Liberating Weather-Cock Minds

A student recently told me that he hadn’t really had time to do research for the essay I’d assigned, so he based his analysis on hearsay from podcasts and YouTube videos. The bad news, I told him, was that this form of evidence and reasoning didn’t meet the requirements for the essay, but the good news was that the rest of our class—and the rest of his time in college—would give him ways to deepen and discipline his understanding of the world.

In several respects, this student (whose approach to the pursuit of truth is shared by many people of all ages) falls into the category of people whom Dante places in the vestibule of Inferno, which Dorothy Sayers describes as “the abode of the weather-cock mind, the vague tolerance which will neither approve nor condemn, the cautious cowardice for which no decision is ever final. The spirits rush aimlessly after the aimlessly whirling banner, stung and goaded, as of old, by the thought that, in doing anything definite whatsoever, they are missing doing something else.” The weather-cock mind spins freely, pointing toward whatever idea or meme or slogan happens to be current. So even when such a mind feels strong approval or disapproval, these tend to be impulsive; weather-cock minds have little patience for reasoning out a particular opinion or for assessing consistency among their different opinions.

The uncommitted, aimless lives of these souls may seem “free” in one sense; they are detached and uncoerced. But such negative freedom does not, in fact, liberate them to pursue truth, understand reality, or live well. The freedom of the weathervane to point wherever the wind blows is not the freedom of the human person to follow Christ and his Kingdom. What such souls need, as Sayers argues in her classic essay “The Lost Tools of Learning,” is a liberal arts education. What they have been formed to want and expect, however, is merely a servile education.

Students today would never declare that they want a servile education. But in acquiescing to the dominant cultural narrative that frames the value of a college degree primarily in terms of career preparation, they willingly consign themselves to the kind of education that, in the classical world, slaves received. As Aristotle argues, slaves merely need an education oriented toward a particular economic task. They don’t need to waste their time trying to understand the world, discern the truth, or make prudential judgments about justice or right action. To the extent that weather-cock students affirm an instrumental view of education and light on a major based upon what career path seems most promising, they view themselves as good for little more than economic servitude, servitude disguised by the multitude of “choices” on offer both in employment listings and in the entertainment-media-technology distraction industry. A soul can feel free as long as it’s free to spin around with every shift in the economic or cultural winds.

Most of the objections I hear voiced about liberal arts education are downstream of this fundamentally instrumental view of education—which derives, ultimately, from an instrumental view of human persons: An education is deemed “good” if it gets me the job or commodity I happen to want right now. I recently participated in a multi-year project to reckon with the most common questions that Americans have about liberal arts education. This project culminated in the publication of a book—The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education—in which twenty-five contributors respond to some of the particular questions that emerge from this basic perception that a liberal arts education is a waste of time. We respond to questions about whether the liberal arts are irrelevant, outdated, unmarketable, and out of touch. We also respond to some of the more nuanced questions such as whether this form of education is elitist, racist, or politically progressive. In seeking to allay these varied objections, we also strive to show that those who excel in the liberal arts become capable of liberating their neighbors, of living as faithful citizens in the Kingdom of God.

If we imagine freedom simply in negative terms, it may not seem obvious that humans need these arts to become free. But freedom entails both a negative and a positive dimension: a negative freedom from constraints and a positive freedom to achieve particular goods. The political theorist Bill Cavanaugh likes to explain this distinction in terms of musical excellence. If I walk into a room with a piano and the fallboard is unlocked, no external constraints prevent me from sitting down and playing a Beethoven sonata. But if I have not disciplined myself through years of practice and training, I am not in fact free to make beautiful music. The weather-cock mind may experience negative freedom, but it is not in fact free to resist destructive or ephemeral desires and diligently pursue friendship with God; this is why Dante places these souls at the outset of Inferno. The liberal arts provide the disciplines and knowledge, the virtues and wisdom, we need to make a beautiful human life—in Christian terms, to vibrantly portray the image of God and serve his kingdom. This image has been tarnished by the fall, which is why John Milton writes that the goal of education is to “repair the ruins of our first parents.”The liberal arts provide the disciplines and knowledge, the virtues and wisdom, we need to make a beautiful human life—in Christian terms, to vibrantly portray the image of God and serve his kingdom. Click To Tweet

As I’ve indicated, the liberal arts tradition stretches back to the classical era, and when I trace its winding lineage for my students, I emphasize that it’s an education to form free people in the arts needed to exercise their freedom well. Throughout human history, most people only had the opportunity to receive various kinds of servile training: they were taught how to perform a particular task and then set to work. We may be living in the first culture where many people are invited to practice the virtues and competencies needed to live a liberated life and yet decline these as unnecessarily rigorous.

