my text today one of Marcuse’s most profound and provocative phrases: “surplus repression,” which makes its appearance in his early work, Eros and Civilization. By an explication of the notion of surplus repression, and a close reading of a single paragraph from the chapter on repressive desublimation in Marcuse’s most famous work, One-Dimensional Man, I can, I think, lay before you a deep justification of liberal education that will explain both how it plays a central role in the critique and reformation of society, and why it is so appropriately undertaken at that moment in late adolescence and early adulthood which we in the United States identify as the undergraduate years.
Marcuse, who as a member of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, participated in the great early twentieth century attempt to fuse the central insights of Marx and Freud, begins Eros and Civilization by accepting the pessimistic thesis of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, that some measure of psychic repression is the necessary precondition for the organised social existence of humanity. Let us begin therefore, where Freud does, with the earliest stages of childhood development.
The new-born infant does not possess a coherent rational self or ego with which to negotiate its relationship to the external world. Indeed, it does not yet so much as possess a conception of itself in contradistinction to its surroundings. What we think of as the ordinary thought-processes of reality orientation – the distinction of self and other, the recognition of relations of space, time, and causality, the distinction between desire and satisfaction, between wish and actuality – all these are in fact secondary accomplishments, painfully acquired in the wake of initial and continuing frustrations. Each of the stages of normal childhood development has a profoundly ambivalent significance for the child, at one and the same time a source of power, satisfaction, and self-esteem, and a suffering of frustration, pain, and rage.
The new-born infant is put to the breast and responds with a natural suckling instinct, gaining warmth, food, and comfort. It is happy. [Incidentally Freud, like other typical late nineteenth century Viennese professional men, probably spent virtually no time with his infant children. His brilliant theorizing was derived from the interpretation of the dreams and associations of his adult patients. But I am, if I may adapt the words of Gilbert and Sullivan, the very model of a modern American father, and I have actually spent many hours caring for my new-born sons, so I can attest to the accuracy of Freud’s account.] The next time the infant is hungry, or so Freud hypothesizes, it conjures the image of the breast, but the image, alas, gives neither warmth nor milk. The infant suffers frustration and feels rage at this failure, the first of many, and it cries. Anyone who has actually watched a tiny baby cry will acknowledge that it is as disappointed, as frustrated, as outraged as a human being can be. It grows red in the face with anger. [What, you will ask, has any of this to do with a liberal education? Patience, patience. I remind you that Rousseau’s great educational work, Émile, begins with an extended discussion of swaddling and breast-feeding.] And then, something quite astonishing and unexpected happens, or at least it does in the early life of a normal, healthy baby: the baby is picked up, soothed, and fed. This is a profoundly important moment, the first of many similar moments to come. Again and again, the baby, and then the young child, learns the deeply ambivalent truth that although it is incapable of achieving the instantaneous and effortless gratification that it desires, there are things it can learn to do that will, with delays and frustrations along the way, to be sure, bring the pleasure it seeks. This elementary fact is, Freud teaches us, the basic template of all human existence.
One example can perhaps stand for the entire years-long process. Little babies, as I have said, are at first unable to express their desires, save by the painful and inefficient method of crying. Still, a fortunate baby will succeed in getting its parent’s attention by crying, and the parent will become hyper-sensitively attuned to those slight variations in the cry which indicate whether it is hunger, fatigue, colic, or teething that is the cause. Eventually, a baby learns to sit up in a high chair and eat with its hands or with a spoon, and (we may suppose) it learns as well that when it waves its hands and makes a demanding noise, it gets a cookie. The baby, let us remember, will be deeply ambivalent about this learned behaviour, for what the baby wants (or so Freud persuasively tells us) is to have its hunger, or its desire for a cookie, instantaneously gratified, without even the temporary frustration of waiting until the parent decodes the cry and responds. But though this state of affairs has come about at the cost of frustration and pain, it is also a source of power and gratification. By learning how to command its parent’s response, the baby can get the cookie. What is more, the parent is likely to respond with manifest pleasure to the baby’s ability to sit up and communicate its wants.
One day, something inexplicable, terrible, frustrating, painful happens. The baby makes its demanding noise, with the cookie in full view just outside its reach, and the parent, instead of immediately handing it over, as has happened every day for as long as the baby can remember, now picks up the cookie, holds it tantalisingly before the baby, and says in what can only be construed as a deliberately sadistic voice, “Can you say ‘cookie’?”
Well, all of us know the rest of this story, for all of us have lived through it. The acquisition of language, the mastery of one’s bowels, the control of one’s temper – all of the stages in development that make one an adult human being who is recognisably a member of a society – all have a negative side, a side associated with shame, rage, pain, frustration, resentment, a backside, as we learn to think of it, as well as a positive side associated with praise, self-esteem, public reward, power, satisfaction – a front, which, as our language very nicely suggests, is both an officially good side and also a pretence, a fake.
By and large, we do not forget the frustration, the pain, the rage, nor do we ever forget those infantile fantasies of omnipotence and instantaneous gratification. We repress those fantasies, drive them out of consciousness, deny them, put them behind us, as we like to say. But, like our own backsides, and the faeces which issue from them, they remain, and exercise a secret, shameful attraction for us.
This brief reminder of our common heritage makes it clear that the repression of “unacceptable” wishes – as Freud so quaintly and aptly labelled them in his earlier writings – is an essential precondition for our development of the ability to interact effectively with the world, and with one another. Mastery of our own bodies, mastery of language, the psychic ability and willingness to defer gratification long enough to perform necessary work, the ability to control destructive, and self-destructive, rages or desires – civilisation, society, culture, survival all depend upon them. But necessary though they are, they are painful; throughout our lives, we carry, repressed, those delicious, illicit fantasies of total, immediate, uncompromised gratification, of instantaneous, magical fulfilment, of the permission to indulge the desires that have been stigmatised as negative.