The Permanent Things: On STEM, the Arts, and the Education of Citizens
We have produced a civilisation that can sequence a genome but cannot read a sonnet. This is not progress. It is a species of highly specialised barbarism.
There is a question that no modern university prospectus will ask you, because the answer would make the entire enterprise of contemporary education unintelligible. The question is this: What is a human being for?
Not what can a human being do. We have answered that question with spectacular thoroughness. A human being can split atoms and splice genes. He can land instruments on comets and sequence the proteins of a virus in a weekend. He can build machines that defeat grandmasters at chess and compose plausible imitations of Beethoven. The catalogue of his capacities grows longer with each fiscal quarter, and the universities that train him to exercise those capacities have become, in effect, the research and development departments of a global economy that measures everything and values nothing.
But what is he for?
The question sounds quaint. It is, in fact, the most urgent question a civilisation can ask, because a civilisation that cannot answer it has no means of distinguishing between the uses and the abuses of its own power. A scientist who can edit a human embryo but has never encountered the moral philosophy that might tell him whether he should is not an educated person. He is a technician with a god’s toolkit and an infant’s judgement. And we are producing him by the tens of thousands, in institutions that were once founded for the cultivation of wisdom and have since been repurposed for the manufacture of competence.
This is the central crisis of modern education, and it is a crisis that the fashionable division between STEM and the Arts has made invisible — because the division itself is the symptom, not the diagnosis.
The False Partition
Sometime in the middle of the twentieth century, the Western world decided that knowledge could be cleanly divided into two categories: the useful and the ornamental. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics were useful. They produced things — medicines, bridges, algorithms, wealth. Literature, philosophy, history, and the fine arts were ornamental. They produced nothing measurable, and in a civilisation that had come to regard measurement as the criterion of reality, this was a fatal deficiency.
The partition was never intellectually honest. Leonardo did not distinguish between his anatomical drawings and his paintings. Newton wrote more about theology than about physics. Einstein played the violin not as recreation but as a mode of thought; he described his theoretical insights in explicitly aesthetic terms — symmetry, elegance, beauty. The greatest scientific minds in history have understood, with an intuition that the modern university has laboured to suppress, that the capacity for scientific discovery and the capacity for humane judgement are not separate faculties. They are expressions of a single intelligence — an intelligence that apprehends the world in its fullness rather than through the narrow aperture of a single discipline.
But the partition served a purpose. It served the purpose of funding bodies, which could quantify the output of a chemistry department but not of a philosophy seminar. It served the purpose of governments, which needed engineers and programmers and were indifferent to whether those engineers and programmers could distinguish a republic from a tyranny. It served the purpose of a market economy that priced labour by its technical specificity and regarded the cultivation of character as somebody else’s problem — the family’s, perhaps, or the church’s, or nobody’s at all.
The result is the world we now inhabit: a world of staggering technical sophistication and equally staggering moral crudity. We can communicate instantaneously with every corner of the globe and have nothing of substance to say. We can extend the human lifespan by decades and have given no thought to what those decades should contain. We have more information at our fingertips than any civilisation in history and less wisdom than a medieval peasant who knew his catechism and could name the cardinal virtues.
This is not an accident. It is the predictable consequence of educating the hand and the intellect while leaving the soul untouched.
What the Arts Do That STEM Cannot
The sciences teach us how the world works. The arts teach us what it means. These are not competing enterprises. They are complementary necessities, and a person who possesses one without the other is, in the deepest sense, half-educated — which is to say, uneducated, because education that does not address the whole person addresses no person at all.
Consider what happens when a student reads King Lear. He encounters a man who has confused the appearance of love with its substance, who has mistaken flattery for devotion, who has divided his kingdom on the basis of rhetoric rather than character — and who discovers, too late, in the storm on the heath, stripped of every comfort and every illusion, what it means to be a human being among human beings. “I have ta’en too little care of this,” Lear says, confronting the suffering of the poor. It is the most devastating line in English literature, and it is devastating because it is true — not in the way that a mathematical proof is true, but in the way that a moral reckoning is true. It lays bare a permanent feature of the human condition: that power insulates, that comfort corrupts, that the recognition of our common humanity requires the loss of everything that separates us from it.
