Educating Interdependence: The Liberal Arts’
Contribution to Environmentalism as a Civic Concern
Paul Turpin | University of the Pacific
Delivered March 24, 2017
at the Sixteenth Annual Conversation on the Liberal Arts
Westmont College, Santa Barbara, CA
Gaede Institute 2017: Liberal arts and the fragile environment
Educating Interdependence:
The Liberal Arts' Contribution to Environmentalism as a Civic Concern
Paul Turpin, University of the Pacific
[email protected]
[conference draft; not for citation]
Abstract
The traditional purpose of the liberal arts and sciences, since the days of the trivium
and quadrivium, has been to train young people in the arts needed to be able to
think for themselves. Cultivating this sense of independent thought is the very
foundation for calling it "liberal," from the Latin word for free. At the same time, the
idea of liberal arts – especially in the trivium's concern with grammar, logic, and
rhetoric – can be taken as a basis for demonstrating that independence of thought is
always contextualized against the background of interdependent social intercourse.
The interdependent aspect of the liberal arts moves from background to foreground
in considering environmental issues. The processes of knowing-about-the-world
embodied in the quadrivium (mathematics, music, geometry, and astronomy) have
greatly expanded in our increasingly sophisticated understanding of natural-world
processes enabled by the sciences. Our growing understanding of natural processes
has led inexorably to the realization of how tightly interwoven and interdependent
natural systems are. While no one can be an expert at everything, the breadth of
liberal arts education is crucial for enabling all students to get a picture of what can
be known through which methods of investigation. This creates the possibility for
an informed public audience that can appreciate what sciences can tell us about the
world.
We need an informed public audience because the fragility of the environment that
particularly concerns us is the degree to which human actions can disturb the
equilibrium of natural systems in ways that will lead to serious consequences. These
are issues for public debate, not just issues that can be settled by application of a
scientific method, and so it throws us back onto the grounds of the trivium:
communicating specialists' knowledge to nonspecialists requires understandings
made available by knowledge of language and persuasion.
The classical roots of the liberal arts and sciences
I take the classical trivium and quadrivium as a point of departure, in order to adapt
them to our current situation. The trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—
represents the core elements of human communication: the many uses of language,
the capacity to reason clearly, and the understanding of persuasive dynamics as
they engage audiences. The quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and
music—represents the investigation of nature and its principles.
Using the classical roots of the liberal arts as an initial touchstone is intended to
point up the need to think in two directions, or perhaps two phases, on the issue of
environmental fragility. The first direction, or phase, is the proximate one of
education, "proximate" because we are all educators first. How can education, and
the liberal arts particularly, make important contributions to understanding the
problems and potential solutions to environmental fragilities? Framing the issue
this way foregrounds the cultivation of understanding as a primary mission of
education.
The second direction, or phase, consists of what may follow upon understanding.
What next, after understanding? This question is most often framed in terms of
policy recommendations: what should we do that most immediately addresses an
environmental problem? But the fact that policy questions come so readily to mind
should alert us to the political nature of policy decisions. In its best possible sense,
this sense of "political" should mean an open public discussion (as against, for
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example, a back-room deal). The demands of public discussion means that what
begins as education must develop into public discussion to bear fruit. The first phase
is developing the understanding, and the second phase is bringing that
understanding into venues of public deliberation.
But each of these phases has its own complexity, which the different foci of the
trivium and quadrivium can keep us alert to. Understanding the natural world is
essential to grasping the complexity of problems that reverberate through
ecosystems. Just as important, however, is the understanding of the human world of
deliberation and discussion. Communicating scientific understanding as a basis for
policymaking is rarely a simple matter.
Interdependence in education: How do we square independent thinking with
the interdependence of knowledge?
The fundamental conundrum is contained within liberal arts education itself: our
goal is to enable students to become independent thinkers, by which we mean that
we work to give them tools for investigating knowledge through which they can
critically test claims for themselves. At the same time, however, no one can be an
expert in everything, so we have to rely on the thinking of other people. How can we
square independence of thought with the inescapable reality of relying on others'
thought?
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This is a problem that Michael Lynch's "Teaching in the Time of Google" does not
manage to address adequately. Lynch's argument is that "Google-knowing"—a
wonderful self-explanatory phrase—leads to "epistemic overconfidence" because it
falls short of achieving understanding, which is roughly defined as knowing how
individual pieces of knowledge (what we might call factoids) fit together.
