Why Modern, Liberal, Pluralistic, Secularist Democracies Cannot Educate Themselves

THADDEUS J. KOZINSKI teaches philosophy and humanities at Wyoming Catholic College. He is the author of The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can’t Solve It (Lexington Books) and is a frequent contributor to Modern Age.

In his masterpiece, Paideia: The Ideals of
Greek Culture, Werner Jaeger wrote,
“Education is the process by which a community
preserves and transmits its physical
and intellectual character. . . . The
formative influence of the community
on its members is most constantly active
in its deliberate endeavor to educate each
new generation of individuals so as to
make them in its own image.” For Jaeger,
what education requires is a welldefined community capable of and willing
to engage in deliberate, collective action.
And for this action to create a definite,
effective, and lasting educational result,
the community must possess a distinct,
coherent, and intelligible image of itself
and be willing systematically and integrally
to impose it upon its members. Do
the communities we call modern, liberal,
pluralist, secularist democracies meet these
indisputable requirements for authentic
and effective education of the soul? Can
they educate themselves?

Of course, in a certain sense the answer
must be yes, since millions of citizens in
today’s Western liberal democracies are,
indeed, liberally educated. Yet, if one asks
precisely how such a high-level and broad
extension of education has occurred, the
answer, as we shall see, is manifestly not
through the deliberate, communal, imagemaking,
educational agency of the modern,
liberal, secular, democratic state. At best,
this state has provided some free, yet ideologically
tainted, space for the true educational
agents to do their work. Not that the
state shouldn’t be an educational agent—
indeed, it is such by its very nature—but it
must first of all be a state, that is, a genuine
political community embodying an intelligible
and obtainable common good, and
not a mere public-interest organization
or military alliance. Insofar as it is not an
authentic political agent, it cannot be an
authentic educational agent.

Not only does modern, liberal, pluralist,
secularist democracy lack a distinct, coherent,
and intelligible image of itself, but the
image it does purport to have is an illusory
specter of an ideological ghost, an incoherent
and insubstantial parody of paideia
overseeing the deliberate refusal communally
to impose any image whatsoever on its
members. As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it:

Every individual is to be equally free
to propose and to live by whatever
conception of the good he or she
pleases, derived from whatever theory
or tradition he or she may adhere to,
unless that conception of the good
involves reshaping the life of the rest
of the community in accordance with
it.

If Jaeger’s understanding of education is
correct, such a “community” of private
goods and private-good seekers could
not possibly educate its members. Yet, as
MacIntyre points out in the same passage,
the collective refusal to impose an educational
image ineluctably becomes a collective,
imposed image! It’s an anti-image
imposed in a project of anti-education:

And this qualification of course
entails not only that liberal individualism
does indeed have its own
broad conception of the good, which
it is engaged in imposing politically,
legally, socially, and culturally wherever
it has the power to do so, but
also that in so doing its toleration of
rival conceptions of the good in the
public arena is severely limited.¹

If a community is defined both by its possession
of an authentic self-image involving
a definitive conception of the good and
a willingness to impose this image upon
its members, then we can say that liberal
democracy is a community only in spite of
itself, a community trying its best not to be
a community, with all the atrocious educational
distortions that attend such social
schizophrenia. Secular pluralism, embodied
in its pure ideological form without
the authentic communal influences and
embodiments that spring up in spite of its
hegemony, is an anti-community devoted
to the anti-education of its members.
MacIntyre suggests just this in this powerful
passage:

Liberalism in the name of freedom
imposes a certain kind of unacknowledged
domination, and one
which in the long run tends to dissolve
traditional human ties and to
impoverish social and cultural relationships.
Liberalism, while imposing
through state power regimes
that declare everyone free to pursue
whatever they take to be their own
good, deprives most people of the
possibility of understanding their
lives as a quest for the discovery and
achievement of the good, especially
by the way in which it attempts to
discredit those traditional forms of
human community within which
this project has to be embodied.²

By applying MacIntyre’s communitydefining terms, tradition, practice, telos,
the good, reason, and revelation, we can
see why the liberal secular state is incapable
of paideia. Democratic pluralism fails as a
community and therefore as an educational
agent due to a lack of any substantive,
intelligible realities that correspond
to these terms in the community, and a
radical confusion, at best, and ideological
mendacity, at worst, regarding such realities
as may indeed be present in the community,
but serve an anti-communal and
anti-educational agenda.

