In my posts and emails to our division over the last seven years, I have spoken to you in what I have lately recognized as a series of homilies. And I have to admit that, for better or worse, I’m prone to homilies.
Perhaps I inherited this tendency from my great-grandfather, Heinrich Friedrich. As a young man, he left his homeland and a career as a baker to follow a call he understood as a divine mission. He became a Lutheran pastor and moved his family to Texas, to preach and work for social justice. He would have put his mission in the language of his faith, but I understand his choices not through his faith but through philosophy.
The Reverend Daude saw his work through the lens of a gospel of divine love and acceptance; I see mine through the “gospels” of the Humanities. In both cases, I believe the goal is a kind of salvation characterized by freedom and autonomy, by an ideal of equality, by work that transforms our world to open space for dignity and compassion. He saw this transformation as an inevitable march toward a single Grace; I see it as our ongoing, fallible efforts to create a humane, genuinely pluralistic society.
For The Rev. Daude, the voices that matter are God’s invitation and our accepting response. For me, what matters are countless human voices that speak of unique, individual striving for meaning and purpose in a world that is often indifferent or cruelly inhospitable.
The principal theme of my homilies has been that the Liberal Arts can save the world — and now there‘s even a t-shirt. At the risk of sentimentality, I want to share what I meant, and what I still mean.
For reasons I cannot fathom, my mother presented me a copy of Nietzsche‘s Also Sprach Zarathustra for my thirteenth birthday. In that book I read Zarathustra‘s famous assertion “Gott ist Todt” (“God is dead.”) Some people in my family see Nietzsche’s philosophy as the engine of my loss of faith; it wasn’t. Instead, Also Sprach Zarathustra was an affirmation, to a young teenager who, with a teenager’s sense of time, had long since turned away from the faith of my childhood, an affirmation that there are other ways of making a way in this world.
I talked with “my pastor” about what Nietzsche meant for me. He offered very little except volume 1 of Luther’s collected works. And volume 2, and 3. I remember my eagerness to find my way as I worked my way through Luther’s sermons, his commentaries on books of the Bible, the catechisms. What struck me, and lingers to this day, is what’s implied in every sentence that starts, “We believe. . . .” As in we — not they. Reading Luther certainly deepened my understanding of what “we” believe, but it left me wanting to know about them. So I returned to Nietzsche.
I think this teenage foray into Nietzsche and Luther inspired another of my characteristic quirks: A tendency to read whole books instead of pretending to get the meaning of an author through a quotation or an excerpt chosen by some expert. In that spirit, I read the rest of what Zarathustra taught about God: Not just “Gott ist Todt,” but this disturbing claim: “An seinem Mitleiden mit den Menschen ist Gott gestorben” (“God died of his sympathy for human beings”).
My thirteen year old self was stricken: We’re doing so bad on our own, that even God died of pity for us. That thought prompted me to give up creeds in favor of actions, and I adopted the one constant guiding principle of my life, namely, to make a sincere attempt to avoid hypocrisy. If I’d known how difficult living up to that standard would be, I’d have chosen something else.
Of course, I believe in other things, but I don’t consider any of them “values,” at least not in the usual sense. For me, respect and transparency and fairness and the like aren’t “values” that we take out and polish when the occasion calls for it. On the contrary, they are — and should be — action-guiding principles, signposts on the hard road to being an authentic human being. And being authentic involves not just taking note of the suffering and injustice we see around us; authenticity requires doing something — something within reach, for each of us.
That’s the significance of the Liberal Arts for living a genuinely human life: In their various ways, the disciplines of the Liberal Arts hold up to our lives so many mirrors that allow us to see things about ourselves we might otherwise miss — our cruelty, the way we dehumanize others, insisting that our way of being human is the way. But the Liberal Arts can also show us the best in ourselves: compassion, or empathy, or the astounding diversity of perspectives and languages and cultures this tiny world in a dark universe has given us. If we have the courage to take these mirrors seriously, we can deepen our understanding of who we are and why we’re here — and what we must do to make lives of meaning and purpose, for ourselves and for others.
Don’t be fooled: Serious engagement in the Liberal Arts is frightening. It challenges our sense of order and threatens to uproot our complacent comfort in our own convictions — and the more voices that join this Great Conversation, the more frightening it will be.