No STEM curriculum can teach this. No algorithm can replicate it. No dataset can quantify the transformation that occurs in a mind that has genuinely wrestled with this play — the enlargement of sympathy, the deepening of judgement, the acquisition of what Edmund Burke called the moral imagination: the capacity to apprehend the consequences of one’s actions not merely in their immediate and calculable effects but in their bearing on the permanent things — on justice, on duty, on the dignity of persons, on the obligations that bind the living to the dead and to the yet unborn.
The moral imagination is not a luxury. It is the faculty without which all other faculties become dangerous. A financier without moral imagination produces the subprime crisis. A technologist without moral imagination produces surveillance capitalism. A politician without moral imagination produces the administered state — efficient, procedurally correct, and empty of human meaning. The twentieth century provided examples enough of what happens when technical mastery is severed from humane judgement. The names of the examples — Hiroshima, Chernobyl, the bureaucratic machinery of the camps — should be sufficient to settle the argument. They have not been sufficient, because the argument is not really about evidence. It is about what we believe education is for.
The Citizen and the Specialist
A republic — and it is worth pausing to remember that we are supposed to be living in one — requires citizens. Not specialists. Not experts. Not human resources. Citizens. The distinction matters, because it determines what education must provide.
A specialist knows his subject. A citizen knows his civilisation. A specialist can solve the problems that fall within his domain of competence. A citizen can recognise which problems ought to be solved, which ought to be endured, which are genuine, and which are manufactured by those who profit from their perpetuation. A specialist defers to the authority of his discipline. A citizen defers to no authority that has not justified itself in the court of reason, tradition, and moral experience.
The education of a citizen, therefore, is not a vocational matter. It is a political matter in the deepest sense — not politics as the contest of parties and programmes, but politics as the art of living together in a community ordered by law, sustained by custom, and animated by a shared understanding of what constitutes the good life. Aristotle understood this. He placed politics not among the technical arts but among the architectonic sciences — the sciences that govern all others, because they concern themselves with the ultimate ends that all other activities serve. The education of a citizen, on this account, is the highest form of education, because it is the education that makes all other forms of education intelligible.
The Romans understood it too. Cicero’s De Officiis — a book that was, for fifteen centuries, among the first works any educated European encountered — is not a treatise on politics in the modern sense. It is a treatise on the formation of character: on what it means to act rightly under conditions of uncertainty, to balance competing obligations, to maintain one’s integrity in a world that rewards its abandonment. The medieval university understood it. The trivium — grammar, logic, rhetoric — was not an arbitrary selection of subjects. It was a curriculum designed to produce a person capable of thinking clearly, arguing honestly, and communicating persuasively — the three capacities without which self-governance is impossible. The American founders understood it. Jefferson’s curriculum for the University of Virginia integrated natural philosophy with moral philosophy, mathematics with classical languages, because he knew that a republic governed by specialists would not remain a republic for long.
The modern university has forgotten what all of these predecessors knew: that the purpose of education is not the production of competence but the formation of character, and that character is formed not by technical training but by sustained encounter with the accumulated moral and intellectual inheritance of civilisation.
What does the education of a citizen require? It requires, at minimum, the following: a knowledge of history sufficient to understand how the present came to be and what it has cost; a knowledge of philosophy sufficient to evaluate competing claims about justice, freedom, obligation, and the good; a knowledge of literature sufficient to develop the sympathetic imagination without which democratic deliberation degenerates into the clash of interests; a knowledge of science sufficient to distinguish evidence from assertion and probability from certainty; and a knowledge of mathematics sufficient to resist the statistical frauds by which modern governments and corporations manipulate public opinion.