Understanding is demonstrated through an ability to explain an extended set of
interconnections and the conditions under which they apply. Google-knowing only
reports on someone's testimony that something is so.
Lynch's main focus is on getting readers to notice the difference between Googleknowing and understanding in order to make the point that education, and
particularly higher education, is about cultivating understanding, not the
accumulation of facts, no matter how accessible the pile of information might be
through an internet search. The weight he puts on skepticism about testimony,
however, does an inadvertent disservice to distinguishing between different types
of testimony. We still face the problem of how we can be independent in our
thinking while still having to rely on the thinking of other people.
The readiest answer we often give is that we should rely (and only rely) on the
testimony of experts. This is the basis for the advice we give our students that peerreviewed journals offer the most reliable sources of support for their research
papers. The entire structure of higher education is grounded in the process of peer
review and scholarly interaction, including at conferences like this one, to ensure
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the greatest possible range for the testing of the claims and evidence that undergird
knowledge and understanding. With the development of the internet, this structure
of academic interaction is worldwide in an even more extensive way than ever
before. But the appeal to domains of expertise have problems at both the level of
college education and at the level of public policy discussion.
Specialization vs. breadth in college education
The conundrum in college, from a student's point of view, is how she could ever
become capable of challenging people more advanced in their studies. In a given
major, there is at least a potential for becoming acquainted with the basic concepts
that delimit and guide a field of study. In general education, however, students may
only get one or two courses in areas outside their major fields. How can that help
them become independent thinkers?
This is a common, and common-sense concern, and one that motivates those who
question the need for breadth requirements of any kind. The problem with this
criticism is that it confuses the what of learning (its information) with the how of
learning (how a given course of study approaches its material). This confuses
knowing different types of information (say, by memorization) with understanding
how to think in different ways, and it comes from the tendency to see knowledge as
having only one of two forms: direct instrumental usefulness or personal
enrichment. For those who think college education should only consist of the
immediately useful, this is the argument for eliminating the breadth supplied by
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liberal arts and sciences entirely; for those who admit enrichment as a possibility,
then the liberal arts can be understood as a type of personal luxury good, but not
something of social benefit.
These two views of knowledge share the same limitation: that thinking is a process
carried out solely as an individual capacity—it only happens between the ears, so to
speak. While this tendency goes deep in Western habits of thought, the subjectiveobjective distinction encouraged by Renee Descartes' influence is especially
pronounced. Usefulness in the world is identified with being able to manipulate
objects, while personal matters like enrichment appeal to qualities of subjective
experience. The first is necessary to life; the second (as befits a luxury) may be nice
but is dispensable.
The limitation of a narrow Cartesian view of thinking is that it misses the extent to
which everything about human thought develops through processes of
communication and interaction. The idea of an intersubjective domain of
communication, interactions, and argumentative reason-giving as the full seat of
human reason is an important corrective to the view that human thought is
exclusively a process of solitary mental reflection. Mental reflection is only solitary
some of the time; the rest of the time it is engaged with the thought of others,
through seeking out their arguments, testing those arguments, and proposing
amendments and alternatives of its own.
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Human reason, in other words, is in fact highly interdependent through its necessary
interaction with others. Nowhere is this more evident than in the natural sciences.
For all that great moments of insight are celebrated in the history of science, what
matters in all the sciences is the full attention of the community of scientists.
Hypotheses, findings, and their theoretical explanations are always open to
question and revision. This is the epistemological foundation for the practice of peer
review in research, and it illustrates how fundamental the process of independent
thinking is interdependent with other independent thinkers. Independent thinking is
not and cannot be a Robinson Crusoe act; it depends on interaction with the thought
of others (though even Robinson Crusoe wasn't entirely solitary, given that he had
salvaged a supply of the latest European technology).
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The worth of studying the natural sciences, however, is an easy defense to make in a
world of Cartesian-colored glasses; scientists observe the world of objects, after all.
What about the social sciences, or worse yet, the humanities? Maybe English majors
would benefit from some science courses, but of what use could a course on the
British novel be to a biologist, besides personal enrichment?
