The Shackles of Self-Rule: Navigating Freedom in the Democracy

Liberal democracy, founded on a doctrine of human freedom and dignity, has as its most respected body of thought a teaching that has no room for freedom and dignity.

-Leon Kass, Toward a More Natural Science

One might assume, that citizens born into regimes with no sovereign rulership and no limits to individual expression are born “free”. That such individuals are somehow spared from Plato’s dismal cave of shadows because there are no obvious shackles binding them to a fixed position, yet nothing could be further from the truth. Let it be known that self-rule comes with heavy responsibility and risk. Because there are no shackles, the democratic citizen is free to look and move in any direction he likes, but this means that his chances of going astray are higher too. Not only is he “free” to wander away from the right or good, but there is also no clear “right” or “good” to begin with since many believe that such qualities are no more than subjective notions based on feelings in democracies. Hence, the democratic citizen needs an education that will give him these bearings. A liberal education equips its beneficiaries with these bearings by inviting them into conversations about topics which challenge students to reach a deeper understanding of human existence and their place in the cosmos. With its thoughtful exploration into past and present mythologies, revolutions, social movements, philosophy, and divinities, students are liberated from any erroneous attitudes or convictions they may hold as they grow wise to their cultural heritage and how it has framed their reality and perspectives.

Unlike modern learning theory that deems creative and practical applications of information to be the final goal of education, a liberal education imagines a much loftier objective for its students, one that empowers them to see their world through a lens of truth. Necessary to this vision, however, is a viewpoint that deviates from the pervasive dogmatism that underpins most public education models in the Western world today which rely on a haphazard image of reality to support their credibility. It requires a position that trusts the design of nature and the objective truths that call forth the student’s curiosity and desire to know, which in turn, free its pupils from their desultory states and any senseless opinions that may be obstructing their intellectual ascent. If a citizen reaches maturity and rationality by way of a liberal education, that citizen is prepared for the accountability a liberal democracy demands of them. They are ready and willing to accept the responsibility of ruling themselves in a regime ruled by the citizens and can navigate the limitlessness of the rights and freedoms available to them. Through its mindful engagement with primary texts and other great books, students take time to pore over the elemental themes of human order such as love, justice, dignity, happiness, prudence, and virtue, which grows in each pupil a set of principles that can support an ethically virtuous life within political society. By exposing students to concepts that transcend both culture and history and embracing a teleological perspective, a liberal education cultivates in its beneficiaries a more purposeful consciousness from which to experience reality.

One of the more questionable characteristics of a liberal democracy is the intellectual “freedom” it allows for. Politically, we may think in moderation, or we may think in extremes. Privately, we may think anything we like, or not at all. Scientifically, we may think about how the chemical reactions of certain isotopes change the radius destruction of a 50-kiloton warhead yield or we may think about why the evolution of the flightless cormorant has caused it to be the only species in the Phalacrocorax genus to live a sedentary lifestyle. In fact, we may think about these things to the exclusion of everything else if we should so choose (once we have completed high school and provided that our circumstances allow for it). But does this make us lucky or doomed? While a liberal education indeed celebrates the curiosity and truth-seeking spirit of the individual, it is also privy to the pitfalls of extreme thinking and its long-term consequences, therefore, understands the importance of growing citizens who can navigate this intellectual “freedom” and capable of reasoning though their desires and appetites. A liberal education develops this potential in its students through its exploration into the ancient ideals of moral virtue and because of the high standards it places on its educators and pupils. It demands educators who embody perfected wisdom, and learners who are open to being led by these educators, yet an equal measure of trust, dedication, love, and truth from both parties. The success of this instructional partnership also depends on a liberal education’s deep appreciation for the human desire to know and because it takes great pains to ensure its beneficiaries are fulfilled in this desire. Unlike modern attitudes toward education, it believes in education for its own sake, and cares about instilling in its beneficiaries a passion for the true common good as well as a life-long interest in learning in the highest sense.

