The Value of a Liberal Education: An Open Letter to the Class of 2007
The Matrix, its sequel Matrix: Reloaded and the soon-to-be released final installment in this pseudo-triptych, Matrix: Revolution, have received a great deal of attention in both cinematic and academic circles. However, while numerous electronic and print reviewers spend time cataloguing esoteric references—go and find the significance of the name “Merovingian”—and discussing the symbolism in the movie, few people take occasion to question what the Matrix trilogy has to say about their own lives. (This, by the way, is almost always the case with good philosophy, literature or cinema, we always assume that “they” are being critiqued, never ourselves.) Of course, I am not suggesting that your world is literally a machine-run simulation, but I am suggesting that you need to question the “reality” that has been “pulled over your eyes.”
Fortunately for you, you have arrived, through planning or good fortune, here at LMU and here there are red pills aplenty if you have the courage to take one. What’s so special about LMU? Many things, of course. There are many good reasons to come to LMU: the excellent faculty, small class sizes, athletics, diverse service organizations and the Catholic tradition that informs the liberal education here, just to name a few. However, one very important aspect of LMU is that it provides a “liberal” education. Unfortunately, although a liberal education is part of LMU’s appeal and one of the hallmarks of an education in the Catholic tradition, many students have no real understanding of what it is or why it is valuable. The primary goal of a liberal education is not to allow you to get a better job, or to earn more money, or to accumulate vast amounts of factual knowledge, or to train you to do a specific task very well. What, then, is a liberal education about?
A liberal arts education is supposed to liberate you, that is, to free you. Ah! Now the Matrix references start to make sense. Free you from what, you ask? A liberal education frees you from yourself or, put another way, frees you to become yourself. It frees you from yourself in the sense that it frees you from your own prejudice, narrow-mindedness, and parochialism. It frees you to become yourself because, in shedding your unreflective assumptions and prejudices, you are able to freely and consciously adopt new ideas and opinions, while preserving the old opinions that successfully pass through the crucible of critical inquiry. A liberal education helps you to become a full human being—someone who thinks for herself, someone who loves truth even when she cannot (yet) grasp it, someone who is conscious of the world around her, her place in it and her relation to it.
This might seem romantic and idealistic, or perhaps even superfluous. After all, we are a nation of “individuals” and “free thinkers,” aren’t we? Well, we all believe that we are independent thinkers, although we do criticize other people (the “they” we all blame things on) for acting like unreflective lemmings. However, ask someone from another country, or a U.S. citizen who as lived as an expatriate, and you will get a sense of how we look to others. Better yet, travel yourself. Live as an expat. When you come back you will be shocked at how fundamentally homogeneous a nation of “individuals” and “free thinkers” can be. In general, we dress the same way, act the same way, eat the same things, and have access to the same information (think television). To a very large extent, we think the same thoughts. This is the dark side of the “American melting pot.”
Of course, none of us are absolutely free or completely independent thinkers, nor should we want to be. We are social beings, which has its benefits (when our society values and works for the good) and drawbacks (when it does not). The problem is not that we are not absolutely free and independent thinkers. The problem is that most of us are much closer to being determined and dependent thinkers.
This is why liberal education is necessary. We have been thoroughly indoctrinated by our society and culture. The average 18 year old arrives at university with quite a bit of intellectual, cultural, and commercial “baggage.” Much of her knowledge is the result of memorization or repetition rather than experience. She believes much of what she believes without knowing why she believes it and she wants a certain kind of life without having questioned its worthiness. In one sense, this is only natural. As children we learn by repetition and we assume, for the most part, that our situation—including everything from our parents to our country to our culture—is a good one. However, the reality is that our parents possess both good and bad qualities, that our country does things that are just and things that are unjust, and that our culture includes elements that are laudable and those that are deplorable. To unreflectively accept and adopt your intellectual, social and cultural milieu is to be a slave and to participate in your own enslavement. It is to allow others to decide what you think is desirable, good, real or true. This might not be a problem if everyone around you always did the right thing—although even then I suspect you would want to do the right thing because you know it is right rather than because everyone else says it is right—however, as history illustrates, people all too often choose to do the wrong thing en masse.
Nevertheless, students (at LMU and across the country) too frequently overlook the value of a liberal education. This intellectual myopia is the natural result of a society, like ours, that places a premium on vocational training rather than education. Just look at the first question that is asked of students who major in philosophy, theology, English or any of the other humanities: “What are you going to do with that?” My good friend Andrew was in the habit of answering the question, “What are you going to do with a philosophy degree?” with the following retort: “Live a more thoughtful and fulfilling life. What the *@#! are you going to do with a business degree?” If it is true that liberal education is not concerned with training you to do anything, it is because it is concerned with helping you become something: a whole person. Of course, most people will need to think about some form of work, if only to provide themselves with a simple living. The great news is that, because a liberal education does not train you to do one specific thing, you can use it to help you do almost anything.
