Modern Age - Summer 2017 - 87

The Liberating Power of the Humanities

an awareness of an absence, education can have no purchase on
an individual soul. The realization of our humanity is not a given;
it depends in some measure on forces external to us and the
development of powers internal to us. Wherever forces threaten
to darken our powers and to render us content with subhuman
states of existence, there are obstacles to liberal education, forces
that seek to extirpate the enduring longing for knowledge and
freedom. The longing for education will be most deeply felt by
those at the margins of modern society, who experience most
dramatically the gap between possibility and reality. As a black
preacher of the time observed, "the ignorant whites had every
chance to learn, but didn't. We had every chance to remain ignorant, and many of us learned in spite of them."26

Rekindling desire
The decline in our ability to name what is missing does not mean
that there are not voices expressing concern about the vanishing of liberal education from our institutions of learning. In her
bestselling Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi offers a memoir
of her time, under Iranian totalitarian rule, as an underground
teacher of young Iranian women with a curriculum consisting
of forbidden Western literary texts. In an account that is at once
beautiful and deeply moving, Nafisi makes a compelling case for
the power of these texts to keep human longing alive and thus to
subvert the aspirations of a totalitarian regime. In her latest book,
The Republic of Imagination, Nafisi, now settled as a professor in
America, wonders at the indifference of Americans to their own
intellectual and literary heritage, an indifference that she fears
will endanger the democratic ideal.27 In totalitarian countries,
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Modern Age - Summer 2017

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