But the Liberal Arts can also offer us models for overcoming ourselves and our fear of each other, tools for empathy and understanding — even ways to embrace the anxiety at the heart of being an individual human being with a life to manage. The Liberal Arts can us teach many lessons, but the core, for me, at least, is this: However strong our convictions may be, it’s in the cracks between our convictions where Truth likes to hide.
People sometimes say that the Liberal Arts, especially the Humanities, are under attack — or worse, that, in today’s world, our disciplines are an elitist irrelevance. Let me point out that the tools for combating the our disciplines’ own elitism can be found within the Liberal Arts themselves, and this reveals that whatever elitism there is in the Liberal Arts was our doing all along. That isn’t a pessimistic platitude: On the contrary, this realization empowers us to undo what we have done to ourselves and others.
If the Liberal Arts are indeed under attack, it isn’t the first time. Our disciplines have survived our willful embrace of ignorance before, and I have faith that the present moment, as frightening as it may be, isn’t the end of the Liberal Arts.
The refrain that the Liberal Arts are under attack may be of some comfort to professors, but in the end, it’s a superficial diagnosis: it’s humaneness itself that is under attack. Just about everywhere we turn, people are dehumanizing others in the name of whatever lapel pin it pleases them to wear.
Again.
If we’re lucky, technology and the sciences may tell us how to save ourselves from climate change, or disease, or AI, or disparities in the distribution of wealth and opportunity — but no science can tell us why. Why should we leave a habitable world to future generations? Why should we ameliorate suffering? Why does every human being deserve a life of meaning and purpose? I believe those are questions that only the Liberal Arts can answer in ways that are grounded in humaneness and the terrifying complexity of human experience.
Maybe the best way to explain what I mean in my homilies about the Liberal Arts is to perform the Liberal Arts for you, in this homily.
When I studied religion, I encountered Māori culture and mythology, and I was captivated. I read what I could find, and tried to get inside that worldview. There is a tradition in Māori culture of communicating wisdom in whakatauiki, which roughly means proverbs or aphorisms, and one of those whakatauiki affected me profoundly:
He toi whakairo, he mana tangata.
Before I give you a translation, let me share that the Māori language is an amazingly concise, layered, profoundly metaphorical vehicle for exploring human experience. This proverb includes nothing we’d recognize as verbs or adjectives; rather, there is He which is something akin to a definite article that implies existence, and four nouns, juxtaposed to resonate with each other. Toi means carving or engraving, which is a metaphor for creative work. Whakairo is more or less excellence. Mana may be familiar to some of you as “power,” but in the Māori language, its range of meanings includes the notion of dignity or inherent worth. And tangata means “people.” Like us.
“(Where) there is artistic excellence, there is human dignity.”
Bearing in mind that the Māori have endured two centuries of oppression — including loss of their lands, economic disparity, and marginalization — this utterance stands as a testament to their creative and intellectual presence in human history. And it’s a reminder to all of us that a human world without the dignity of creative work is not a world that’s worth saving.
That’s pretty close to what I mean: The Liberal Arts can save the world.
But it doesn’t have to.
As Liberal Arts scholars, we resolve never to let inconveniences like time or death deter us from a good conversation, and although our times did not overlap, I’ve learned a lot from my exchanges with the Rev. Daude — whom I refer to as HF in my inner conversations with him. HF urges me to accept a single story; I caution him about the dangers that lie on that path — chief among which is that we don’t listen to voices like Adiche. His faith taught him that there is a single way; I see a world with a single way as impoverished and impoverishing. HF and I will never agree about means and paths, but when it comes to ends — a world of equality and autonomy, compassion and regard for fellow human beings, commitment to individual dignity and the common good — there, we find some common ground, even if he still disapproves of my path.
And I learned something else from the Rev. Daude: Faith should never become a weapon. The Liberal Arts isn’t a faith or a value to brandish against the uninitiated, or a talisman to take out when we feel powerless. On the contrary, I believe that the Liberal Arts live primarily in modes of acting in the world and on the world; they hold out the promise of transforming ourselves into the kind of being that can own its dignity through creative and intellectual work; they represent the elusive prospect of overcoming our fear of each other long enough to relearn, again and again, the ways of genuine pluralism.
And that, dear colleagues, is why my claim that the Liberal Arts can save the world is necessarily linked with teaching and modeling the Liberal Arts in everything we do: The whole human world must become our classroom.
And now — how else would you expect me to end this homily and my time as your dean?
Go into your classroom and teach like the world depends on your teaching.
Because it does.