A liberal education is often described as being a “freeing” education, in part, because two of its main goals are to enlighten its beneficiaries about the nature of their personal reality and to bestow on them “experience in things beautiful” (Strauss 8). One of the ways that it achieves these goals is by taking seriously the most influential ideas (many of which are buried very deep) within the great works of the Western tradition and the authors who produced them. And although some may argue that this concentrated engagement with Western literature and its greatest minds is an all too ethnocentric and/or elitist approach to learning, citizens of the west must be cultured (in the most sophisticated sense) if they are to withstand the negative effects of mass culture. Rather than grounding citizens in a set of universal beliefs that might lift them up, mass culture, paradoxically, breeds a harmful relativism that extinguishes principles of right or good with its drowning maxim that there are no distinguishable rational standards for judging different cultures (Myers et. al. 32).

In Liberal Education and Value Relativism: A Guide to Today’s BA., authors, Patrick Malcolmson, Richard Myers, and Colin O’Connell refute the validity of this maxim by equating it to a false inference that stems from the cultural relativist’s original observation that there is a high (perhaps even unlimited) number of different living standards. The authors argue that this is simply and error in logic because “the fact that there is a great diversity of cultures says nothing about whether there is [a] universal standard or transcultural perspective for judging all cultures” (Myers et. al. 33) and that this inference automatically corners the relativist into a contradictory position that he would not like “wrong” done to him or others yet, at the same time, does not believe that there is a non-relative standard for judging such infractions (Myers et. al. 35). The authors then move to a critical examination of historical relativism which holds that truths are merely relative to specific time periods, which they argue is a position that is equally culpable in delegitimizing notions of right and wrong. Such relativism, they say, undermines the most fundamental human rights because it means that things like slavery are not invariably wrong, only wrong within a particular historical context within this perspective (Myers et al. 37). Furthermore, since “there is no fixed human nature and that human beings cannot be understood apart from their historical context” (Myers et. al. 36) from the relativist’s standpoint, no final causes, design, or purpose can exist in nature which the author’s say necessarily eliminates the possibility of first principles and causes as well (Myers et. al. 37).

In Toward A More Natural Science, Dr. Leon Kass explains how this loss of the teleological perspective has affected the pursuit of wisdom and how it has left modern scientific pursuits with no clear ethical boundaries. He says that since modern science is based on theory that rejects the truth that the universe and all forms within in it have purpose, the notion of end goals, and final causation is consequently removed from all scientific inquiry (250). Furthermore, since the original goal of science is to replace opinion with knowledge, this inevitably threatens the worth of all beliefs that lie outside the perimeters of observability and examination as deemed by modern empirical methods such as “the gods, justice, the good life, or the equal rights of man” (Kass 4). Worryingly, objective standards of right and right wrong, good and bad, just an unjust, do not and cannot exist within the realm of science. A realm, which Kass argues, is itself, the ruling doctrine of liberal democracies. As a result, the scientists producing new technologies and discoveries in these democracies have not taken into consideration the long-term effects that their innovations have on society, its ruling beliefs, or even human dignity. Kass’s observations in this text are compelling because they help us understanding how mass culture has been impacted by science and where its mechanistic perspective originates. A liberal education effectively counters the negative outgrowths of mass culture by illuminating the scope to which our opinions, perspectives, and desires have been instilled in us by our culture and history (which Plato believed was the first step to liberating citizens from their false reality), and then challenges the relativism that mass culture breeds by seeking a universal perspective from which to objectively judge cultural practices and principles (including scientific ones). Once the pupil has replaced their subjective moral perspective with a standard of right and wrong that is rooted in universal principles, they also gain the ability to legitimize inherent freedoms that concern the common good like human rights because their measure of justice is no longer limited to the positive law they live under (Myers et al. 31-35).

The most disturbing thing about 21st century educational reform I find, is its disinterest in whether students are fulfilled in their learning. It mistakenly feels that its purpose is to bring children up for the use of society and that a “practical” or “useful” education is the only education worth investing in. Offensively, its aim is to produce citizens who can contribute to their nation’s wealth and economic prosperity because that is what is considered the “common good” from a 21st century perspective. Education is a machine, that when functioning well, spits out a useful citizen who specializes in something that our society relies on. This goal and attitude toward education is fruitless in the long run however, because agents of such an education do not become free enough to know the truth of things. They do not gain intellectual and spiritual liberation because their education does not care to fulfill their intrinsic human desire to know.

