Thanks to Steve Lubet for noting my book, Let’s Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education, and for inviting me to guest-blog about it.
I like Locke. Like Daniel Kahneman, albeit without a fistful of studies, John Locke reflected deeply on how the mind goes wrong. His The Conduct of the Understanding is a master class in identifying mental mistakes. Like John Stuart Mill, Locke worried especially about our one-sidedness. We “see but in part, and we know but in part, and therefore it is no wonder we conclude not right from our partial views.”
Unlike Kahneman, who looks to water cooler conversations, or the Mill of On Liberty, who looks to untrammeled freedom of thought and discussion, Locke looks to something like what we now call liberal education to overcome, as much as possible, our narrowness. As I explain in the book and here, Locke aims at “comprehensive enlargement of mind.” That requires attention to the “opposite arguings of men of parts.” It requires attention to those we imagine “come short of” us in talent. Even if we haven’t overestimated our own talent or underestimated theirs, they will know things we don’t. It requires recognition of the limits of “the science that [we] study and the books that [we] read.” It requires the study of some old books because part of our narrowness is of time, though Locke thinks the education of his time too bound to such books. It requires, where possible, travel because parochialism pertains to place.
Lockean liberal education is about more than skills or breadth. The man Locke calls the “logical chicaner”—one might think more broadly of bullshitters, spokespeople for cornered politicians, or one’s Twitter nemesis—sometimes possess these in frustrating abundance. The reasonable person at whom Locke aims is perhaps above all one who is determined to be guided by reason, rather than to use her reasoning skills to get the better of others. Locke is aware that different matters admit of different degrees of being known, but in a passage from Some Thoughts Concerning Education, with which my book opens, he sticks to the limit case in which reason spits out something like a clear answer: "There cannot be anything so . . . misbecoming . . . anyone who pretends to be a rational creature as not to yield to plain reason and the conviction of clear arguments."
The logical chicaner and the “man of reason” are “the two most different things" Locke knows. The difference between them guides Lockean education. I argue that it should guide ours, too.
Conservatives of the sort who look to conserve what they see as the Locke-inspired American Founding could be part of reform efforts in this direction. Indeed, it was not that long ago that conservatives, though conservative hostility to our colleges and universities goes back even before William F. Buckley’s 1951 God and Man at Yale, could rally around the idea of the university as the “home of reason.” The Closing of the American Mind offered only half a loaf to traditionalist conservatives. Allan Bloom was a proponent of “great books” but as a means of opening up “fundamental questions,” not of transmitting preferred answers. Still, conservatives of different stripes, including Buckley, championed Closing, both because they and Bloom had common enemies and because, in the university as Bloom conceives it, conservatives have a fighting chance.
Today, even some distinguished conservative academics, like the classicist Victor Davis Hanson consider the American university a “virtual outlaw institution,” a Snidely Whiplash tying innocent undergraduates to the tracks, forcing them to rack up debt and major in gender studies. The rest of us are fed a steady diet of horror stories by outfits like Campus Reform, whose journalists scour the utterances of higher education’s 20 million students and 4 million employees and find that some of them say or do something outrageous nearly every day. Would you believe that someone published an op-ed on manspreading? Defund the universities! Hanson is now a Trumper, but anti-Trump conservatives are only somewhat more bullish about the prospects for university reform. We’re in the “burn baby burn” phase of higher ed. conservatism.
One of the convictions that animates my book is that conservatives shouldn’t give up on the universities. At the very least, their judgment of the universities should not be guided by hyperbole. For example, when one hears Heather Mac Donald assert that Shakespeare is “on life support” in our classrooms, one ought to know that, according to the Open Syllabus Project, Shakespeare still tops the charts, followed by Plato.
My fellow conservatives aren’t wrong, exactly, about higher education, whose leftward tilt is both undeniable and somewhat worse than it seems overall (one’s conservative colleagues in agriculture aren’t looking up from their biofuel crops to out-organize self-styled scholar-activists). Questions about the politicization of parts of our campuses are likely to be met with a shrug, “isn’t everything political?” or, as Michael Roth has put it, “The posture”—note the contempt in that description—“of the apolitical” is a “posture of complicity.” Never mind the authors of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, who envisioned the university as a “base for their assault on the loci of power” or Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement activists who envision it as a “site of struggle.” When Republican legislators figure that if any politics is going to govern campuses, it’s going to be theirs, one remembers to worry about “politicized college governance.” A more honest response, however hypocritical and destructive recent state legislative efforts may be, would be “I reckon you got us.”
Dispiriting trends on the right and left notwithstanding, reasonability, understood roughly as Locke understood it, retains considerable power at our colleges and universities, which have not—horror stories notwithstanding—dumped the Enlightenment. I end the book this way: “Now, perhaps even more than in other times, those who love reason and know its fragility can be persuaded and, in turn, persuade others that liberal education addresses a permanent need.”
Jonathan, Looks like a wonderful project. Looking forward to reading it. Loved your description--well done!