Complicating the public case for the value of a broad liberal arts education is the
strong impetus in Cartesian thinking to find certainty. The heritage of Descartes'
cogito transmuted through modernity's baptism of fire has become that certainty is
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supplied by technology—that is, by the objective manifestation of a scientific
understanding in the world. Descartes' desire to find epistemological confirmation
has been transformed into technological dominance of the material world as a form
of reassurance. From this perspective, the biggest problem with the social sciences
and the humanities is that they are no longer comforting, and they are no longer
comforting because of the disagreements in their ranks. By all appearances lacking
objectivity, they lack certainty.
It is no accident that the growth of public criticism of liberal arts education
paralleled the canon wars in English departments (among others), which
accelerated during the growing academic interest in poststructuralist and
postmodern critiques of traditional intellectual modes. Rather than converging on
their objects of study, as the natural sciences appeared to be doing, the social
sciences and the humanities appeared to be splintering into factions that made
consensus or even tolerance seem impossible. If tolerance was impossible, then
what hope could there be for independent critical thought? (This attitude continues
today amid charges that political correctness makes reasoned disagreement
impossible.)
Let me take the humanities as the a fortiori case, and literature as their
representative. The common-sense account of the value of literature is that reading
refines one's appreciation for life. This is the personal enrichment argument, and it
assumes that the subjective experience of imagining oneself into a story makes
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vicarious feelings available through identifying with characters and imagining
experiences one would not actually undergo in real life. The quality of the stories
would be established by standards of taste that would function as almost perfect
analogues to material sensations of flavor, with high-culture literature indicating a
refined taste, and pulp fiction a taste for cheap thrills.
The common-sense account, however, is misleading, and it misleads because it fails
to recognize that the subjective experience of feeling (say, sorrow at a protagonist's
failure) is a consequence of the intersubjective experience of encountering someone
else's view of the world. Literature, regardless of its highness or lowness, is about
human efforts to find meaning in the world, and that meaning comes through
interaction with other human beings, even in the encounter with one's own self
under the question of what it means to be human. The full range of how such
meanings are attempted is what we call culture, which is the overarching category
we use for the objects and practices and ways of being that communicate meaning
and preserve the histories of its production.
Rather than being an exclusive shop (shoppe?) for luxuries that cater to privileged
students, the humanities are comprised of the ways to study how people make
meaning and what the meaning is that they make. The intersubjective dynamics of
the interdependence inherent in culture are too often taken for granted, and hence
become invisible in the way that habits are invisible. Education is the process of
bringing those dynamics to awareness again.
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So while individuals may pick up a book or watch a movie for the sake of the feelings
they may experience, we ask students to study stories to be able to get a sense of the
range of human experience and how it is talked about. My first-year students, for
example, tend to think of movies as a sort of thrill-ride (the 'pure' subjective
experience, as it were) before we start talking about them, and then whole new
perspectives open up.
This experience of encounter with meaning is what a biology student stands to get a
glimpse of in a breadth course in humanities. To push the point further, getting a
sense that the range of human experience extends beyond one's personal life is the
basic process of growing up, of becoming a person who realizes that she lives
among, and is interdependent with other persons who have lives and perceptions of
their own. While that process of maturation is one we hope every person goes
through, in college the further hope is that the understanding grows into a more
general flexibility of mind that generates a disposition toward active curiosity about
the world and other people.
What may look like a splintering of the humanities, seemingly the opposite of a
harmonious interdependence, is actually the acceleration of change in human
culture that appears to be an inescapable feature of the pressures of modernity. The
humanities' objects of study—human meaning-making of all sorts—is undergoing
rapid change due to the disruptive pressures on traditions from the pace of change
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as well as the shocks of the collision and mixing of cultures from the movement of
peoples. Complicating the turmoil, part and parcel of those changes are the insights
that reveal ongoing historical injustices. Small wonder there are differing
viewpoints among people who study meaning when the makers of meaning
themselves are unsettled in efforts to create it.
The point here in claiming that the humanities, too, rely on interdependence as a
framework in which independent critical thought can take shape, is that the need for
making sense of meaning is greater than ever before, precisely because of the
pressures and disruptions of modernity. To think of the capacity to engage with
meaning as a purely subjective experience, as if it were a personal consumption
choice like selecting a flavor of ice cream, is to give up the confessedly hard work of
sustaining a livable world with other people. A 'pure' subjectivity would surrender
the very idea of meaning to its reduction into an act of consumption that would
subordinate all understanding of social relations to market relations. In higher
education, this attitude is exemplified by framing education as transactional: the
transfer of information from one mind to another for a fee; in this view, Googleknowing looks revolutionary by lowering the fees.