Communities are essentially embodied
theories, and since education can only be
effected in, by, and through communities,
we can best understand the character and
evaluate the effectiveness of any educational
practice by examining the theoretical
architecture its overseeing community
embodies. Real education is concerned
not primarily with job training, social,
political, cultural, psychological, or spiritual
indoctrination, or even the acquisition of
knowledge, however sublime; education is
primarily the development of intellectual
and moral virtue, which renders us capable
both of knowing and of achieving our
good, the telos of all human activities. And
virtues, whether moral or intellectual, are
not acquired on our own through our own
isolated powers, but in community with
the help of the mentoring and cooperation
of others, through participation in what
MacIntyre calls practices:

By a practice I am going to mean any
coherent and complex form of socially
established co-operative human activity
through which goods internal to
that form of activity are realised in the
course of trying to achieve those standards
of excellence which are appropriate
to, and partially definitive of,
that form of activity, with the result
that human powers to achieve excellence,
and human conceptions of the
ends and goods involved, are systematically
extended.³

Education, then, is a practice, involving
and embodying internal goods, human
excellences, and ends, the active and intelligent
participation in and understanding
of which enable us to make these goods
and excellences our own and render ends
theoretically intelligible and practically
appropriable. Just as virtues, because they
are human powers that can only develop
in and through communion with others,
have their home, as it were, in communal
practices that situate their performance
and learning and thus enable their acquisition;
so practices, because they embody
and make intelligible goods, excellences,
and ends, must be situated within an overarching
tradition, giving to them both
theoretical and practical point and purpose.
For MacIntyre, all rational enquiry is
inherently tradition-guided and traditionbound,
and education is essentially a practice
of rational enquiry—more specifically,
a sharing of and participation in the fruits
of rational enquiry. The social and cultural
setting in which the practice of rational
enquiry takes place is all-important, for it
is the nutrient-rich soil without which no
fruit can grow. For MacIntyre, rigorous
philosophical conversation in the setting of
the well-ordered university is the primary
fertilizer, as it were:

Philosophy is not just a matter of
propositions affirmed or denied and
of arguments advanced and critically
evaluated, but of philosophers
in particular social and cultural situations
interacting with each other in
their affirmations and denials, in their
argumentative wrangling, so that the
social forms and institutionalizations
of their interactions are important
and none more so than those university
settings that have shaped philosophical
conversation, both to its
benefit and to its detriment.⁴

MacIntyre describes the function of
tradition as that “which provide[s] both
practices and individual lives with their
necessarily historical context.”⁵ Just as an
individual life becomes intelligible only in
the context of an historical life-narrative,
so a communal life, as well as the communal
practices that constitute it, is made
intelligible only through a historical, communal
narrative; tradition is just this communal
narrative:

A living tradition, then, is a historically
extended, socially embodied
argument, precisely in part about the
goods which constitute that tradition.
. . . Once again the narrative
phenomenon of embedding is cru
cial: the history of a practice in our
time is generally and characteristically
embedded in and made intelligible in
terms of the larger and longer history
of that tradition through which the
practice in its present form was conveyed
to us; the history of each of our
own lives generally and characteristically
is embedded in and made intelligible
in terms of the larger and longer
histories of a number of traditions.⁶

Tradition, for MacIntyre, is the concrete,
contingent, particular, and historically
embodied realities of our daily lives,
unified in a coherent system of thought
and practice. It is any set of practices, customs,
rituals, texts, arguments, authorities,
institutions, artifacts (and any other type of
historically extended and socially embodied
phenomena) unified by a distinct narrative
serving to interpret and order these
phenomena, and affording the participant
particular habits of knowing, judging, and
feeling, and thus, intellectual access to an
overarching comprehension of the world,
the good, and his proper relation to these.
MacIntyre insists that it is only through
active participation in particular authentic
traditions that men are rendered capable of
discovering and achieving their ultimate
good; for it is only through a particular
tradition that we can properly apprehend
universal truth. Indeed, without tradition
we are unable to make much sense of reality
at all because our bodies, minds, and
souls are, in a certain sense, products of
tradition themselves. Men are body and
soul composites, and so, pace Descartes,
any intellectual encounter with reality is
necessarily mediated by our bodies, which
are, along with our souls that provide their
form, themselves inextricably embedded
in a particular culture with a particular history.
Moreover, the language and concepts
we use to interpret and make sense of the
brute facts of reality originate and develop
in traditions. In short, all men are necessarily
habituated into one or more particular
traditions, even if these be incoherent and
considerably defective traditions, such as the
liberal pluralism of modern secular democracies.
Absent the resources of one tradition
or another, coherent knowledge and
discovery of the good is simply impossible
for human beings. We are, in MacIntyre’s
improvement on Aristotle’s classic definition,
“tradition-dependent rational animals.”

