One could accuse me, justly perhaps, of being too hard on liberal arts colleges. But I think that it is a legitimate question to ask what in fact liberal arts colleges do teach if not the liberal arts? Remember that we turned to the question of the liberal arts precisely because of the imprecision, and indeed the incoherence, of the term humanities.
I suggested that the good our liberal arts colleges have on offer is certain kind of courtliness: a narrow cultivation, but one sufficient to make a bachelor a lifelong member of a certain cultural clique. Like any courtliness, it aims at forming tastes rather than intellectual habits.
There is nothing wrong with being courtly - courtiers are often pleasant company, after all. Corteisie gives its devotees a stake in culture and its preservation, and can indeed be extraordinarily productive of literature and art (yes, Malory and Woody Allen do have something in common).
This post has been delayed because every few days brings a new piece on the crisis of the humanities. William Dersiewicz and Harry Lewis discuss the former's book at the Chronicle; No-Foie-Gras Kristof meditates on the deep and profound effects of his meaningful engagement with contemporary humanists - people in fact are different, and don't be mean to animals - in the Times; and the liberal arts college is being disrupted by yet another dull pedagogical technological innovation in the Atlantic - the answer (spoiler alert) is a proprietary seminar software. This all speaks to an identity crisis - an identity crisis I would argue that results precisely from the incoherence of any notion of what the liberal arts education is for.
Studying medieval history may indeed lead to a successful career in tech and a less successful career in politics. Chattering abounds in anecdotal evidence of success in business following a liberal arts degree - while at the same time, there is still insistence that the purpose of the liberal arts is not job training. Left defenses of the liberal arts have been notoriously weak (as Dersiewicz points out), but there is something comic when they claim that the partially genuine right wing attack on the liberal arts is a nefarious plot aimed at functional disenfranchisement. Both left and right seem to agree: liberal education is the education of a free citizen to participate in self-government. And yet this is just servility sneaking in the back door - it's still as technocratic as arguing that the liberal arts form critical thinking skills which allows one to flourish in a rapidly-changing economy.
Maybe true, maybe false - but in either case irrelevant. Both of these fall victim to the law of incidental benefits: certain goods can only be achieved when they are obtained as a corrollary to an actual goal. As Robert Putnam showed us, the real good of bowling leagues may have been the cohesiveness and community - that is, the social capital - they fostered, but that benefit was only achieved when people were focused on the more prosaic goal of bowling together. Good citizenship and critical thinking skills are often valuable results of a liberal arts education; but they can only be by-products. Make them the goal and you will fail. If you want students to learn to think critically, force them to think about the justice of the city of the Republic, or the conjugation of a -mi verb, or the metrics of Catullus, or the syntax of Thucydides, for that matter, or even the forms of the syllogism - Barbara, Celarent, and on - or the propositions of Euclid, or Ptolemaic cosmology. Somehow, at the end of it, you will have students emerging with a headful of profoundly use-less knowledge, who somehow manage to have the skills of critical thinking.
But if the benefits of liberal arts education are solely incidental, we need to have a reason to pursue them. And that precisely is the question at hand, and that is precisely what modern apologists of the humanities have failed to articulate. Because deep down most humanists know the answer, and they are afraid to say it aloud: the purpose of the liberal arts is to manufacture, from the raw material of the philistine, vulgar, bigoted, and callow, people just like themselves.
And that is just courtliness, in another guise - not the courtliness of Cicero or Martianus, nor the courtliness of Malory, nor of Castiglione, but courtliness all the same.
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