In the sciences, there is a presumptive core of material processes, usually lumped
together as 'reality,' to be approached and studied through different scientific
methods. The humanities and the social sciences, on the other hand, face a shifting
and conflicted landscape of evolving cultural meaning and identities; the lack of an
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overarching consensus (or more accurately, disputes about what the consensus
should be) appears to mean that the disciplines of the humanities and the social
sciences lack the coherence necessary to generate a fruitful interdependence like
science does. This situation, interestingly enough, returns us to something like the
conditions the trivium originally evolved to deal with in the classical world: how can
we manage to live together in the face of conflicting interests? The answer of the
trivium has been: understand how language operates, understand how reasoning
works, and understand how audiences perceive and respond to persuasive appeals.
In sum, the conditions of disagreement on social and cultural issues mean that there
is a greater demand on interdependence precisely because of its contested nature.
To put this another way, dissensus generates its own force in forging independent
thought in interdependent contexts. The pressures of dissensus—call it fragility—
motivate the search for better arguments.
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The argument to this point has been that exposure to breadth in the liberal arts and
sciences in higher education is essential for maximizing students' opportunities to
begin to understand the scope and importance of interdependence. Following the
analogies offered by the trivium and quadrivium, interdependence is fundamental
both to human interactions and to material interactions in the natural world. A
broader way to put this is that interdependence becomes understandable in terms
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of environments: human and natural. The hope of higher education is that students
will leave with an enlarged capacity for viewing their world as overlapping sets of
environments, each with their unique internal dynamics, but also affecting each
other.
Interdependence after college
What contribution can the interdependence fostered by a liberal arts education
make in what is sometimes referred to as Real Life? This is an especially fraught
question in terms of specific contemporary problems that render environmental
systems of many different types fragile. A liberal arts education should ideally foster
an awareness of the two broad domains pointed to by the trivium and quadrivium—
the domain of interdependent human interactions and the domain of
interdependent natural processes, respectively.
What is at stake in real life—that is to say, in the world as it actually is—is to
recognize where and how natural processes are at risk of becoming unbalanced,
whether through anthropogenic influences or otherwise. With that understanding,
policy measures on how to evaluate, resolve, or mitigate the problems becomes
possible. This indicates a clear overlap between the domain of human interaction
and the domain of nature.
In addition to the expertise of the specialist who discovers problems, we also need
in our public audiences the broadly educated nonspecialist who is capable of
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grasping the principles that define the parameters of the problem. This
nonspecialist, we might say, is the public role taken on by the humanities major who
did encounter principles of biology and environmental sciences in his
undergraduate breadth courses.
At the same time, however, we need specialists who know how to go beyond
technical methods and communicate the significance of findings to nonspecialists.
The main way to do that is through storytelling, so we need the biology major who
encountered the way narratives carry meaning in her breadth courses.
Why do we need both sides? Why, for instance, might good storytelling scientists not
be enough? Or why is storytelling even necessary at all? Why can't the scientific
facts speak for themselves? To put this problem another way, recall the problem of
the impossibility of becoming an expert in everything. For those areas in which one
is an expert, facts do speak for themselves, but they do so because of the rich context
in which facts make sense through their interconnections with other facts and
processes. Facts, in other words, really only make sense when they are understood,
as Michael Lynch suggested, and understanding encompasses the whole set of
interconnections that make a fact meaningful.
Facts, in this light, do not speak for themselves to nonspecialists in public audiences,
so making facts meaningful to public audiences is the task and burden of the
communities of environmental experts. Some of this is inevitably educational in
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nature, in that processes, even more than simple facts, are necessary to demonstrate
the timescales of increasing fragilities, and, in keeping with the insights made
available from the humanities, the best way to communicate processes to
nonexperts is through storytelling.
Along with framing environmental fragility in terms of stories, the equally urgent
issue facing scientists is the ongoing campaign to impugn their credibility. Many
scientists are nonplussed by accusations that their reports about environmental
problems are unproven (at best) or deceptive (at worst). Again, the humanities
provide insight into the problem, in particular directly from the trivium and an
understanding of the rhetorical principle of ethos.
