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By: Dr. Christine Boor, Vilma György Pallos Chair in Classical and Liberal Education and Associate Professor in the Honors College

“Shall We All Commit Suicide?” In the period between the First and Second World Wars, Winston Churchill asked this provocative question in a series of essays that addressed the mixed blessings of technology. While he allowed that technological progress affords ever-greater health, convenience, comfort, and longevity, Churchill devoted his leisure to exploring the darker side of our progress. He foresaw the possible disasters that could befall Western Civilization should technological advancements outstrip man’s moral development. Safer, healthier, and more comfortable, modern human beings would become lonelier, more isolated, and more capable of destruction than ever before. Much contemporary social science reveals the prophetic quality of Churchill’s dystopian vision of modern progress. 

While his diagnosis of the modern world is generally grim, one particular quality of human nature gave Churchill reason to hope that all might still be well. In the essay “Fifty Years Hence,” he summarizes his technological musings by imagining a futuristic world in which people would live extraordinarily long and comfortable lives pursuing heretofore undreamt of pleasures and exploring interplanetary systems of Star-Trek proportions. His remarks on the souls of this futuristic posterity are worthy of reflection: 

“But what was the good of all that to them? What did they know more than we know about the answers to the simple questions which man has asked since the earliest dawn of reason—‘Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Whither are we going?’ No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive…can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that Science can reveal, which gives the best hope that all will be well. Projects undreamed of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants; forces terrific and devastating will be in their hands; comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.” (Emphasis added)

The contemporary university more broadly, but especially those devoted to liberal education, are facing precisely the question of life and death that Churchill asked of his readers in 1925, and for similar reasons. The decline of the university—and in particular of the study of the humanities—has been well documented. The causes of this are multifarious, though I will note two in particular. 

First, the ever-flowing rush of technological innovation in the market has led the majority of even liberal arts colleges to emphasize technical majors and programs that conform to the perceived demands of the job market, often to the detriment of liberal education. These majors are advertised as means to the end of securing a job that will in turn provide financial security. However well this strategy worked for a time, it seems now only temporarily to have stemmed the tide of declining enrollment that has already led some small schools to close their doors. 

Second, the university today is marked by an ever-increasing focus on identity politics, a movement that calls attention to stigmatized, neglected, or victimized demographics brought together in part as a result of the globalizing effects of technology. Thus, the demand for “diversity” has pushed many a liberal arts college to abandon the attempt to educate students in the Western tradition altogether. Instead, they pursue what is at best an eclectic and at worst a schizophrenic (even subversive) course of study that aims to produce “global citizens” rather than lovers of wisdom or citizens who understand the principles of their political order. The paradoxical result is diversity of every human quality except that of thought. And this at a time when liberal education might play the crucial public role envisioned by America’s founders of providing students with the broad awareness of our cultural inheritances that democracies require in order to cool the inevitable factions and frenzies that arise within them.

Faced with this landscape, one I have witnessed while teaching at secular public and private institutions, the end of higher education as we know it appears imminent—perhaps for good reason. 

Yet to survey this horizon is as much a cause for hope as of despair for higher education. One has only to look at the exponential growth of charter schools, home school programs, and private schools that have pursued classical education with remarkable vigor and success over the past few decades for some sign of life and hope. In the same vein, institutes that provide opportunities for adults who never had formally studied the humanities while in school are on the rise. Universities that have devoted themselves to the study of liberal education with renewed emphasis have seen extraordinary growth in the number and quality of applicants. 

What to make of this picture of higher education today? Is not the ache of the human heart that Churchill spoke of once again at play? Are not these manifold areas of revival and interest in humane letters not signs that our own hearts ache for meaning, for truth?

The presupposition of liberal education remains that the oldest human questions are the most pressing. Our own take on this in the Honors College is that these questions are best pursued not only with the aid of the greatest thinkers and authors but also in the company of friends. 

The survival of the great texts of the Western tradition is at least in part owed to the monasteries of St. Benedict, which copied, preserved, and contributed to that ancient wisdom through the fall and rise of civilization. Faced once again with various threats to the preservation of wisdom and truth in our day, is it not our duty, in the spirit of St. Benedict, to take up a similar cause? The choice between life and death is upon us. Let us choose to live and live well.