The Wisdom of Secular Education

Right-wing commentator Dennis Prager said at a recent “Moms for Liberty” conference: “There is no such thing as a secular institution with wisdom… That is why the stupidest institutions are the most secular: the universities.”

He’s wrong. The wisdom of secular universities is found in their reluctance to teach wisdom. That may sound like a paradox. But it is an approach to teaching that is as old as Socrates.

I am a professor of philosophy—a “lover of wisdom.” But I don’t teach wisdom. I think that what I teach may help students develop wisdom. But I would never presume to teach wisdom. I can teach about the world’s wisdom traditions. But I do not have the right to teach wisdom in my role as a secular professor.

Prager’s critique of secular education

Prager is a frequent critic of secularism, and of public education. He is not happy with what secular schools teach about racism, gender, and religion. Prager wrote, in a column in July 2022: “When America was more religious, wisdom was taught to young people. This is another reason to fear a thoroughly secularized America—we are producing a nation of fools. The proof lies in our universities. The most secularized institution in America is the most foolish institution in America.”

Really? American universities lead the world in research and creativity. People come here to study from across the globe. American universities are not stupid or foolish.

But Prager is right that secular universities do not teach wisdom, in his sense. He thinks that wisdom implies the specific content of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

But it is not the job of a secular university to instill the values of a specific religious tradition. This does not make universities foolish or stupid. Rather, secular universities refrain from teaching wisdom because in a diverse society grounded on liberty, we leave wisdom to the private sphere. If you want wisdom, go to a church or temple. But if you want knowledge, go to a secular school.

Secular universities should be neutral, inclusive, and pluralistic. They ought to disseminate knowledge, without staking a claim about wisdom. They ought to train students in the art of sifting and winnowing. They should teach skills in scientific method, critical thinking, and hermeneutics. But knowledge and critical thinking skills do not produce wisdom.

Wisdom vs. knowledge

Wisdom is about meaning, value, and purpose. It is a matter of the soul, the conscience, and our fundamental beliefs. Universities can and should include courses that teach about the varieties of opinion about wisdom and the meaning of life. But no secular university professor should presume to grade and evaluate students based upon the condition of their soul. That would be obnoxious, and it would violate the spirit of open inquiry that is essential to the secular pursuit of knowledge.

The pursuit of wisdom is different from the pursuit of knowledge. In religious traditions, teachers of wisdom provide definitive answers about meaning, value, and purpose. The teachers of religious wisdom aim to transform the souls of their disciples. They inspire, admonish, and guide their pupils toward a vision of the good life.

This is not what university professors should be doing. University professors teach knowledge, and methods for discovering it. But they should avoid any attempt to peer into the soul of a student. They may inspire students to seek knowledge. But they should not pick sides in cultural, religious, or spiritual struggles.

The pursuit of knowledge is, of course, part of wisdom. Wisdom requires knowledge. Ignorant and stupid people are not wise. But wisdom is not simply the accumulation of knowledge. And there are knowledgeable people who lack wisdom. Wisdom is a virtue or character trait. It is more a way of being than a pile of facts.

Wisdom involves judgement, discernment, and a sense of justice. Wisdom is about what we do with our knowledge, how we apply it to solve problems, and how we construct a life of meaning and value.

The Socratic model

An important model for the contemporary secular approach is Socrates. Socrates never claimed to be wise. He was a questioner, and a gadfly. He did not pontificate about the meaning of life, apart from suggesting that to be fully human is to think. This what he meant when he said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Socratic wisdom is a lifelong commitment to the ongoing labor of thinking. But this is an open-ended kind of wisdom that avoids picking sides in cultural or religious squabbles.

And now, finally, let’s return to Prager’s contention that when America was more religious, wisdom was taught to young people. He’s probably right. In a homogeneous world young people are often trained to conform and identify with a specific answer to life’s questions. Some may call that training wisdom. But it is narrow and limiting.

Such a narrow training in wisdom is not appropriate for a world that values liberty, free inquiry, and diversity. For that world—our world—we need a secular, Socratic approach. The secular approach is oriented around the Socratic “love of wisdom,” and a process of arguing and inquiring that is open-ended. Secular universities do not teach wisdom. Rather, they teach us how to decide for ourselves what is wise.