Note what this list contains. It contains both STEM and the Arts — not as competing claimants for curricular space, but as integrated components of a single educational purpose. The scientist who has never read Thucydides does not understand the dynamics of power that will determine whether his discoveries are used for human flourishing or human destruction. The humanist who has never studied statistics does not understand the evidentiary standards by which claims about the social world must be evaluated. The engineer who has never read Burke does not understand why the mere fact that something can be built does not mean it should be. The philosopher who has never studied biology does not understand the material constraints within which all moral aspiration must operate.
The partition between STEM and the Arts is not merely administratively convenient. It is intellectually catastrophic. It produces scientists who are technically brilliant and culturally illiterate, and humanists who are morally sensitive and empirically helpless. It produces, in short, precisely the kind of fragmented intelligence that is least equipped to govern a complex civilisation — and most likely to be governed by those who exploit its fragmentation.
The Permanent Things
Russell Kirk — whose shade I invoke here not as an authority but as a companion in a shared concern — spent his life arguing that education must be oriented toward what he called “the permanent things”: those enduring truths about human nature, moral obligation, and social order that persist beneath the surface of historical change. The permanent things are not ideological propositions. They are not the platform of a political party. They are the accumulated wisdom of civilisation — tested by experience, refined by reflection, transmitted by tradition, and always in danger of being forgotten by a generation that mistakes novelty for progress.
Among the permanent things: that human beings are fallible, and that institutions must be designed to restrain their fallibility rather than to presume their perfectibility. That freedom without responsibility is not liberty but license, and that license destroys itself. That the community is prior to the individual — not in the totalitarian sense that the individual exists to serve the state, but in the Burkean sense that the individual becomes a person only through participation in the inherited customs, affections, and obligations of a particular community. That reason, unaided by tradition and moral imagination, is an insufficient guide to action — because reason can calculate means but cannot determine ends, and the determination of ends requires the kind of wisdom that comes not from analysis but from formation.
These are not conservative truths in the partisan sense. They are human truths — as available to a thoughtful socialist as to a thoughtful Tory, as visible in Orwell as in Oakeshott, as present in Simone Weil as in Roger Scruton. They are the truths that education, properly understood, exists to transmit — not as dogma, but as the inherited capital of a civilisation that has learned, through centuries of error and suffering, certain things about how human beings can live together without destroying each other.
An education that transmits these truths requires both STEM and the Arts, because the permanent things are apprehended through multiple faculties. The scientific method teaches intellectual humility — the discipline of subjecting one’s convictions to empirical test and abandoning them when they fail. Literature teaches sympathetic imagination — the capacity to inhabit a perspective not one’s own and to discover, in the act of inhabitation, the common humanity that underlies all difference. History teaches prudence — the recognition that every action has unintended consequences, that every reform contains the seeds of new disorders, and that the statesman’s task is not to construct utopia but to navigate a world of permanent imperfection with wisdom and restraint. Philosophy teaches the discipline of argument — the capacity to distinguish a valid inference from a sophistical one, a genuine principle from a rationalised interest, a truth from a truth’s effective counterfeit.
Remove any one of these and you do not get a partial education. You get a deformed one. A person trained only in STEM inhabits a world of means without ends — technically omnipotent and morally adrift. A person trained only in the humanities inhabits a world of ends without means — morally articulate and practically helpless. Neither is a citizen. Both are, in different ways, dependants — dependent on others to supply the faculties they lack, and therefore vulnerable to manipulation by anyone who possesses what they do not.
The Modern University’s Betrayal
The modern university has, with few exceptions, abandoned the education of citizens in favour of the production of specialists. It has done so not because specialists are more needed than citizens — the opposite is manifestly the case — but because specialists are more fundable. A chemistry department attracts grants. A philosophy department attracts budget cuts. A computer science programme produces graduates whom corporations will hire at starting salaries that justify the tuition. A classics programme produces graduates who can read Virgil in Latin, which no corporation has yet found a way to monetise, though Virgil has more to teach about the foundations of political order than the entire output of most business schools.
