As those familiar with the liberal arts know, in antiquity there were seven such arts. Three formed the trivium of the humanities: rhetoric, grammar, and logic. And four formed the quadrivium of the sciences: music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. The assertion was this was the knowledge one required to participate as a citizen, as a “free man” (sic). Obviously the liberal arts have gone through various incarnations over the centuries. And this is not a history lesson.

Following on my last post, here I am interested in the humanities portion of the liberal arts. Although I think we still talk about citizenship, we clearly must discuss it differently. Today, in most of the world, in most instances, we become citizens by birthright. As university faculty in a diverse, multicultural society is there an ethical way to claim that citizenship is something that must be learned? Is it a responsibility, an obligation, as much as it is a right? Certainly we are responsible to the law, but beyond that? It is hard to say that the remit of the humanities is to define citizenship; that said, we certainly have much to say about it. The humanities is (could/should be?) the study of how citizenship operates. That is, it is not a political education in a specific political perspective on how one should act as a citizen. It is a study of how individuals and communities have acted as citizens, as participants in civic, public and professional life.

Or at least that’s one way to look at it, and I said in my last post, I’m interested in considering dimensions of these disciplines besides those charted by traditional departments.

What I see in the original trivium is the development of the capacities to communicate and deliberate. These capacities remain in short supply and are as important as ever in every profession and in every civic space from social media to the ballot box. Can we make a good decision? Can we deliberate? How do we distinguish good? valid? reasonable? decisions without defining them simply as decisions with which we agree? We cannot deliberate with those whose make decisions with which we disagree if those decisions also strike as unreasonable, as invalid. We can negotiate, because peaceful resolution is always possible, but we cannot deliberate. We cannot make decisions in common, as a community.

In my view, a posthuman liberal arts begins with understanding the flexibility and multiplicity of reason. There are many valid ways to reason. That might require some serious rethinking of the term for some. The multiplicity of reason reflects the posthuman conditions of the global networked mediascape, climate change, migration, transnational capitalism, and human and cultural differences. It is the fourth Industrial Revolution or maybe the fifth. It is accelerationism, whether we like the idea or not (not so much, I would say). If the first Industrial Revolution was the 1780s and the second was the 1880s and the third was the 1970s, we’ve now had a fourth in the 2010s and a “fifth” in this decade? I feel like I’ve drunk a fifth of industrial revolution. Maybe we all have.

The fourth/fifth revolution takes us from AI, IoT, data, and biotech into …. into what? Well, basically clickbait and vaporware. Who knows? But not to disappoint, I’d suggest it will have to do with a reorganization of human communities and new concepts of humanness that are highly disruptive of the pre-modern social order. Let’s try one story. We are beings genetically evolved to be hunter-gatherers who find ourselves shoehorned into a clunky technoculture that threatens mass extinction and suffering. The mediascape we’ve built in this century really is rotting our brains. All the other times we said that were just warming up. Remember when Nick Carr asked if Google was making us stupid? It’s not so funny now, huh?

Well, maybe the fifth revolution is the one where we finally get it right, or at least start turning in a good direction, one that brings our humanity and ecologies in harmony with technology. Then again, maybe not.

I’m digressing. But this is the world for which posthuman liberal arts must prepare us. How do we participate as citizens in that? How do we deliberate and negotiate? Before that, how do we communicate? How do we remedy misunderstandings? (with a pharmakon of course). With the pharmacology of media and rhetoric, and of course the AIs at our sides all the time.

Humanities faculty have knowledge and expertise to address these questions as researchers and teachers, but for most it will require repurposing what they know and do. All I can say is that I have been doing that my entire career because this is not a subject that stands still. It isn’t long dead like the contents of most humanities disciplines. But that’s our world, where industrial revolutions no longer function on the scale of millennia or centuries, but decades.