Educating Interdependence: The Liberal Arts’ Contribution to Environmentalism as a Civic Concern

Paul Turpin | University of the Pacific

Delivered March 24, 2017at the Sixteenth Annual Conversation on the Liberal ArtsWestmont College, Santa Barbara, CA

Gaede Institute 2017: Liberal arts and the fragile environment

Educating Interdependence: The Liberal Arts' Contribution to Environmentalism as a Civic Concern

Paul Turpin, University of the Pacific

turpin.p@gmail.com [conference draft; not for citation]

Abstract

The traditional purpose of the liberal arts and sciences, since the days of the trivium and quadrivium, has been to train young people in the arts needed to be able to think for themselves. Cultivating this sense of independent thought is the very foundation for calling it "liberal," from the Latin word for free. At the same time, the idea of liberal arts – especially in the trivium's concern with grammar, logic, and rhetoric – can be taken as a basis for demonstrating that independence of thought is always contextualized against the background of interdependent social intercourse. The interdependent aspect of the liberal arts moves from background to foreground in considering environmental issues. The processes of knowing-about-the-world embodied in the quadrivium (mathematics, music, geometry, and astronomy) have greatly expanded in our increasingly sophisticated understanding of natural-world processes enabled by the sciences. Our growing understanding of natural processes has led inexorably to the realization of how tightly interwoven and interdependent natural systems are. While no one can be an expert at everything, the breadth of liberal arts education is crucial for enabling all students to get a picture of what can be known through which methods of investigation. This creates the possibility for an informed public audience that can appreciate what sciences can tell us about the world. We need an informed public audience because the fragility of the environment that particularly concerns us is the degree to which human actions can disturb the equilibrium of natural systems in ways that will lead to serious consequences. These are issues for public debate, not just issues that can be settled by application of a scientific method, and so it throws us back onto the grounds of the trivium: communicating specialists' knowledge to nonspecialists requires understandings made available by knowledge of language and persuasion.

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The classical roots of the liberal arts and sciences

I take the classical trivium and quadrivium as a point of departure, in order to adapt

them to our current situation. The trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—

represents the core elements of human communication: the many uses of language,

the capacity to reason clearly, and the understanding of persuasive dynamics as

they engage audiences. The quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and

music—represents the investigation of nature and its principles.

Using the classical roots of the liberal arts as an initial touchstone is intended to

point up the need to think in two directions, or perhaps two phases, on the issue of

environmental fragility. The first direction, or phase, is the proximate one of

education, "proximate" because we are all educators first. How can education, and

the liberal arts particularly, make important contributions to understanding the

problems and potential solutions to environmental fragilities? Framing the issue

this way foregrounds the cultivation of understanding as a primary mission of

education.

The second direction, or phase, consists of what may follow upon understanding.

What next, after understanding? This question is most often framed in terms of

policy recommendations: what should we do that most immediately addresses an

environmental problem? But the fact that policy questions come so readily to mind

should alert us to the political nature of policy decisions. In its best possible sense,

this sense of "political" should mean an open public discussion (as against, for

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example, a back-room deal). The demands of public discussion means that what

begins as education must develop into public discussion to bear fruit. The first phase

is developing the understanding, and the second phase is bringing that

understanding into venues of public deliberation.

But each of these phases has its own complexity, which the different foci of the

trivium and quadrivium can keep us alert to. Understanding the natural world is

essential to grasping the complexity of problems that reverberate through

ecosystems. Just as important, however, is the understanding of the human world of

deliberation and discussion. Communicating scientific understanding as a basis for

policymaking is rarely a simple matter.

Interdependence in education: How do we square independent thinking with

the interdependence of knowledge?

The fundamental conundrum is contained within liberal arts education itself: our

goal is to enable students to become independent thinkers, by which we mean that

we work to give them tools for investigating knowledge through which they can

critically test claims for themselves. At the same time, however, no one can be an

expert in everything, so we have to rely on the thinking of other people. How can we

square independence of thought with the inescapable reality of relying on others'

thought?

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This is a problem that Michael Lynch's "Teaching in the Time of Google" does not

manage to address adequately. Lynch's argument is that "Google-knowing"—a

wonderful self-explanatory phrase—leads to "epistemic overconfidence" because it

falls short of achieving understanding, which is roughly defined as knowing how

individual pieces of knowledge (what we might call factoids) fit together.