The result is an institution that has become, in Christopher Lasch’s formulation, a mechanism for the production of a new ruling class — a class defined not by birth or property but by credentials, and specifically by credentials in those technical disciplines that the economy happens to reward at this particular historical moment. This class is educated in the narrowest sense and uneducated in every sense that matters for the governance of a free society. Its members can build the infrastructure of a surveillance state but cannot articulate why surveillance is objectionable. They can optimise an algorithm for engagement but cannot explain why a life spent in algorithmic captivity is a diminished life. They can manage a portfolio but cannot distinguish between wealth and the good.
They are, in short, the perfect subjects of an administered world — competent, compliant, and incapable of the independent judgement upon which democratic self-governance depends. They do not need to be coerced. They need only to be specialised, and the university has obliged.
The remedy is not to diminish STEM. The remedy is to refuse the partition. A true education — the education of a citizen, the education that Aristotle described and that every great civilisation has recognised as the precondition of its own survival — integrates scientific rigour with humane letters, technical skill with moral imagination, the capacity to calculate with the capacity to judge. It does not produce specialists who must be supplemented. It produces whole persons who can govern themselves.
What a Real Citizen Looks Like
Let me describe the citizen that a genuine education would produce, because description here is more useful than argument.
She understands the second law of thermodynamics and has read enough of Dostoevsky to know what it feels like when a human mind confronts a universe that tends toward disorder. He can evaluate a clinical trial and has read enough of Montaigne to know that certainty is the enemy of wisdom. She understands compound interest and has read enough of Austen to know that the economic arrangements of a society shape its moral possibilities. He can write code and has read enough of Orwell to know that the tools of communication are also the tools of control.
This person is not a conservative or a progressive. She is something prior to both — a person whose judgement has been formed by sustained encounter with the best that has been thought and said and discovered and demonstrated, and who therefore possesses the intellectual resources to evaluate any proposal, any technology, any policy, any claim to authority, on its merits rather than on its tribal affiliations.
This person is what a republic needs. She is what a democracy presupposes. He is what the modern university has ceased to produce and what the modern economy has ceased to value — which is itself the surest sign that both the university and the economy have lost their bearings.
The Stakes
We are living through a period in which the technical capacity of our civilisation is growing exponentially and its moral capacity is, at best, stagnant. Artificial intelligence can now produce text indistinguishable from human writing, generate images of photographic realism, and conduct conversations of apparent depth — and we have not yet decided, as a civilisation, what it means for a machine to imitate thought, or whether the imitation constitutes a threat to the dignity of the original. We can edit the human genome with precision that would have seemed miraculous a generation ago, and we have not yet agreed on what a human being is or what moral status attaches to the biological substrate we propose to modify. We can surveil entire populations in real time, and we have not yet settled whether privacy is a right, a preference, or an anachronism.
These are not technical questions. They are questions about the permanent things — about the nature of the person, the limits of power, the obligations of the strong to the weak, and the conditions under which a life can be called good. They are questions that require, for their adequate consideration, exactly the kind of integrated intelligence that the partition between STEM and the Arts has made impossible to cultivate.
The scientist tells us what we can do. The humanist asks whether we should. The citizen — the person in whom both capacities are joined — decides. And if we do not produce citizens, the decisions will be made for us, by people whose technical competence is unmatched and whose moral formation is nonexistent, and we will have no grounds for complaint, because we chose to educate them that way.
Kirk understood this. He understood that the permanent things are permanent not because they are old but because they are true — true in the way that gravity is true, not as a proposition to be debated but as a condition to be reckoned with. A civilisation that ignores the permanent things does not refute them. It discovers them, painfully, in the wreckage of its own experiments.
Education is the process by which a civilisation transmits its understanding of the permanent things to the generation that will be responsible for honouring or betraying them. When that process is reduced to the transmission of technical skill, the civilisation has not modernised its education. It has abandoned it. And the consequences of that abandonment will not be theoretical. They will be lived — by the citizens we failed to produce, in the republic we failed to sustain.