May 21, 2023May 21, 2023

Finding Hope Beyond the Political

Or Why We Need Philosophy, Religion, and Art

Political life is limited and ultimately unsatisfying. When we focus on the external and horizontal dimension of political life, we are bound to be frustrated. But there are other dimensions and sources of meaning, beyond the political.

The despair of the political

The world is unjust. Good people often suffer in misery and obscurity. And bad folks become rich and powerful. The social and political world is messy and frustrating. Our imagined ideals fail to become real. And although progress can be made, there is backlash and unfulfilled expectations.

We inherit a broken world that conflicts with our idealism. The dream of justice runs aground on the shards of these fragments. The more we want to repair these ruins, the more hopeless things appear. We also disagree about who ruined this world, why it is broken, and how it ought to be fixed.

This sense of grievance and longing explains why the passion of the political can become shrill, dogmatic, and polarizing. Political intensity feeds off dissatisfaction. And when these deep emotions are frustrated long enough, there is the risk of despair. The passion of the political dwells in the thought that if these ruins cannot be repaired, all is lost.

Clinging to hope

To fight the despair that haunts politics, political rhetoric is often infused with what Barack Obama called “the audacity of hope.” The best and most inspiring political speech reminds us of an imagined future in which the ideal will be actualized.

Martin Luther King, Jr. provides a well-known example. He was aware of the problem of political despair. In response to the disappointments of the civil rights movement, King said, , “The only healthy answer lies in one’s honest recognition of disappointment even as he still clings to hope, one’s acceptance of finite disappointment even while clinging to infinite hope.” And: “Our most fruitful course is to stand firm, move forward nonviolently, accept disappointments and cling to hope.”

King warned that disappointment in the face of injustice can lead to bitterness, self-pity, cynicism, nihilism, and other “poisons” of the soul. His remedy was to “cling to hope.” This phrase is interesting. To cling is to hold on, to try to remain committed, even as the storm rages.

Thinking in more than one dimension

As a Christian, King found a source of hope beyond the storm. King’s hope was oriented toward another dimension, a source of meaning that exists in a realm beyond the political. This is what Rev. Jeremiah Wright (who inspired Obama’s idea of the audacity of hope) called “the vertical dimension.”

Politics is one dimensional. It views the self and the other on a merely horizontal dimension, failing to take into account other dimensions of life and experience. This is bound to be dissatisfying because human beings live in more than one dimension.

The vertical dimension is often understood in religious terms, as an axis oriented toward the divine. But secular folks can also discover an inner dimension connected with love, beauty, or other sources of meaning found in the human experience. The most important of these non-political axes are called art, religion, and philosophy (borrowing a set of concepts from Hegel).

Now there is a tendency among some thoroughly political (or politicized) folks to reduce art, religion, and philosophy to politics. Marxists explain the “ideological” in terms of material and economic conditions. Feminists and race-conscious theorists also sometimes interpret art, religion, and philosophy from a liberatory framework. Conservatives do this as well, when they think that art, religion, and philosophy ought to support some preferred nationalistic ideal.

But the wonder of art, religion, and philosophy is that they burst the bounds of any politicized and reductive account of human reality. The artist, the mystic, and the sage exist in a different dimension, oriented toward values and ideas that are not reducible to questions of justice or power.

The example of comedy and tragedy

This may sound abstract. So let’s consider two familiar artforms: the comedic and the tragic. Comedy can be political. It can be used both to liberate and to oppress. But sometimes the comedic reveals the absurdity of existence. And laughter can be an end-in-itself.

Tragedy can also be employed for political purposes: to tell a story about oppression or the “triumph of the will.” But tragedy also transcends the political. It makes us shudder to wonder about death, evil, pride, murder, and betrayal. Sophocles has the chorus say in Antigone (line 332): There are terrors and wonders on earth, and none is more terrible or wonderful than we humans.

When a comedic artist reveals absurdity, we are directed beyond the political dimension toward broader reflection on the human condition. When we laugh, and play along, we are engaged in a world of imagination, on a dimension apart from the political. The same is true, when we are moved by tragedy to see the terror and the wonder of human existence. This act of imagination gives us a glimpse of a dimension of experience that is beyond the political.

This act of imagination can be a source of hope, repair, and reconciliation. It can also renew the spirit and gives us the energy to return to our struggles with better perspective, and a clearer sense of self.

