"Democratic Blindness"

Newman calls liberal learning “a gentleman’s knowledge.”  He emphasizes that, for knowledge to be liberal, it is pursued only for its own sake.  If I understood Newman correctly, when knowledge is pursued solely for use, it ceases to be liberal.  In other words, utility is not the measure.  Instinctively, I feel that this is true.  I know firsthand the delights of learning and its influence on my personal development.  But there’s still a disconnect: liberal knowledge seems like a selfish pleasure when considered apart from its uses.  The concept of “useless,” gentlemanly learning has an aristocratic flavor—a bad taste on my American palate. 

According to Allan Bloom, many Americans share this reaction.  In a section titled “Tocqueville on Democratic Intellectual Life,” Bloom identifies the core of my attitude: in the context of today’s inequality and poverty, pursuing the useless seems wrong.  He writes,

The democratic concentration on the useful, on the solution of what are believed by the populace at large to be the most pressing problems, makes theoretical distance seem not only useless but immoral.  When there is poverty, disease and war, who can claim the right to idle in Epicurean gardens, asking questions that have already been answered and keeping a distance where commitment is demanded?  The for-its-own-sake is alien to the modern democratic spirit, particularly in matters intellectual.  Whenever there is a crunch, democratic men devoted to thought have a crisis of conscience, have to find a way to interpret their endeavors by the standard of utility, or otherwise tend to abandon or deform them. (250)

This devaluing of learning’s intrinsic worth is a “peculiar democratic blindness.”  Bloom observes, “The deepest intellectual weakness of democracy is its lack of taste or gift for the theoretical life.”  The university exists to cure this weakness.  In a democracy (unlike an aristocracy), the university is often the ONLY center for the cultivation of the mind.  This institution is necessary to preserve “freedom of the mind” in our society, and the true openness to knowing, by emphasizing the permanent questions and the classic works that addressed those questions.  Rather than providing us life experiences that we could have in society, a university should provide experiences we generally don’t have in a democratic society.

Here, then, is one answer to my concerns: By encouraging the theoretical life, liberal learning fills in the weak areas & blindness that I, as a product of my society, have acquired.  In the next post, I’ll look more carefully at Newman’s argument for knowledge as an end in itself.