In “Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation”, author, Leanne Simpson reflects on her own Nishnaabeg learning experience that took place “both from the land and with the land” (7) and describes her ascent to knowing as being primarily a “learner-led” experience that was deeply spiritual in nature, and says that her learning conditions supported a sort of embodiment of the lessons. Worryingly, 21st century education has adopted this learner-led approach from Indigenous culture yet does so under unfree and unspiritual conditions. It inadvertently encourages the student to simply take from their education what they want to be “successful” in their future endeavours rather than learning with the intent to pass their wisdom on to their fellow citizens or the next generation.

If a liberal democracy wants rational citizens who can govern and discipline themselves, then it must be committed to getting its students inside the ethical point of view. As Aristotle once said, “we cannot be prudent without being good”, thus, we cannot expect citizens who lack moral virtue to exercise good judgement in their democracy. Education ought to be as much about virtue/character development as it is about the accumulation of knowledge so that students may employ their practical intelligence and so that their virtues have time to become deeply ingrained habits by the time they have reached rationality.

Had I known what a liberal education was before I found myself, quite accidentally, submerged in one, I, myself would have been one of one of its harshest adversaries. Brainwashed by the mob, ingrained in me was a reflex to resist anything that defied my young ideals of equality. What — sitting around a table conversing all day about canonical works in the Western literary tradition? Such an education was the height of snobbery in my judgement back then, not to mention useless in the real world (or at least what I believed the “real world” to be). Further still, it infringed upon the relativism that was, unconsciously, my ruling doctrine. A doctrine rooted in a dogma which I believed was the most inclusive and accepting position to take: There is no objective good, bad, right, wrong, true, or false because value standards are relative to history and particular cultures. Furthermore, I had bought into a progressivism that deemed modern ideas superior to anything that came before them, the belief that time was somehow equal to progress. So strong were my convictions, that it took me some time before I felt comfortable in my so-called “liberal studies”; before I realized, to my horror, that my relativistic vantage point was, in many ways, the most naïve and the most oppressive position of all, and that the most worthwhile ideas were not, in fact, born in the era I lived. In truth, it began as a sort of love/hate relationship in which I often hated the pretentiousness of the authors I was studying yet loved the work for its genius and eccentricity.

It was, nevertheless, apparent to me from the beginning that I was gaining a special education that everyone in my democracy ought to receive, or at the very least, have access to. It was an education that was cultivating in me the areas I needed to grow in — faith, virtue, knowledge, and wisdom, all corroborated by my newfound sense of purpose rooted in an unchanging first principle. It was enlightening me about values and ideas which are seldom disseminated in mass culture for reasons I can only imagine have sinister origins. Ideas that liberated me from the cave of illusions I had grown up in, and which allow me to finally choose well from the limitless smorgasbord of options my liberal democracy offers me. To use more sentimental language, a liberal education grew my heart and my soul. It left me with a mind that can take comfort in contemplation and delight in dialectics. It left me with courage to voice my ideas, and the confidence to participate in conversations about anything truly worth conversing about. But most of all, in a liberal education, I found my freedom. A true sense of freedom guided by moral and intellectual virtue as it was understood by the ancients and which left me with a deep determination to pass my wisdom on to the next generation and to anyone still trapped in the cave.

Sincerely,

Heather

Works Cited

Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by David Ross. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Aristotle. “Physics.” Course pack for LBST 325: Our place in the Cosmos, compiled by

David Livingstone, Spring 2022, Vancouver Island University.

Kass, Leon. Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs, The Free Press, 1985, pp. 249-275.

Myers, Richard et al. Liberal Education and Value Relativism: A Guide to Today’s BA. vol.26, Canadian Review of Books Ltd, Toronto, 1997.

Plato. The Republic, Trans. Desmond Lee. London: Penguin Group, 2007.

Schall, James. The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails of Thinking. Washington, D.C., Regnery Gateway, 2006.

Simpson, Leanne. “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation.” Decolonizing: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 3, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1-25.

Steel, Sean. The Pursuit of Wisdom and Happiness in Education: Historical Sources and Contemplative Practices. Albany, Suny Press, 2014.

Strauss, Leon. Liberalism Ancient and Modern. Forwarded by Allan Bloom, The University of Chicago Press, 1968.