In Aristotle's rhetorical framework, ethos concerns the trustworthiness of the
persuader and is often the most influential rhetorical appeal. Ethos consists of three
elements, each of them a register of an audience's perception of the persuader: good
sense, goodwill, and good moral character. Good sense can be taken as practical or
prudential judgment; goodwill as being favorably inclined toward others; and good
moral character as having virtuous dispositions. These qualities all have their
opposites as well, however, and their negative expressions degrade
trustworthiness: poor judgment; indifference or antipathy; and bad faith.
It is not enough for scientists to defend their credibility by reference to their
training and their expertise as scientists—for example, in their ethos of commitment
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to the pursuit of accurate explanations of natural phenomena, the avoidance of bias
in their research, and so forth. In moving out of the lab into the realm of policy
recommendations, scientists must rely on more than just their credentials of subject
matter expertise because they take on the additional role of advocates. While
environmental scientists and environmental advocates (and activists) are not
necessarily identical—not least because many activists are not scientists—they
necessarily share an ethos when it comes to policy issues.
Where scientists can claim an ethos of disinterestedness, in the methodological
sense of not having a preferred outcome to their research, as advocates they take
positions, and environmental advocacy has regularly been painted as anti-business,
if not as outright anti-capitalism. In a period of precarious employment, as the
recent election has demonstrated, the imputation of anti-business can be portrayed
as anti-working class as well. At best, this can lead to a perception of indifference (or
worse, antipathy), the opposite of goodwill, and can also lead to a perception of bad
faith—an inclination to deceive, the opposite of trustworthy moral character.
On top of the potential ethos problems that advocacy risks, the current populist
political atmosphere adds the element of a distrust of elites. This is a more general
indictment of distrust that imbues scientific or technical advice itself with an air of
favoring the interests of the accomplished—the successful, the educated, the welloff—over others not as fortunate. Even among those elites not actively advocating,
the feeling goes, their interests do not run in harmony with those less favored.
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A not-uncommon reaction to such charges or intimations of distrust is that they
amount to ad hominem attacks—impugning the character of the arguer rather than
addressing the substance of the argument, and as such, in this reaction, are logical
fallacies not to be taken seriously. To react this way, while understandable, is a
strategic error. It misses the rhetorical force of an assault on the ethos of an
advocate, which is not a logical fallacy but a common and all-too-effective strategy of
undermining credibility.
How, then, to counter such attacks on ethos? First, it is crucial to understand the
field of persuasion: who is the audience? —this is the core salience of rhetoric in the
trivium. In public debate, there is always a range of audiences with differing degrees
of certainty as well as different degrees of understanding: those opposed, those
already in support, and the undecided. The strategic goal in public debate is less to
convince your direct opposition than to convince the undecided who are listening to
your debate.
Once your audiences are carefully in mind, then strategies to mitigate attacks on
ethos should be directed toward them, and a key means for doing so is to express
the positive qualities of ethos in the storytelling itself. Keeping always in mind that
the point of environmental stories should be to make scientific understandings
comprehensible to nonscientists, the storyteller needs to establish a prudential
perspective (by acknowledging risks or costs, for example), needs to manifest
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awareness of and interest in the audience's concerns (by acknowledging their
involvement with the risks and costs), and needs to foreground the storyteller's
concern with truthfulness and honest respect for the audience.
The fragility of common ground
Stories of environmental problems are by their nature cautionary tales; they warn of
impending danger. As such they run the risk of appearing to use scare tactics,
especially if the risk is not readily apparent to the audience. Communicating such
stories itself can be a risky business in revealing how the domain of human
interaction can also be fragile.
In using the trivium and quadrivium to explore the connection between
independent thought and interdependence within social or natural systems, I have
attempted to demonstrate the value of the interplay between thoughtful reflection
and active communication with others in the context of cultivating awareness of the
complexity of life. Some of that complexity we come to know in detail, other parts in
broad strokes, but we also come to appreciate what others know that we do not.
This is the best outcome I can imagine from a liberal arts and sciences education,
one that acknowledges connections at the same time as noting their fragilities.
Notes:
My apologies that this conference draft lacks a full bibliography. The one direct quotation is from
Michael Lynch's "Teaching in the Time of Google," The Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 April 2016.
Many ideas are inspired by and drawn from other sources, but they must wait on a later draft.
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