Anyone who is attracted to liberal learning has heard the never-ending argument against it. What good will it do you where it really matters—in the wallet?

If you’re still a student, this argument has been bearing down on you most of your life. Since the 2008 crash, liberal education has taken it on the chin. It’s too expensive and doesn’t repay the investment. It doesn’t give students skills needed in the job-market.

If you’re a responsible adult, similar arguments claim that liberal learning is a waste of your time. After all, time is money. So why would you spend time learning stuff that has no bearing on making more money? If you’re going to spend time or money learning anything, make it something that plumps up the bottom line, like new training courses in your industry.

The main argument in these complaints is financial. This befits the prevailing economic paradigm that dominates our thinking.

And that is why these arguments are so wrong. They are saturated with the false belief that there is such a thing as homo economicus—the monetized human being. The economic paradigm is myopic and one-sided. It does not, and cannot, apply to everything, and especially not to learning, which is an unlimited good, not subject to the law of supply and demand.

Yet those who argue against liberal learning seem to think that the most important aspect of learning has to do with job training. Job training has nothing whatsoever to do with liberal learning. Any course of study that prepares people for a specific job also narrows them, molds them to fit a specific task. This has the effect of diminishing individual freedom. The fate of people trained for specific jobs is determined by employers, not by themselves.

Nothing could be farther from the goals of liberal learning. The purpose of liberal learning is to awaken our power to reimagine both ourselves and our conditions. It tries to show us the possibilities for remaking ourselves and the world around us. By attending to the possibilities for change, we may someday escape from subservience to external conditions.

Job training unleavened by liberal learning keeps people in chains. Society does not really need more industrious drones, laboring away their lives in predetermined niches. We are moving toward a world in which most of the drone jobs will be done by drones—robots, that is. How are we going to solve the problem of all those who will be out of work because all they know how to do is the sort of labor that a machine can do better? Asking that question points to what society really needs: imaginative creators who can reinvent the world.

The modern economic paradigm cannot grapple with this problem because it focuses far too much on scarcity. But scarcity is something of an illusion. It is a one-sided view of reality that ends up distorting our perceptions. Of course, it is obvious that some resources are limited. But that is hardly the entire story. The counterbalancing element—a fact just as indisputable as scarcity—is creativity. One creative genius can generate new economic value together with a brand new stream of wealth. Think of the electric light, air travel, personal computing.

One might think that economics should pay more attention to the optimistic reality that value can be created instead of the pessimistic reality that scarcity exists. But for some reason, the field prefers pessimism to optimism, spending most its time figuring out how to extract short-term profits from a long-term losing game. Economics is not called the dismal science for nothing.

Liberal learning takes a much, much wider view of reality than the economic paradigm. It understands the role played by scarcity in the woes of humanity, but it is not fettered by scarcity. It sees that scarcity hinders us, but it also sees that the disease of scarcity has an antidote—creativity. Where there is lack, it can be overcome by diligent, determined creativity.

The focus on scarcity also causes the economic paradigm to distort the truth about liberal learning. The economic paradigm sees liberal learning through the lens of “survival.” In reality, liberal learning is about something much more valuable than mere survival. It’s about life mastery. It’s about taking charge of your entire life—not just your finances.

Getting a remunerative job is not taking charge of your life. Taking charge aims at something much more comprehensive. It includes plans for family, career, finances, community, service, and many other aspects of life. All of these aspects need to be weighed in relation to one another and to your vision of a life worth living.

To adopt the means and the end of economics—namely, job training and financial survival—as you begin to build your life is a tragic error for two reasons. First, because it delivers you into a state of bondage from which you may never be able to extricate yourself. Second, because it narrows your perspective just as you are starting out, limiting your imagination to the set of choices that appeal to the economic paradigm.

And since the economic paradigm distorts reality, your adoption of it distorts the truth about the choices that are really available. This in turn impedes your ability to weigh all the elements that ought to go into your idea of a life worth living.

Unless you know at least something about all the important aspects of life—not just the financial aspects—and unless you understand that your task in mastering life is to judge all these aspects from the highest vantage point you can attain, you may never master your life.

Life mastery is the aim of liberal learning. Impossible as it is to know everything, it is necessary to know enough about everything that is important, so that you can master life rather than be mastered by it.

Ever since I posted the last entry, I’ve been receiving emails with questions about serious conversation. Let me try to explain how the concept grows out of the difficulties faced by determined, resolute readers.

