For centuries and millennia, people have asked about the best way to organize a society, and about the proper relationship between society and government. Attempted answers to such questions are based on some concept of human nature.
What does it mean to be human? The answer to this question will imply answers to the other questions about society and government. Larry Arnn formulates the Enlightenment insights about “the principle, and therefore the essence, of the human.”
Humans are meant to know, to be free, and to love the best things. These things are not automatic: they must be cultivated.
In order to gain the benefits which come from Enlightenment thinking - in order to gain liberty, knowledge, and judgment - traditions, institutions, practices, and disciplines are necessary. “This cultivation gives” to these cultural artifacts, “as it gives” to “all human life, the purpose that makes it what it is.”
This is not an elitist message: those who have the opportunity to engage with culture are not more human; they are not better humans. They are as much and as little human as anyone else, but they have had to the opportunity to explore their humanity in a way, and to a depth, unavailable to people who do not have access to culture.
People obtain benefits from having the opportunity, not merely to read, but to wrestle with, engage, and debate about texts by Schopenhauer or Kierkegaard; the opportunity, not only to hear, but explore the musical structures found in the works of J.S. Bach or Robert Schumann.
Anyone who is a friend of humanity will want to offer these experiences to as many people as possible.
Concert halls and art museums, classrooms and libraries, the architecture of cathedrals and the historical development of linguistics — all of these are more than simply bodies of knowledge and opportunities for critical thinking. They are the experiences by which people can investigate and exercise their own humanity.
Larry Arnn argues that to deny such culture is to abuse those to whom it is being denied:
We think we and all others have a right to pursue this cultivation. It is the ultimate human right, and it must be defended.
Education is both a part of, and a transmitter of, culture. School, colleges, and universities can either facilitate or withhold chances to engage texts or other cultural artifacts.
Sadly, these institutions do sometimes deny such chances, and do so increasingly under the banner of ‘multiculturalism’ - a misnomer which is often used to label a lack of any culture, instead of the study of several cultures.
Happily, there are still many chances for the individual to find and explore culture — and thereby find and explore himself. The essence of the individual’s humanity is found “in relation to” someone or something else.
As the individual explores humanity, so also the community, and the benefits to the community are tangible, as Thomas Jefferson writes:
I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves ; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.
Herein lies one connection between education and liberty, between culture and freedom: a nation-state with a written constitution and with a limited government composed of freely-elected representatives must have an educated citizenry, if it is to retain individual political liberty.
It is for this reason that universities have so often posted on their walls the words from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787:
Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
Knowledge, freedom, and “love” for “the best things” are the result of caring for, and tending to, humanity. Etymologically, ‘culture’ is ‘cultivation,’ and the cultivation of both the community and the individual, i.e., the cultivation of the mind, leads to the freest, most powerful, and best expression of humanity.