Understanding is demonstrated through an ability to explain an extended set of

interconnections and the conditions under which they apply. Google-knowing only

reports on someone's testimony that something is so.

Lynch's main focus is on getting readers to notice the difference between Google-

knowing and understanding in order to make the point that education, and

particularly higher education, is about cultivating understanding, not the

accumulation of facts, no matter how accessible the pile of information might be

through an internet search. The weight he puts on skepticism about testimony,

however, does an inadvertent disservice to distinguishing between different types

of testimony. We still face the problem of how we can be independent in our

thinking while still having to rely on the thinking of other people.

The readiest answer we often give is that we should rely (and only rely) on the

testimony of experts. This is the basis for the advice we give our students that peer-

reviewed journals offer the most reliable sources of support for their research

papers. The entire structure of higher education is grounded in the process of peer

review and scholarly interaction, including at conferences like this one, to ensure

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the greatest possible range for the testing of the claims and evidence that undergird

knowledge and understanding. With the development of the internet, this structure

of academic interaction is worldwide in an even more extensive way than ever

before. But the appeal to domains of expertise have problems at both the level of

college education and at the level of public policy discussion.

Specialization vs. breadth in college education

The conundrum in college, from a student's point of view, is how she could ever

become capable of challenging people more advanced in their studies. In a given

major, there is at least a potential for becoming acquainted with the basic concepts

that delimit and guide a field of study. In general education, however, students may

only get one or two courses in areas outside their major fields. How can that help

them become independent thinkers?

This is a common, and common-sense concern, and one that motivates those who

question the need for breadth requirements of any kind. The problem with this

criticism is that it confuses the what of learning (its information) with the how of

learning (how a given course of study approaches its material). This confuses

knowing different types of information (say, by memorization) with understanding

how to think in different ways, and it comes from the tendency to see knowledge as

having only one of two forms: direct instrumental usefulness or personal

enrichment. For those who think college education should only consist of the

immediately useful, this is the argument for eliminating the breadth supplied by

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liberal arts and sciences entirely; for those who admit enrichment as a possibility,

then the liberal arts can be understood as a type of personal luxury good, but not

something of social benefit.

These two views of knowledge share the same limitation: that thinking is a process

carried out solely as an individual capacity—it only happens between the ears, so to

speak. While this tendency goes deep in Western habits of thought, the subjective-

objective distinction encouraged by Renee Descartes' influence is especially

pronounced. Usefulness in the world is identified with being able to manipulate

objects, while personal matters like enrichment appeal to qualities of subjective

experience. The first is necessary to life; the second (as befits a luxury) may be nice

but is dispensable.

The limitation of a narrow Cartesian view of thinking is that it misses the extent to

which everything about human thought develops through processes of

communication and interaction. The idea of an intersubjective domain of

communication, interactions, and argumentative reason-giving as the full seat of

human reason is an important corrective to the view that human thought is

exclusively a process of solitary mental reflection. Mental reflection is only solitary

some of the time; the rest of the time it is engaged with the thought of others,

through seeking out their arguments, testing those arguments, and proposing

amendments and alternatives of its own.

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Human reason, in other words, is in fact highly interdependent through its necessary

interaction with others. Nowhere is this more evident than in the natural sciences.

For all that great moments of insight are celebrated in the history of science, what

matters in all the sciences is the full attention of the community of scientists.

Hypotheses, findings, and their theoretical explanations are always open to

question and revision. This is the epistemological foundation for the practice of peer

review in research, and it illustrates how fundamental the process of independent

thinking is interdependent with other independent thinkers. Independent thinking is

not and cannot be a Robinson Crusoe act; it depends on interaction with the thought

of others (though even Robinson Crusoe wasn't entirely solitary, given that he had

salvaged a supply of the latest European technology).

* * *

The worth of studying the natural sciences, however, is an easy defense to make in a

world of Cartesian-colored glasses; scientists observe the world of objects, after all.

What about the social sciences, or worse yet, the humanities? Maybe English majors

would benefit from some science courses, but of what use could a course on the

British novel be to a biologist, besides personal enrichment?