Let me get a bit more specific regarding what this education entails and how it forms students to pursue their lofty calling as those made in the image of God. Traditionally, the liberal arts have been defined in terms of the Trivium and the Quadrivium: the “three ways” of using words to describe and shape reality (grammar or relations among words, logic or relations among ideas, and rhetoric or relations among people) and the “four ways” of using numbers to describe and shape reality (math or pure number, geometry or number in space, music or number in time, and astronomy or number in space and time).

The curriculum in classical schools today and in many Christian liberal arts colleges descends from this basic model. Students study relations between words in both English and a foreign language; they learn how to craft logical and persuasive arguments; they trace the history of various human cultures—the art and ideas and stories by which we have sought to define and order our relations to others and to God. Students also study math and the sciences, in both their theoretical and applied forms, to learn the power of numbers to apprehend creation in its awesome complexity. Finally, students apprentice themselves to what Thomas Aquinas called the queen of the sciences: theology. In this educational model, all students, regardless of their major or intended career, receive this liberal arts formation so that they might use their more specialized training in ways that beautifully reveal the facet of the divine image with which they have been entrusted.

No longer bound by ignorance or ideology, students cultivate the arts by which we make sense of the world and judge the rightness of our work and the beauty of our lives. They learn, thus, to put their particular gifts and training in service of the common good. In this way, the liberal arts liberate: they free us to live lives of generosity, of liberality. And as the etymology of the word free suggests, they free us to pursue friendship with other people and, ultimately, God. In Milton’s terms, they enable us “to love [God], to imitate him, to be like him.” Such formation is not merely an optional commodity among many other possible products. It’s a vision of what human persons need in order to respond to their God-given callings. His commitment to this vision leads the contemporary American author Wendell Berry to urge his readers not to view “education as ‘career preparation.’” If we do so, Berry warns, we make “it a commodity—something to be bought in order to make money. The great wrong in this is that it obscures the fact that education—real education—is free. I am necessarily well aware that schools and books have a cost that must be paid, but I am sure nevertheless that what is taught and learned is free. . . . To make a commodity of it is to work its ruin, for, when we put a price on it, we both reduce its value and blind the recipient to the obligations that always accompany good gifts: namely, to use them well and to hand them on unimpaired.”In this way, the liberal arts liberate: they free us to live lives of generosity, of liberality. And as the etymology of the word free suggests, they free us to pursue friendship with other people and, ultimately, God. Click To Tweet

When students pay thousands of dollars to attend fancy private schools, they experience understandable pressure to view their education as a private commodity. But the largesse and creativity of many secondary and post-secondary schools can make this formation accessible, and we highlight several institutions in The Liberating Arts who have found ways to extend this kind of education to people from all backgrounds and income brackets. Making a Christian liberal arts education affordable isn’t easy, but it’s both essential and possible. Students who receive scholarships and who live and learn in buildings paid for by donors experience the generosity of previous generations, and they likewise receive the obligation to use the gift of a liberating education well and to hand it on unimpaired.

Similarly, as students engage in learning experiences that don’t show up on their transcripts or résumés—attending an evening lecture or concert or play, sharing a conversation and a meal at a professor’s home, helping to lead a student group, debating a big question with a roommate—students come to experience their education as a liberating gift. Alexis de Tocqueville believed this rich associational life to be a bulwark against the manifold threats of tyranny; participation in free communities oriented toward a common good in high school or college shapes students to exercise their freedom similarly in the churches and towns and civic organizations to which they will belong after they graduate.

Indeed the true fruit of a liberal arts education is enjoyed in the redemptive, liberating communities sustained by people who excel in these arts. Such people exercise the virtues and skills they have been given in the slow, difficult, and joy-giving work of loving their neighbors. They have become free to point their lives toward the Kingdom of God no matter how the winds of fashion or economics might buffet.

Photo Credit: Wagner Wang