How a Liberal Arts Education Can Inoculate Against Ideology
My liberal arts education served me as the spear of Ithuriel from Milton’s Paradise Lost. Once I held that spear in my hand and learned how to wield it, I could touch all the reading material I was assigned, and separate the precious from the vile, the good, true, and beautiful from the spurious, the gold, silver, and precious stones from the wood, hay, and stubble.
How, then, did I learn to wield the spear of Ithuriel? Back in the 80s, when counterfeit cash was a much bigger problem than it is today (yes, I read Nancy Drew in bed with a flashlight as a child), bank tellers would train to recognize counterfeit bills by handling real money from the U. S. mint come day, go day, God send Sunday. By familiarizing themselves with the feel of real money, they trained themselves to instantly recognize a counterfeit bill.
For many years before I entered the university, I had been constantly handling “real money,” that is, great literature. I was utterly steeped in the beauty and majesty of the King James Bible. At age 12, I began a lifelong love affair with literature when I read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for the first time. The richness and depth of Charlotte Brontë’s genius prose was to the milk toast Christian fiction to which I was then accustomed as wine is to water, as homemade bread is to boughten bread.
Jane Eyre inspired me to go on reading the Bronte’s, not just the masterpieces like Wuthering Heights and Villette, but the lesser-known works like Shirley and The Professor, and the often painful-to-read prose of gentle Anne. A year later, I discovered Jane Austen and was enthralled by her depth of understanding and love for fragile human nature, and I have been a devoted Austenite ever since.
I was exposed for the first time to the utter tosh that is literary criticism in the scholarly forewords to many of those great classics. Thus, when I entered university and was taught to read the great literature of the past through a gender theory, neo-Marxist, postmodern lens, I already knew that no line of literary criticism could ever pierce my soul and uplift my spirit and sing to me of the humanity of all people.
I knew Portia’s “The Quality of Mercy” speech, Captain Wentworth’s letter to Anne Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence”, and Jane Eyre’s impassioned speech for feminine equality. I had no idea who Judith Butler or Kimberle Crenshaw were. But because I was so steeped in the great literature of the past, I could instantly recognize that no obfuscating essay written by those two academics could ever inspire my heart to sing and soar like the works of great literature, but instead inspired me to throw those texts across the room in disgust.
I first learned the juxtaposition of ideology and reality-truth from an excellent college professor who taught Wilfred Owen, the Great War poet, and his most famous poem, “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” so skillfully that it is seared upon my mind and heart. The Latin title, which roughly translates to “it is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country,” is a line from the Roman lyric poet Horace.
The ideology of patriotism expressed in that line was used to draw an entire generation of young men to their deaths in the trenches of the Great War. Owen pleads with us, his audience, to see through his eyes the nearly unbearably ironic contrast to the blood and bone reality of a young man dying in agony following a chlorine gas attack.
There is nothing “sweet and fitting” about that slow and obscene death, and Owen has seen to it that the awful images seared into his mind are likewise seared into the minds of his readers.
At its best, great literature places ideology in illuminating juxtaposition with real life. Joseph Conrad’s narrator, Harlow, in Heart of Darkness, tells us explicitly that this is what his aim is in telling his story:
The conquest of the earth… is not a pretty idea when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea… not a sentimental pretense but an idea…
Conrad makes no bones of the fact that his audience is the pampered, protected citizens of Western civilization who cannot understand, nor can be expected to understand, what he has seen. But Heart of Darkness serves, as all great literature does, as a guide through the ideas and ideology and straight into the heart of darkness.
But neither great literature nor Conrad leaves us in that heart of darkness. Conrad leads us to the moment in time when “all the wisdom, all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment in time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.” Conrad has led us to the heart of light that T. S. Eliot speaks of in The Four Quartets: “Burnt Norton.” Once we have made that journey, not in the flesh but by being for a time in the same skin as Conrad through reading, we can never again mistake ideology for reality-truth.
When I hear whatever thought-terminating cliche is currently in vogue, I think, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. And that cry has taken many different forms in recent years:
Black Lives Matter!
Trans rights are human rights!
Free Ukraine!
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
I’ve learned through my education to read on, past the ideology in the title, to the poem. To let the novelist lead me by the hand through the heart of darkness. To disturb the dust on the bowl of rose leaves on my journey toward the heart of light.
I still haven’t been able to look at raw footage from the George Floyd riots, the aftermath of gender reassignment surgeries, warfare on the ground in Ukraine, or the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. But I know what’s in that footage. And I cry out, with Wilfred Owen, that had you seen what I did,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria more.
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How smart you were to have read those classics and learned their truth before you entered university. I applaud you and the spear of Truth you hold. Reading All Quiet on the Western Front changed me forever. I know the poem as well. Excellent essay. Thank you!
I have not in my 67 years read all of the great works you cite. However I grew up watching Walter Cronkite every-night provide enemy killed and kill ratios on TV. I watched live and viewed the aftermath of the George Floyd riots, Ukraine and October 7th atrocities with the same emotions and responses from my adolescent years watching Walter. It shaped a generation. My generation has lived and viewed these atrocities for decades and stand by our country as the shining light of freedom. IMO you are one of the few that embraced their eduction in a way that allows you to see through the false rhetoric and theologies that are spewed forth today. You may stand alone as, IMO, the educational system has failed in teaching history in full (the good and bad), has embraced at some level an esoteric view of socialism that truly does not exist and ultimately bent the educational process into creating altruistic graduates that cannot cope with reality.