Complicating the public case for the value of a broad liberal arts education is the

strong impetus in Cartesian thinking to find certainty. The heritage of Descartes'

cogito transmuted through modernity's baptism of fire has become that certainty is

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supplied by technology—that is, by the objective manifestation of a scientific

understanding in the world. Descartes' desire to find epistemological confirmation

has been transformed into technological dominance of the material world as a form

of reassurance. From this perspective, the biggest problem with the social sciences

and the humanities is that they are no longer comforting, and they are no longer

comforting because of the disagreements in their ranks. By all appearances lacking

objectivity, they lack certainty.

It is no accident that the growth of public criticism of liberal arts education

paralleled the canon wars in English departments (among others), which

accelerated during the growing academic interest in poststructuralist and

postmodern critiques of traditional intellectual modes. Rather than converging on

their objects of study, as the natural sciences appeared to be doing, the social

sciences and the humanities appeared to be splintering into factions that made

consensus or even tolerance seem impossible. If tolerance was impossible, then

what hope could there be for independent critical thought? (This attitude continues

today amid charges that political correctness makes reasoned disagreement

impossible.)

Let me take the humanities as the a fortiori case, and literature as their

representative. The common-sense account of the value of literature is that reading

refines one's appreciation for life. This is the personal enrichment argument, and it

assumes that the subjective experience of imagining oneself into a story makes

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vicarious feelings available through identifying with characters and imagining

experiences one would not actually undergo in real life. The quality of the stories

would be established by standards of taste that would function as almost perfect

analogues to material sensations of flavor, with high-culture literature indicating a

refined taste, and pulp fiction a taste for cheap thrills.

The common-sense account, however, is misleading, and it misleads because it fails

to recognize that the subjective experience of feeling (say, sorrow at a protagonist's

failure) is a consequence of the intersubjective experience of encountering someone

else's view of the world. Literature, regardless of its highness or lowness, is about

human efforts to find meaning in the world, and that meaning comes through

interaction with other human beings, even in the encounter with one's own self

under the question of what it means to be human. The full range of how such

meanings are attempted is what we call culture, which is the overarching category

we use for the objects and practices and ways of being that communicate meaning

and preserve the histories of its production.

Rather than being an exclusive shop (shoppe?) for luxuries that cater to privileged

students, the humanities are comprised of the ways to study how people make

meaning and what the meaning is that they make. The intersubjective dynamics of

the interdependence inherent in culture are too often taken for granted, and hence

become invisible in the way that habits are invisible. Education is the process of

bringing those dynamics to awareness again.

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So while individuals may pick up a book or watch a movie for the sake of the feelings

they may experience, we ask students to study stories to be able to get a sense of the

range of human experience and how it is talked about. My first-year students, for

example, tend to think of movies as a sort of thrill-ride (the 'pure' subjective

experience, as it were) before we start talking about them, and then whole new

perspectives open up.

This experience of encounter with meaning is what a biology student stands to get a

glimpse of in a breadth course in humanities. To push the point further, getting a

sense that the range of human experience extends beyond one's personal life is the

basic process of growing up, of becoming a person who realizes that she lives

among, and is interdependent with other persons who have lives and perceptions of

their own. While that process of maturation is one we hope every person goes

through, in college the further hope is that the understanding grows into a more

general flexibility of mind that generates a disposition toward active curiosity about

the world and other people.

What may look like a splintering of the humanities, seemingly the opposite of a

harmonious interdependence, is actually the acceleration of change in human

culture that appears to be an inescapable feature of the pressures of modernity. The

humanities' objects of study—human meaning-making of all sorts—is undergoing

rapid change due to the disruptive pressures on traditions from the pace of change

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as well as the shocks of the collision and mixing of cultures from the movement of

peoples. Complicating the turmoil, part and parcel of those changes are the insights

that reveal ongoing historical injustices. Small wonder there are differing

viewpoints among people who study meaning when the makers of meaning

themselves are unsettled in efforts to create it.

The point here in claiming that the humanities, too, rely on interdependence as a

framework in which independent critical thought can take shape, is that the need for

making sense of meaning is greater than ever before, precisely because of the

pressures and disruptions of modernity. To think of the capacity to engage with

meaning as a purely subjective experience, as if it were a personal consumption

choice like selecting a flavor of ice cream, is to give up the confessedly hard work of

sustaining a livable world with other people. A 'pure' subjectivity would surrender

the very idea of meaning to its reduction into an act of consumption that would

subordinate all understanding of social relations to market relations. In higher

education, this attitude is exemplified by framing education as transactional: the

transfer of information from one mind to another for a fee; in this view, Google-

knowing looks revolutionary by lowering the fees.