Hope beyond politics

Now a critic may suggest that this experience of transcendence comes from a position of “privilege” that is conveniently able to ignore the challenges of political reality. But the move beyond the political is not an excuse for political indifference. We are political animals, as Aristotle said. And we cannot simply ignore injustice and the struggles of political life.

But we all possess the power of human imagination. And we can all find consolation and hope when we open our minds to those other dimensions of human experience that transcend the political.

March 15, 2022March 15, 2022

Tyranny from Plato to Trump

I’m pleased to announce the publication of my new book, Tyranny from Plato to Trump: Fools, Sycophants, and Citizens.

The book offers insight into the perennial problem of tyranny. Tyrants seek to grab power. They are supported by sycophants. And cheered on by fools. This is a political problem as well as a social and spiritual problem. There are tyrants in our families and in our businesses. There is also a tyrannical tendency in our souls. The same is true of the tendency to suck up to the powerful. And each of us can behave moronically, more interested in amusement than ethics or truth.

The cure is spiritual and political. We benefit from self-examination. And we need social and political guardrails that prevent tyrants from consolidating power.

January 14, 2022January 14, 2022

On the Importance of Looking Up

The new Netflix film “Don’t Look Up” has a lot of people talking. It is a black comedy, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, and Jennifer Lawrence. It’s about corporate greed, bureaucratic incompetence, and the apocalypse. Its bleak conclusion gets you thinking about the dangers of power, narcissism, and willful ignorance.

The movie’s fans see it as a cautionary allegory about climate change, science denial, and clueless amateurs running the government. Some worry that its gloomy ending may encourage despair. Others hope it will be a call to action.

Reviews of the film reflect our polarization. Conservatives claim it is another example of Hollywood preaching a liberal gospel. One critic in the National Review suggested it is the worst film of 2021. He lambasted is as a “better-than-you comedy” that “reveals the nastiness of liberals.” Another critic in the Washington Examiner said it was a “lazy anti-Trump comedy.”

More subtle criticism came from New York Magazine, where a sympathetic commentator accused the film of oversimplifying the climate crisis. He said liberals “need to stop telling themselves self-flattering fairy tales.”

I suppose the point is that we are all in this together. Narcissism and stupidity cross party lines. Hollywood is part of the problem. The film seems to recognize this. It shows how the cult of celebrity corrupts everyone, even the neurotic scientist played by DiCaprio.

At any rate, this is an allegory, not a documentary. Allegories simplify reality. They tell memorable stories that get people talking. In this regard, the film succeeds. It provokes conversations about life, death, politics, and American culture.

This conversation should extend to the very idea of “looking up.” The film’s title calls to mind Plato’s famous “allegory of the cave.” In Plato story, we are prisoners chained in a cave. We are not permitted to turn around and see reality. Even when we are set free, most of us refuse to turn around. Plato suggests the masses would go so far as to kill truth-tellers and educators, who like Socrates are trying to get us to look up.

Plato’s allegory is about willful ignorance. Plato warns that most people don’t want to know the truth. We deliberately choose not to look up. We are happy with our illusions. We don’t want to confront reality. We keep our heads down, preferring slavery over enlightenment.

In the film, this idea becomes the slogan of the political party led by Streep’s character, President Orleans. The party encourages people not to look up at the comet hurtling toward earth. This is a parody of our culture’s struggle with science denial, “fake news,” and “alternative facts.” It also implies authoritarianism. “Don’t look up” also means “mind your own business” and don’t criticize the elites.

The philosophical solution to all of this is the pursuit of wisdom. We ought to look up. It won’t be easy or comfortable. We may discover things that confuse us or make us unhappy. But it is better to live in the light than in the darkness.

One of the questions raised by the film is whether you would want to know how and when you are going to die. The scientists in the film know the exact time of the apocalypse. And there is a supercomputer using big data to predict how people will die.

What would you do with this knowledge? Would knowledge of your death cause despair? Would you prefer to remain in ignorance about your death?

A modest hopeful appears toward the end of the film when DiCaprio’s character responds to knowledge of his death by changing his life. He refutes the computer’s prediction about his death, thereby reclaiming some modest dignity.

This is the kind of dignity that knowledge provides. When we look up and confront reality, we can take charge of how we live and how we die. To live in ignorance is to live as a prisoner. The truth sets us free.