About the telos of education, MacIntyre
writes:

What education has to aim at for
each and every child, if it is not to be
a mockery, is both the development
of those powers that enable children
to become reflective and independent
members of their families and political
communities and the inculcation
of those virtues that are needed to
direct us towards the achievement of
our common and individual goods.

The powers and virtues that are developed
in authentic education are ordered to the
full flourishing of the human being, and
thus to the human good, a good that must
be known with a high level of definitive
certainty by the educational agent if it is to
lead students to know it and achieve it. The
good to be known and achieved is both
individual and common: learned about,
exercised, obtained, and finally perfected
via, in, and for oneself qua member of a
community, whether family, educational,
or political.

Education enables us “dependent rational
animals” to become “independent theoretical
and practical reasoners” with the help of
others more actualized than we, which is
to say, by the mentoring of the teachings of
tradition, the truth-and-good-embodying
practices that embody and transmit it, and
the masters who personify it. Since we
are animals, such practices embody and
enable the obtainment of bodily and emotional
goods, as well as the truth of their
essential yet subordinate role in human
perfection. Since we are rational, these
practices include the good of reason, that
is, natural and supernatural truth, offering
an apprenticeship into the contemplative
life we all must live to some extent. Since
we are dependent, they include the goods
and virtues that cause, are made possible
by, and are inherent in community-love,
service, sacrifice, compassion, solidarity,
and friendship-and the truth that no man
is an island.

Ultimately, education is about developing
the ability of human beings to reason.
But the ability to reason is itself only
valuable if used as a means to knowing
and achieving the good of human beings,
an essential aspect of which is the good
of reasoning itself. What is this good? It
is, as Aristotle made clear in the Nicomachean
Ethics, happiness; but Aristotle did
not know clearly and fully what, or rather,
who happiness ultimately is. For all Aristotle’s
wisdom regarding the nature of
community, virtue, education, and the
soul, without the God-revealed knowledge
about man’s ultimate good, any
Aristotelian project of education must be
incomplete, however well-founded and
rightly structured it is. Natural reason, and
the tradition-guided and embodied practices
that aim at its full development in its
practitioner-apprentices, is itself not a fully
competent educational agent. Reason itself
requires a “master-craftsman” to guide and
develop it, as MacIntyre suggests here:

Part of the gift of Christian faith is
to enable us to identify accurately
where the line between faith and
reason is to be drawn, something
that cannot be done from the standpoint
of reason, but only from that of
faith. Reason therefore needs Christian
faith, if it is to do its own work
well. Reason without Christian faith
is always reason informed by some
other faith, characteristically an unacknowledged
faith, one that renders
its adherents liable to error.⁷

Modern, liberal, pluralist, secularist
democracy not only rejects the mastercraftsman
of faith, but also its foreverbudding
natural apprentice, reason. Secular
liberal pluralism relegates Christian
faith to the purely idiosyncratic, subjective,
non-rational, apolitical realm of the “private”
and reason to the reductively objective,
inhumanly universal, instrumentally
rational, and pragmatically utilitarian
realm of the “scientific,” which amounts
to a reduction of reason to the purely
pragmatic role of managing the private,
irrational desires of individuals. The sole,
unimpeachable, authoritative educational
agents in modern liberal democracy, as
MacIntyre makes clear, are the “managers,”
“bureaucrats,” and “therapists,” a
self-appointed elite who together execute,
in the name of human liberation, equality,
and well-being, a quite imposing paideia
on the rest of us.