In the sciences, there is a presumptive core of material processes, usually lumped

together as 'reality,' to be approached and studied through different scientific

methods. The humanities and the social sciences, on the other hand, face a shifting

and conflicted landscape of evolving cultural meaning and identities; the lack of an

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overarching consensus (or more accurately, disputes about what the consensus

should be) appears to mean that the disciplines of the humanities and the social

sciences lack the coherence necessary to generate a fruitful interdependence like

science does. This situation, interestingly enough, returns us to something like the

conditions the trivium originally evolved to deal with in the classical world: how can

we manage to live together in the face of conflicting interests? The answer of the

trivium has been: understand how language operates, understand how reasoning

works, and understand how audiences perceive and respond to persuasive appeals.

In sum, the conditions of disagreement on social and cultural issues mean that there

is a greater demand on interdependence precisely because of its contested nature.

To put this another way, dissensus generates its own force in forging independent

thought in interdependent contexts. The pressures of dissensus—call it fragility—

motivate the search for better arguments.

* * *

The argument to this point has been that exposure to breadth in the liberal arts and

sciences in higher education is essential for maximizing students' opportunities to

begin to understand the scope and importance of interdependence. Following the

analogies offered by the trivium and quadrivium, interdependence is fundamental

both to human interactions and to material interactions in the natural world. A

broader way to put this is that interdependence becomes understandable in terms

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of environments: human and natural. The hope of higher education is that students

will leave with an enlarged capacity for viewing their world as overlapping sets of

environments, each with their unique internal dynamics, but also affecting each

other.

Interdependence after college

What contribution can the interdependence fostered by a liberal arts education

make in what is sometimes referred to as Real Life? This is an especially fraught

question in terms of specific contemporary problems that render environmental

systems of many different types fragile. A liberal arts education should ideally foster

an awareness of the two broad domains pointed to by the trivium and quadrivium—

the domain of interdependent human interactions and the domain of

interdependent natural processes, respectively.

What is at stake in real life—that is to say, in the world as it actually is—is to

recognize where and how natural processes are at risk of becoming unbalanced,

whether through anthropogenic influences or otherwise. With that understanding,

policy measures on how to evaluate, resolve, or mitigate the problems becomes

possible. This indicates a clear overlap between the domain of human interaction

and the domain of nature.

In addition to the expertise of the specialist who discovers problems, we also need

in our public audiences the broadly educated nonspecialist who is capable of

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grasping the principles that define the parameters of the problem. This

nonspecialist, we might say, is the public role taken on by the humanities major who

did encounter principles of biology and environmental sciences in his

undergraduate breadth courses.

At the same time, however, we need specialists who know how to go beyond

technical methods and communicate the significance of findings to nonspecialists.

The main way to do that is through storytelling, so we need the biology major who

encountered the way narratives carry meaning in her breadth courses.

Why do we need both sides? Why, for instance, might good storytelling scientists not

be enough? Or why is storytelling even necessary at all? Why can't the scientific

facts speak for themselves? To put this problem another way, recall the problem of

the impossibility of becoming an expert in everything. For those areas in which one

is an expert, facts do speak for themselves, but they do so because of the rich context

in which facts make sense through their interconnections with other facts and

processes. Facts, in other words, really only make sense when they are understood,

as Michael Lynch suggested, and understanding encompasses the whole set of

interconnections that make a fact meaningful.

Facts, in this light, do not speak for themselves to nonspecialists in public audiences,

so making facts meaningful to public audiences is the task and burden of the

communities of environmental experts. Some of this is inevitably educational in

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nature, in that processes, even more than simple facts, are necessary to demonstrate

the timescales of increasing fragilities, and, in keeping with the insights made

available from the humanities, the best way to communicate processes to

nonexperts is through storytelling.

Along with framing environmental fragility in terms of stories, the equally urgent

issue facing scientists is the ongoing campaign to impugn their credibility. Many

scientists are nonplussed by accusations that their reports about environmental

problems are unproven (at best) or deceptive (at worst). Again, the humanities

provide insight into the problem, in particular directly from the trivium and an

understanding of the rhetorical principle of ethos.

