The Liberal Arts as Distraction

In the best possible sense(s) of that word

I’m not about to start complaining about having a sabbatical. But once or twice in the last two weeks, I’ve caught myself wishing that I were back in the classroom. Not just because it’s hard to be alone for hours at a time when you’re wrestling with the post-election feelings I tried to articulate last Thursday, but because I’d love to spend some more time teaching the parts of the past that seem only indirectly connected to our present. Discussing Descartes, Newton, or Kant with students in our first-year Western Civ survey, analyzing China’s Cultural Revolution in the Cold War history class that I normally teach even-numbered falls, meeting with students in our department’s capstone seminar to discuss the progress of their disparate research projects…

I’d love, in other words, to have a distraction.

CC BY 4.0 (PowerThesaurus)

I recoil from that word, at first thought. According to Webster’s, a distraction is akin to an amusement — like the historical dramas and sporting events I’ve been watching even more than usual of late. Descended from an Anglo-French term for inattentiveness, to distract someone is to cause them “to turn aside” from what they should be focused on — by contrast to the woman in the dictionary’s sample sentence, who “refused to be distracted from her purpose.”

None of that seems to square with what I cherish about teaching history at a Christian liberal arts college, a mode of education meant focus our attention on what is important. To engage in the work of the liberal arts is to concentrate, all the more so when our object of study — or the mirrored reflection it shows us of ourselves — is frightening, enraging, or dispiriting. To do it as Christians is to come to a clearer sense of who we are as followers of Jesus, how we can love our neighbors, and what it means to do justice with kindness and humility.

Yet there are ways in which it’s entirely appropriate to conceive of a liberal arts education as a distraction.

First, it’s the best kind of amusement. For some of us, telling stories about the past, contemplating the ideal or eternal, or peering into a microscope or telescope is innately enjoyable. Perhaps such study is even doing what God made us to do; and so we feel his pleasure, as surely as when Eric Liddell ran.¹ Even if we don’t see the direction in which such play is taking us.

Second, most liberal arts enthusiasts that I know are already fine with the idea of studying philosophy, reading literature, or making music as a diversion from whatever the world at present deems to be most relevant, most practical, or most valuable. In fact, we often regard such relevance, practicality, or value-setting as the real distraction, turning our concentration away from more permanent things.