I have been tempted, in this essay, to rehearse the liberal arts as they were known in antiquity. But I realize now that I am little concerned with concreteness, and much less with reality. The Center of Inquiry is more qualified and better equipped to handle facts and falsifiable claims. No, I admit, I have let my delusions guide me. That I even hope C&T will survive long enough to withstand reform suggests the extent of my megalomania. I am adding two and two and hoping for five, I am running at a concrete wall and expecting to fall through the atoms, stoppering an Erlehnmeyer flask with the mad expectation that I will decrease the entropy of the universe. “Impossible,” you say. “The laws of thermodynamics state that…” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Damn the torpedoes.
In the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee reveals that the father, Atticus, has hidden certain glorious details of his past from his two children. Namely, that he is a crack shot with the rifle. The response of the children is important. Scout, the narrator, discovers that she didn’t know something about her father, namely, that her daddy is the “deadest shot in Maycomb County.” Jem, older and wiser, is developing an awareness that for the first ten years of his life he didn’t know anything about his father. The incident leaves him shell-shocked: “ ’d you see him, Scout? ’d you see him just standin’ there? … ’n’ all of a sudden he just relaxed all over, an’ it looked like that gun was a part of him … an’ he did it so quick, like…”
This distinction – between not knowing something and not knowing anything – is the essential difference between the liberal arts and a professional school. At a professional school, you learn a trade – you learn to weld, or cook, or press buttons – and in retrospect you can look back on your schooling and enumerate what you did not know: “I didn’t know that, and that, and that.” The list may be long, but it will be finite. Reflecting, however, over four years at Wabash College, a student should be able to say: “I didn’t know anything.” To be, like Jem, shell-shocked, is the goal of any liberal arts education, and especially is it the goal of our sophomore year in Cultures and Traditions. Achieving this goal requires good books and historical anecdotes, snatches of philosophy and interesting movies, but it also requires – and this is woefully under-represented – Math and Science.
We slip into intellectual habits as easily as biting our nails or picking our nose. Imagine, however, that someone were to stop you in the midst of your ignominious task, and ask: “But why do you pick your nose?” We would give him or her – Heaven forbid it was a her! – a dumb look, and squirm, and admit, “Dunno, I just do.” And, I imagine, our answer would be the same if that person were to ask, “Why do you believe that a² + b² = c²?” Most sophomores have not asked themselves this question, just as they have not read Chinua Achebe or Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But in his own way, Euclid confronts our weltanschauung with equal intensity, for he too forces the iGeneration to reconsider the scope of their assumptions, he begs them to admit: “I don’t know anything.” So, what follows are my three lusty cheers for the proper incorporation of Division I into the C&T curriculum, not as an isolated experiment in the Modern World module, but as an organic procession of arguments, elegance, and human effort.
1. Science and math offer pristine examples of clear thinking. Like Lord Kelvin’s temperature scale, the contents of Euclid’s Elements offer the absolute zero for clarity, that procession of premise and conclusion which follow one from the other seamlessly. Born three centuries before Christ, the Elements have withstood any modern textbook, outlasting Rome, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and even the Quantum Revolution; their elegance has influenced thinkers as diverse as Bertrand Russell and Abraham Lincoln. In these relatively primitive mathematical proofs, we encounter, first, the machinations of well-oiled minds. And second, if we choose to go there, we encounter the limits of such pathetic machinery. Because finally Euclid is reduced to axioms, and here is the rub (I warn you that it will obliterate the scale of ignorance, if you dare to think it): Euclid’s axioms are faulty. So much for the Pythagorean Theorem, I guess.
2. Science and Math, perhaps more than any other discipline, incite wonder. Even the most recalcitrant political science major is not immune to the charm of Hubble photographs, the mind-boggling demonstration of the non-denumerability of the continuum, or the sheer complexity of life, which is mirrored even in its glorious etymologies, words that bounce around the mouth: ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxyl-ase oxygenase or crassulacean acid metabolism photosynthesis. The balance, of course, must be struck between presenting science and presenting the special effects. After all, Dr. Porter does not regularly combust hydrogen balloons in his research, despite the brilliance (and bang) of that demonstration. But neither should students be forced to play with a string and a ball, because, while such an experiment might fascinate those naturally inclined to science, it is a farce for those students and teachers alike who do not know how a car works, and who are not bothered by that ignorance.
We wrestle, here, with teaching students that they did not know something, versus teaching them that they did not know anything. Complete ignorance inspires wonder, while selective ignorance – like high school chemistry – inspires under-the-table text messages. So mix a hexadecakissyllabic word into the story of Gregor Mendel, and we’ll have a party.
3. At some point, though, science and math will fail us. At the macroscopic level, we confront photons or the geometry of the universe, and physicists from Los Alamos to Geneva scratch their heads, pat their expensive equipment, and say, “Well, we don’t know anything.” And every breakthrough only allows a century or two of certainty, before we must start over. The whole rigamarole of the sciences, then, becomes a tenuous path, worse than bread crumbs. Each observation guides us to assumptions that closer observations dispel, until we discover a universe that is a house of mirrors: each time we think we see, we only catch a reflection of previous errors. But zoom into the trivial, the error-prone and the simple, like the titration of an unknown acid. And that microcosm, too, reveals a similar tension between effort and possibility, between the absolute zero of Euclid’s proof and the messy, tarnished data of our world, where rocks fall faster than feathers, and virtue falls faster than all.
There is something heroic, then, about the scientific method. And if Division I is to contribute to C&T, it must contribute this: the irrational. It must present the story of science and mathematics as the human pursuit of Truth against all odds and the certainty of failure. Like all great ideas, those of science announce: “We don’t know anything, we can’t know anything, but we will keep trying. We will titrate with glass stopcocks, we will measure position and momentum, we will pursue proofs like windmills, and with just the ferocity of Don Quixote.” And there is nobility, a beauty, in this process, such that, in doing science, we train ourselves to be human, to seek order in absurdity, chivalry in decadence, and grace in sinfulness.
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