In Aristotle's rhetorical framework, ethos concerns the trustworthiness of the

persuader and is often the most influential rhetorical appeal. Ethos consists of three

elements, each of them a register of an audience's perception of the persuader: good

sense, goodwill, and good moral character. Good sense can be taken as practical or

prudential judgment; goodwill as being favorably inclined toward others; and good

moral character as having virtuous dispositions. These qualities all have their

opposites as well, however, and their negative expressions degrade

trustworthiness: poor judgment; indifference or antipathy; and bad faith.

It is not enough for scientists to defend their credibility by reference to their

training and their expertise as scientists—for example, in their ethos of commitment

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to the pursuit of accurate explanations of natural phenomena, the avoidance of bias

in their research, and so forth. In moving out of the lab into the realm of policy

recommendations, scientists must rely on more than just their credentials of subject

matter expertise because they take on the additional role of advocates. While

environmental scientists and environmental advocates (and activists) are not

necessarily identical—not least because many activists are not scientists—they

necessarily share an ethos when it comes to policy issues.

Where scientists can claim an ethos of disinterestedness, in the methodological

sense of not having a preferred outcome to their research, as advocates they take

positions, and environmental advocacy has regularly been painted as anti-business,

if not as outright anti-capitalism. In a period of precarious employment, as the

recent election has demonstrated, the imputation of anti-business can be portrayed

as anti-working class as well. At best, this can lead to a perception of indifference (or

worse, antipathy), the opposite of goodwill, and can also lead to a perception of bad

faith—an inclination to deceive, the opposite of trustworthy moral character.

On top of the potential ethos problems that advocacy risks, the current populist

political atmosphere adds the element of a distrust of elites. This is a more general

indictment of distrust that imbues scientific or technical advice itself with an air of

favoring the interests of the accomplished—the successful, the educated, the well-

off—over others not as fortunate. Even among those elites not actively advocating,

the feeling goes, their interests do not run in harmony with those less favored.

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A not-uncommon reaction to such charges or intimations of distrust is that they

amount to ad hominem attacks—impugning the character of the arguer rather than

addressing the substance of the argument, and as such, in this reaction, are logical

fallacies not to be taken seriously. To react this way, while understandable, is a

strategic error. It misses the rhetorical force of an assault on the ethos of an

advocate, which is not a logical fallacy but a common and all-too-effective strategy of

undermining credibility.

How, then, to counter such attacks on ethos? First, it is crucial to understand the

field of persuasion: who is the audience? —this is the core salience of rhetoric in the

trivium. In public debate, there is always a range of audiences with differing degrees

of certainty as well as different degrees of understanding: those opposed, those

already in support, and the undecided. The strategic goal in public debate is less to

convince your direct opposition than to convince the undecided who are listening to

your debate.

Once your audiences are carefully in mind, then strategies to mitigate attacks on

ethos should be directed toward them, and a key means for doing so is to express

the positive qualities of ethos in the storytelling itself. Keeping always in mind that

the point of environmental stories should be to make scientific understandings

comprehensible to nonscientists, the storyteller needs to establish a prudential

perspective (by acknowledging risks or costs, for example), needs to manifest

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awareness of and interest in the audience's concerns (by acknowledging their

involvement with the risks and costs), and needs to foreground the storyteller's

concern with truthfulness and honest respect for the audience.

The fragility of common ground

Stories of environmental problems are by their nature cautionary tales; they warn of

impending danger. As such they run the risk of appearing to use scare tactics,

especially if the risk is not readily apparent to the audience. Communicating such

stories itself can be a risky business in revealing how the domain of human

interaction can also be fragile.

In using the trivium and quadrivium to explore the connection between

independent thought and interdependence within social or natural systems, I have

attempted to demonstrate the value of the interplay between thoughtful reflection

and active communication with others in the context of cultivating awareness of the

complexity of life. Some of that complexity we come to know in detail, other parts in

broad strokes, but we also come to appreciate what others know that we do not.

This is the best outcome I can imagine from a liberal arts and sciences education,

one that acknowledges connections at the same time as noting their fragilities.

Notes: My apologies that this conference draft lacks a full bibliography. The one direct quotation is from Michael Lynch's "Teaching in the Time of Google," The Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 April 2016. Many ideas are inspired by and drawn from other sources, but they must wait on a later draft.