Knowing the truth won’t change the indifferent reality of the cosmos. Knowing the truth won’t stop a comet or cure you of Covid. But knowledge allows us to live responsibly and, if necessary, to die with dignity. It is tempting in a crisis to bury our heads in the sand. But wisdom is only available to those who look up.

November 27, 2015December 8, 2015

Misguided War on Liberal Arts

Candidates short-sighted war on liberal arts

Political attacks on philosophy prompt a philosopher to reply
Liberal arts education is a key to progress in troubled times
Citizens benefit from training in critical thinking and moral educatio

Fresno Bee, November 27, 2015

Last month, Jeb Bush suggested that a liberal arts degree was a waste of time. “That philosophy major thing,” he said, “that’s great, it’s important to have liberal arts … but realize, you’re going to be working at Chick-Fil-A.”

Marco Rubio made a similar point at a recent debate. He said we need “more welders and less philosophers.”

But in these troubled times, we need more philosophical reflection and less heated rhetoric, more careful analysis and fewer glib one-liners. A broad liberal arts education teaches us to think. Good thinking is essential for citizens of a free, self-governing democracy.

Consider the question of war against the Islamic State.Sen. Rubio describes this as a “clash of civilizations.” He said, “They do not hate us because we have military assets in the Middle East – they hate us because of our values. … They hate us because we have freedom of speech, because we have diversity in our religious beliefs. They hate us because we’re a tolerant society.”

Claims like these deserve critical scrutiny. Is this really a clash of civilizations? How can we know why someone hates us? And what should we do about it? To answer those questions, we need philosophers, historians and students of religion and culture.

The study of the world’s religions sheds light on the idea of a clash of civilizations. Muslims, Jews and Christians share common roots and a long history of intolerance and warfare. These traditions share an ideal of holy war, crusades and jihad. They also contain a common hope for peace, shalom or salaam. Understanding the similarities and differences among these traditions develops through broad historical, cultural and philosophical inquiry.

A liberal arts education also helps us understand the value of religious toleration. Secular systems of government evolved in recent centuries as a response to ongoing religious violence. Theocratic regimes are throwbacks, seemingly at odds with the general logic of historical progress.

But does history have a logic? And are we wise enough to figure out what to do next? Historians warn against such broad generalizations. Consider this: the Sykes-Picot agreement that divided the Middle East among European powers was hammered out 100 years ago. A century of European and American intervention has left us with a mess. Perhaps we are not as wise as we think we are.

Jeb Bush has urged an all-out war against the Islamic State. But in order to decide that war is justified, we need a substantial amount of philosophical reflection. We need to ponder – among other things – the justice of the cause, the question of proportionality, the issue of how noncombatants will fare and the plan for postbellum peace.

NO MATTER THE TRADE OR PROFESSION, WE NEED CITIZENS WHO UNDERSTAND THAT WAR, TERROR AND HATE DESTROY UNDERSTANDING AND KILL HOPE.

Understanding all of that requires training in ethics, political science and history. To make sure that our soldiers fight morally appropriate wars, we need better liberal arts education – not less of it.

Indeed, a liberal arts education is likely part of the long-run solution for the war on terrorism. The root cause of war and terrorism is, after all, bad philosophy. Extremism, demagoguery, ignorance and moral blindness are cured through education. The best cure for bad ideas is better ones.

A broad liberal arts education produces critical, virtuous and responsible citizens. Science grounds us in facts about geography, biology and the physical world. History provides context for understanding current events, while reminding us that progress can be made. Music, literature and poetry deliver transcendent joys that unite us despite our differences. The study of the world’s religions shows us that there are diverse paths to a meaningful life. Ethics teaches us to distinguish good from evil. And philosophical training reminds us to be curious, courageous, compassionate and modest about what we know.

Good education helps to create good people. In order for society to function, we need welders – fast food cooks, lawyers, and even politicians – who are honest, trustworthy and kind. No matter the trade or profession, we need citizens who understand that war, terror and hate destroy understanding and kill hope.

It is true that there are very few paying jobs for full-time philosophers. But welders, cooks, and politicians – indeed all citizens – benefit from philosophical insight and broad education. We need better thinking and more enlightened citizens – more liberal arts and less hot air.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/article46737230.html#storylink=cpy