Life mastery—the goal of liberal learning

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.