In Defense of a Liberal Education

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.
—E. O. Wilson

It’s an impressive list, but Brooks found that this intense set of activities was mostly in the service of building a resume and came with little intellectual curiosity.

But most of the complaints today are quite different from the reactionary concerns of the past. After centuries of bemoaning the fact that the young are too rebellious and disrespectful, the problem today, it appears, is that they are not rebellious and disrespectful enough.

Younger Americans believe that the U.S. government has become dysfunctional and polarized. The young might choose to effect social change by working with NGOs rather than working for government, but that is about the mechanism not the goal. And given the state of politics, the bureaucracy of government, and the intrusions of a hyperactive media, surely they are being rational, maybe even wise.

As a result, our youth are not very ideological. They combine a mix of impulses—capitalist, socially liberal, supportive of social welfare, but uncomfortable with bureaucracy and regulation. It doesn’t quite add up to a passionate political philosophy. And certainly, it doesn’t take them to the barricades.

John Adams famously wrote during the American Revolution, “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

We do not look inside of ourselves enough to understand our strengths and weaknesses, and we do not look around enough—at the world, in history—to ask the deepest and broadest questions. The solution surely is that, even now, we could all use a little bit more of a liberal education.

In his writings and talks, David Brooks emphasizes his concern that the young lack a language about virtue today. They are, he believes, “morally inarticulate.”

IF IGNORANCE IS
bliss, why do people want knowledge? This is a question with a long pedigree in Western culture. Prometheus brought fire from Mount Olympus down to earth and its mortal inhabitants. In doing so, he enraged Zeus, the supreme deity, who had him chained to a rock and tortured for eternity by an eagle feasting on his liver. And that was just the punishment for Prometheus. Human beings were sent a curse in the form of Pandora, with her box of ills that would afflict humankind forever once it was unlocked—disease, sickness, sorrow, envy, hatred.

he highlights John Rawls’s contribution to political thought: that the most just society would be the one you would choose if you did not know how rich or poor or how talented or untalented you were when born into it.