How does a liberal education free you? By challenging your unreflective assumptions, by demanding that you give an account for your beliefs and ideas, and by exposing you to new ideas that you can question and, perhaps, adopt. A liberal education does not tell you what to believe, it merely helps you to consciously, reflectively and actively adopt those ideas and attitudes that you freely choose to adopt. A liberal education does not make you anything; rather it frees you to make yourself. Compare this process and goal to the situation of someone who has not been intellectually liberated. If you do not question the person that you are or the culture you are in, you will adopt the “default option”: the normal, everyday attitude and beliefs of those around you. For the most part, you will want the same things that everyone else wants, believe the same things that everyone else believes, and think the same thoughts that everyone else thinks. I hope that you, my reader, are not so far gone that this thought no longer makes you break out in a cold, panicky, nauseated sweat. Note, however, that a liberal education is neither about thinking differently just for the sake of difference (Q: "What are you rebelling against?" A: "Wattya got?") nor about relativism ("Everything is equally valid," "Anyone's opinion/belief/assumption is just as good as anyone else's," etc.).
Unfortunately, as we know from The Matrix, people who do not realize they are slaves do not yearn to be free. Nevertheless, I suspect that most intelligent persons—including anyone sharp enough to be here at LMU—have some inkling that there are ways in which they are conditioned by society. In any case, now that you know what a liberal education is, I trust I do not have to convince you of its value. What price would you put on your freedom? Your choice now, on the verge of adulthood, is whether you want to struggle to become free or whether you want to sink into the comfortable, gilded cage of ignorance and the unreflective life. Plenty of people are too scared or too greedy to care about intellectual freedom, too willing to allow others to think for them, or just too lazy to bother to think for themselves. If we stick with the Matrix as an example, take a look at the character Cypher (played by Joe Pantoliano). He is willing to betray and murder his friends in order to return to slavery. His fear of reality and nostalgia for an illusion are so complete that he requests, in a delightfully ironic scene, that the machines wipe his memory and make him “someone important… like an actor.” The nostalgia for ignorance—which is often justified as a somewhat more understandable nostalgia for innocence—is indicative of how thoroughly society has inculcated (i.e., brainwashed) you for the first 18 years of your life; no one likes the idea that their most closely held beliefs might be wrong. Shedding this dross is like peeling an onion layer by layer. It is a question, as Morpheus says in The Matrix, of “how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
Alas, winning your freedom is not quite as simple as “taking the red pill.” Moreover, since the Matrix is only a metaphor for human society, once you become intellectually freed there is no going back. Even the most pathetic and base forms of self-deception will be incapable of deluding you into believing in things that you have discovered are false. Harbor no illusions; a liberal education is a struggle. A liberal education requires certain ingredients if it is to have any chance of liberating you.
First, a liberal education must be truly interdisciplinary. It must be a broad education. Why? The only way to challenge the things you take for granted is by exposure to things you would not consider on your own. The breadth of a liberal education goes well beyond simply reading literature or philosophy that you disagree with. A liberal education must include studies across the disciplines: philosophy, math, politics, the natural sciences, the physical sciences, art, music, literature, rhetoric and languages. Such an interdisciplinary curriculum should not produce dilettantes, people who have a broad but very shallow sort of knowledge. Rather, the desired result is a person with deep understanding of several subjects--one cannot know everything--with the breadth to allow cross-fertilization between disciplines.
Second, a liberal education requires sincere and sustained effort on your part. A technical or vocational education requires much less effort because you are told what to think. However, a liberal education does not tell you what to think, but asks you to think for yourself. Memorization is easy; even animals and computers can repeat what they are told. To use the faculties that make you human, to think critically, rationally and independently, is much, much more difficult. In fact, independent thinking is so difficult that most people never make a sincere start at it, much less become proficient.
So, now that you are fortunate enough to find yourself here at LMU what should you do with this unique opportunity?
So, here is my challenge to you, the students of LMU, especially the incoming class of 2007: take LMU’s “red pill.” Take advantage of the unique opportunities LMU affords you. Take advantage of the opportunity to have a liberal education. Challenge yourself. Grow beyond the confines of your familiar and comfortable world. Expand your mind. Now, go run and read Plato’s Republic so I can drop some of the Matrix references.
Brian Treanor
Loyola Marymount University
Fall 2003