Secular pluralism, because it has
rejected both supernatural faith and metaphysical
reason as politically relevant desiderata
and authoritative communal guides,
and because it has subjectivized and privatized
the good and the true, cannot possibly
educate itself. But because it still
pretends to be, and actually is in a highly
attenuated and perverted fashion, a political
community, it unfortunately acts as a
powerful educational agent. Of course,
it makes a mockery of both education
and community, seducing—when it is
not demanding—citizens’ participation in
defective practices embodying counterfeit
goods and transmitting an anti-tradition
of, ultimately, self-and-nothing worship.
Secular liberalism’s communal telos is the
aggrandizement of an elite class of sophist-
educators who teach their students to
abandon the quest for their own good
and the common good for the pursuit
of idiosyncratic ephemera, and to seek,
not the truth about God, the world, and
man, along with the political and cultural
instantiation of these truths, but purely
practical “knowledge” ordered to nothing
but the equal satisfaction of individual
desires, as James Kalb puts it.⁸ Such serves
only to require and extend the hegemonic
power of the state authoritatively to manage
and define this equality by preventing
the existence and flourishing of genuine
common-good organizations ordered by
and to the transcendental—by persecuting
and neutralizing true educational agents.

The upshot of this pluralistic, inclusive,
tolerant, and rational “community” is, as
MacIntyre puts it, “interminable moral
argument with no prospect of resolution,”
“civil war by other means,” a controlled
anarchy where power, profit, and fraud
are the true educational agents, and where
the citizen-student is taught, rather, brainwashed
that such a state of affairs is good,
and, what’s more, the only real possibility
for free men. MacIntyre continues:

What each standpoint supplies is a
set of premises from which its proponents
argue to conclusions about
what ought or ought not to be done,
conclusions which are often in conflict with those of other groups. The
only rational way in which these disagreements
could be resolved would
be by means of a philosophical
enquiry aimed at deciding which out
of the conflicting sets of premises, if
any, is true. But a liberal order, as we
have already seen, is one in which
each standpoint may make its claims
but can do no more within the
framework of the public order, since
no overall theory of the human good
is to be regarded as justified.⁹

If “no overall theory of the human good
is to be regarded as justified,” then education
in the proper sense of the term, paideia,
is rendered impossible. Yet, insofar as
secular democracy retains the fundamental
structure and function of community,
an image of itself is indeed imposed on its
unwitting members, even when this image
is denied by the very imposers (impostors).
What sort of an image is it?

And now, I said, let me show in a figure
how far our nature is enlightened
or unenlightened. Behold! Human
beings living in an underground den,
which has a mouth open towards the
light and reaching all along the den;
here they have been from their childhood,
and have their legs and necks
chained so that they cannot move,
and can only see before them, being
prevented by the chains from turning
round their heads. Above and
behind them a fire is blazing at a distance,
and between the fire and the
prisoners there is a raised way; and
you will see, if you look, a low wall
built along the way, like the screen
which marionette players have in
front of them, over which they show
the puppets. . . . To them, I said, the
truth would be literally nothing but
the shadows of the images.¹⁰

Of course, there are still many communities
of education not yet wholly modeled
on and obscured by modern liberalism’s
seductive shadow-images, and many of
these exist as educational institutions chartered
and overseen by secular democracy
itself, such as the hundreds of public highschools,
colleges, and universities, which,
though tainted by the political correctness
peddled by the cave puppeteers and unwittingly
fostering anti-educational practices
that promote the goods of effectiveness over
the goods of excellence, are still permitting
good educational work to be done, through
the efforts of those few educational craftsmen
who have managed to acquire an
“old-school” education, and who are courageous
and cunning enough to pass this
“secret” wisdom on to new initiates and
keep the true liberal arts guilds alive. Let
us be vigilant to preserve and increase the
autonomy and integrity of those institutions
that have not entirely been corrupted
and to build new ones to be as incorruptible
as possible.

NOTES

1. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
   (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
   Dame Press, 1988), 336.

2. “An Interview with
   Giovanna Borradori,” The MacIntyre Reader, ed.
   Kelvin Knight (Notre Dame, IN: University
   of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 258.

3. Alasdair
   MacIntyre, After Virtue, Second Edition (Notre
   Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
   1984), 187.

4. Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy,
   Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic
   Philosophical Tradition (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
   Littlefield, 2009), 1.

5. Ibid, 223.
6. Ibid, 222.
7. Ibid., 153.
8. See James Kalb, The Tyranny of
   Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered
   Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by
   Command (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008).

9. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?,
   343.

10. Plato, Republic, 514 a–c, 515c.