The dilemma of the resolute reader

I am a reader. Always have been, as far back as my memories go.

Even before I could read, I loved books—their feel, their smell, their typefaces, their bindings.

I joined the faculty at a small college devoted to reading and studying the greatest books ever written so I could spend most of my time with books.

Over the years, I’ve met thousands of people who share the thirst for reading.

What is it that drives us? Is it a desire for knowledge? For information? For entertainment? For self-improvement? For advice?

We may be looking for any of these things at various times.

But I believe the desire that keeps us poring over books is something deeper, more profound, closer to our hearts. It’s a longing for wisdom.

Real readers—dyed-in-the-wool, inveterate bookworms who are attracted to the most demanding books—are seeking wisdom.

We open a book hoping that somewhere in its pages the author may have dropped a nugget of wisdom, a chunk of insight so hard that the passage of time cannot erode it.

As I see it, a reader is a seeker.

You know who you are. You probably enjoyed school more than any of your friends or acquaintances because there you could read and discuss books. You probably stayed in school as long as you could. Maybe you even became an academic.

But when you started working for a living you discovered that the world isn’t much interested in the search for wisdom that animates genuine readers.

You discovered that most members of your own family, as much as they love you, aren’t interested in the matters you want to discuss. And even if they are, the pressures of life usually interfere with such discussions.

Nearly all the serious readers I know have the same complaint: they hardly know even one other serious reader they can talk to. This makes their reading solitary. What is worse, it hinders the search for wisdom.

Why? Because what we are likely to get out of a book is determined by what attracts our attention. And our attention is conditioned by our personal experiences, our predilections, and our prejudices.

When we read profound books alone, we probably miss most of what is there to see. “Reading alone,” I once heard someone say, “is as bad as drinking alone.”

And this unsatisfying situation not only harms readers, it harms society as well. Society’s lack of interest in the search for wisdom sidelines the very people who are most eager to dive deeply into the nature of things, who are most inclined to discover hidden connections and underlying truths. How many groundbreaking discoveries never happened because society’s seekers don’t have the time to read seriously and contemplate deeply?

No one is winning here. Readers can’t fulfill their desire to seek out wisdom. And society cannot benefit from the insights that successful readers might contribute.

A world made for readers

In my experience, the most helpful thing for serious readers who want to get the most out of their reading is—serious conversation.

By serious conversation I don’t mean ponderous, humorless conversation among effete intellectuals and self-important poseurs.

I mean sustained, lively dialogue about a single book among several readers dedicated to searching for wisdom.

This kind of dialogue overcomes the limitations of solitary reading while retaining all of its value.

In serious conversation, we can share the personal concerns that arise during solitary reading. And we can get help from others. And, even more important, we can discover new ideas that would never have occurred to us on our own.

Serious conversation turbocharges reading. It multiplies our efforts.

If the world were made for readers, opportunities for serious conversation would be everywhere. In the world as it is, they are hardly anywhere.

You have probably joined book clubs and attended book conferences. But their penchant for novelty, popularity, and faddishness make them too superficial for dedicated seekers. You may have tried academic courses or their technological spin-offs, internet courses. Good ones can be very interesting.

But they are all based on the lecture model of information transfer: the teacher has the knowledge and tries to impart to learners by talking at an audience.

I→YOU teaching is not serious conversation. Many things can be learned in this way, but wisdom is not one of them. The search for wisdom requires active participation in reading and conversing, repeated engagement with the same issues, and assistance from like-minded seekers.

Modernity does not support this kind of interaction.

Modernity loves gigantic scale. But the scale of serious conversation has to be small. Somewhere between twelve and eighteen participants is the best size for serious conversation if everyone is to be heard equally.

Modernity loves speed. But serious conversation proceeds slowly. The nuggets don’t reveal themselves quickly.

Modernity loves debate. But serious conversation requires cooperative contributions from all participants.

Modernity loves efficiency. But serious conversation relies on serendipity, indirectness, and unforeseen developments to generate new connections.

All this explains why it is so hard to find serious conversation in the world around us. The modern world is just not suited to serious readers.

I think it’s long past time that we dedicated readers shaped our own reader’s world.

What do you think?

If all this resonates with you, if serious reading is your passion, and if you want to get the most out of the greatest books ever written, what do you think we should do to create a reader’s world that will support our search for wisdom?

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts, because I think we need a reader’s world—and now, before people like us become an endangered species.