Posted by: Ediberto Roman | July 07, 2021 at 10:17 AM
Excellent post, Jonathan. Thanks for joining us today.
Posted by: Steven Lubet | July 07, 2021 at 11:58 AM
While my worldview is largely of a Marxist orientation (albeit a bit idiosyncratic) I happen to believe in the importance of Liberal education (in the manner of Liberal political philosophy), one that is open to allowing space for educational philosophies and pedagogies not circumscribed by Liberalism proper, say, as found among anarchist intellectuals and activists or the works of Paulo Freire. Conservatism, even of the non-Trumpian variety (that is, the sort not lacking an aversion to reality testing), remains regressive and backward-looking overall, still prone to what Albert Hirschman famously identified as the "rhetoric of reaction" in his 1991 book by that title. Moreover, it has never disassociated itself from the ideologies Stephen Holmes diagnosed as common to anti-liberalism in The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993). It is a vapid political philosophy, with precious few redeemable parts, hence the easy descent among Republicans into anti-democratic and fascist or neo-fascist views and political behavior. What is left of conservatism makes for neoliberalism, an hysterical and desperate attempt to save the radically inegalitarian distribution of economic and political power on a global level with a noxious mix of top-down capitalist markets and corporate power, the latter dominated by finance capitalism. Conservatives of all kinds, when not simply engaged in self-deception, denial, and pernicious wishful thinking, lack a clear understanding of global climate change, rendering them irrelevant (when not dangerous) for the most urgent political and economic subject of our time.
Finally, it seems your book has failed to address the foremost problem besetting would-be Liberal higher education: the capitalist distortion and deformation of the entire system of such education, evidence for which I gathered together titles in my bibliography, Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education: a reading guide, found on my Academia(dot)edu page.
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | July 08, 2021 at 08:47 AM
"Conservatives of all kinds, when not simply engaged in self-deception, denial, and pernicious wishful thinking..."
Oh boy. The reactionary Marxist forces strike again.
Thank you for your: class essentialism and insistence upon that forming our core identities; the monistic and myopic lens of historical materialism; positing mystical "forces" of production; the insistence that we are alienated from our true nature (because, despite evolution by natural selection being scientific fact, we have a species being that will be made manifest when the appropriate socio-economic conditions obtain); seeing morality within capitalist society as "ideology" whilst failing to observe that your own conceptions of who should own what are entirely predicated upon those - socially-constructed - moral norms (including in terms of what counts as a fair share between the sale of the "labourer's" product and the capitalist's take. How do you know that that just isn't a function of YOUR false consciousness?); a "dialectical materialism" that even Marx basically admitted was a vacuous term he employed when he needed a place filler.
How is any of that crap progress? Don't our scientific advancements, and greater appreciation of the social constructedness of our entire conceptual scheme, suggest that we should leave (most of) that sort of religious mumbo jumbo in the dustbin of history? If you don't, do you think that dumping millions of "undocumented workers" into the USA and shouting "no one is illegal!" is really just a form of class warfare?
You also going to try to give us the essentialist spiel about conservatives perforce lacking a clear understanding of climate change? (How about an essentialist claim that a capitalist legal liberal system couldn't perforce regulate the economy to the extent required to curb climate change?).
Do you see the Marxists, socialists, social-democrats, and "liberals" clamoring to shut down the carbon-disaster resource extraction facets of the economies in those Western countries in which they loom large (e.g., Canadian and Norwegian oil)? Based on their actual track-records in office, don't all of them simply try to tax those more or just try to socialize them? Would the Scottish National Party actually bring an end to North Sea oil production, or is that not instead its dominant hope for trying to convince Scots that a separate country would actually be viable?
How, moreover, do YOU distinguish between fascists and neo-fascists in terms of ideology, Patrick? In Italy, for example, prominent - self-styled - neo-fascists famously tried to ally with the communists after the "Years of Lead" precisely because they shared the dream of ending capitalism.
I usually don't buy into other people's self-promotion of their materials on this blog. So, give us the skinny: when exactly was the education system in the USA non-capitalist, such that it could be distorted and deformed by capitalism?
Posted by: Anonymous Bosch | July 08, 2021 at 12:04 PM
Perhaps needless to say, the individual above made all kinds of assumptions, presumptions, and extravagant inferences from my post and about my worldview (which is not just Marxist). As I do not engage anonymous posters, should anyone want to learn more about my views they can read my close to 1,000 posts at Religious Left Law and/or look at the material on my Academia page (it has well over 100 bibliographies on sundry subjects, published and unpublished articles, essays and other stuff, as well as study guides for some major religious worldviews).
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | July 08, 2021 at 12:26 PM
"While my worldview is largely of a Marxist orientation..."
And again with the self-promotion, Paddy?
We've tangled before (e.g., when I demonstrated to you that you had zero evidence that torture doesn't actually work... 'cause there'd actually have to be publicly available, testable evidence that would establish that that's the case...). Don't quit your day job, tovarish.
Posted by: Anonymous Bosch | July 08, 2021 at 11:14 PM