The Good Life Beyond the Real World
By: Chris Gehrz
Chris Gehrz teaches history at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author or editor of several books, most recently a spiritual biography of Charles Lindbergh, and writes a Substack newsletter called The Pietist Schoolman.
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The Good Life Beyond the Real World
Since 2011 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has attempted to measure the good life. At least, the “better life”: it annually compares how its 38 member countries fare according to eleven indicators. While the United States is near the top in housing, income, and jobs, it lags well behind in other categories, including education, where American schools and universities rank just 20th.
I certainly agree that education contributes substantially to the good life, but the OECD offers too limited an explanation of that contribution: “Education plays a key role in providing individuals with the knowledge, skills and competences needed to participate effectively in society and in the economy.” While nodding to the connections between learning, health, and happiness, the OECD assumes that education improves life principally because it “greatly improves the likelihood of finding a job and earning enough money to have a good quality of life.”
By this account, educational institutions like universities have something to do with the good life, but almost entirely insofar as they prepare students to get by in what we too often call “the real world.”
The University and “The Real World”
According to some business experts, this is precisely where higher education falls short in the United States. In 2021 Cengage CEO Michael Hansen complained in the Harvard Business Review that “the U.S. education system is not held accountable for ensuring that students are properly equipped with the skills and capabilities to prepare for a career where they can obtain financial stability.” He argued that colleges and universities “should collaborate with employers to align educational offerings with the skills needed to perform jobs in the real world.”
I can understand that perspective, and even accommodate it to some extent. This fall I’m teaching our department’s interdisciplinary capstone course on the “applied humanities,” in which history, philosophy, and political science students use their skills in reading, research, critical thinking, and communication to analyze a contemporary problem and propose a solution to it. We developed the course in part to help our students demonstrate that they’re as capable as business and STEM majors of working collaboratively to solve problems in what simulates a “real-world setting” —the same activities that employers most often say are lacking in American higher education.
In that sense, I do believe that the good life is an active life, and universities should prepare students to apply their minds to the material flourishing of economies, polities, societies, and communities.
But the good life is also a contemplative life, in which we not only think critically about our participation in such systems but ponder other dimensions of existence.
Like action, contemplation requires certain skills, knowledge, and virtues, and the time and space in which to hone them. So it’s essential that the university continues to prepare students to live that aspect of the good life, through the seemingly impractical study of three worlds that are no less real for being intangible, invisible, and even ineffable.
The Bygone World
First, the world that historians like me study: the past. Admittedly, it’s not immediately obvious what learning about the dead has to do with the good life in the present. Indeed, several years ago, her roommate saw that one of my students was reading a book about the Holocaust and asked, “Why would you want to study history? The past is gone.”
She was both right and wrong. Those who dedicate themselves to its study know just how elusive the past can be. Most of the evidence we rely on has vanished, and what we’re left to work with is incomplete, sometimes unreliable, and almost always open to contradictory interpretations. But contemplating bygone worlds is nevertheless essential to living the good life.
Most fundamentally, it is impossible to understand the world of the present without understanding the world of the past, where we recognize the structures, practices, beliefs, values, and identities of today—at least to some degree—as the effects of historical causes.
Sometimes we even fulfill my first-year students’ expectations and “learn lessons” from earlier mistakes. Yet there is more value to the study of the past than that to be found in present-day application. Even within my department’s “applied humanities” construct, we leave space for the history majors in the course to study the past for the past’s sake.
In part, that’s because we think that the good life is a curious life. Studying something as elusive as the past teaches students to ask questions — not just How did that happen? and What resulted from it?, but What did it feel like? and Why did those humans think and act differently than I do?
Often, the answers to such questions also remind us that the past is “a foreign country.” Like travel, such study teaches us to view ourselves more humbly and others more empathetically. Rather than “make the past work for us,” writes historian John Fea, we “enter into it with an attitude of wonder about what we might find and the kinds of people and ideas we might encounter.”[1]
The Imagined World
University students should encounter the world as it was, but it may be even more important that they imagine the world as it could be. After all, that world will be harder and harder to envision as employment, parenting, and other responsibilities reduce what’s real to what’s routine, or as graduates’ frustration with the world’s ill-functioning, often unjust systems turns into the cynicism of expecting nothing more than what is.
So what Louis Menand says of the early Cold War should also be true of a university education: “Ideas mattered. Paintings mattered. Movies mattered. Poetry mattered.”[2] Not because those fields are still battlegrounds in an ideological struggle that brought humanity to the brink of thermonuclear war, but because the study of arts and sciences brings students to the edge of their understanding, then expands it.
The arts matter because they help us to express what’s hardest to say and to recognize what’s hardest to see. They identify and align what pianist Karl Paulnack calls “the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls.” And through that interior work, this kind of study also has the potential to change “the real world” into a better world. “If there is a future of peace for humankind,” Paulnack concludes, “if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do.”
Equally important is a kind of study that’s too often pitted against the arts. What C. P. Snow observed in 1959 is at least as true today: “the scientific edifice of the physical world” is still, “in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all.”[3]
But for that matter, scientists themselves can be too quick to brush past beauty and wonder in their rush to ask what use we can make of that “edifice.” In the age of STEM, the middle initials increasingly give meaning to the other two. For example, physics, mathematics, and biology courses are too often treated as means to the ends of engineering, programming, and medicine.
All such work is important, but the sciences must also teach students to see beyond application, to theory and experimentation. Like the arts, the sciences help us to seek knowledge that doesn’t have immediate value in the real world, to contemplate ideas that may even overturn our assumptions about reality.
The Spiritual World
Finally, as important as science is to our project of contemplation, we can’t let a too-narrow scientific worldview blind us to one more dimension of reality: the spiritual.
“No matter how wonderful our scientific explanations of the working of the cosmos,” warned historian George Marsden a quarter-century ago, “we should not stumble into the unfounded conclusion that the physical cosmos is all there is.” Against such naturalistic reductionism, Marsden contended that belief in Creation, Incarnation, and the Holy Spirit should leave Christian scholars like him and me “open to the spiritual dimension of things… to keep in mind (or to have the heart for) a sense of higher reality and its implications, even as we deal with the mundane in otherwise pedestrian ways.”[4]
As Marsden has observed in this venue, that idea may seem less outrageous to some of our non-religious peers than it did when he wrote those lines in the late 1990s. It’s those people—religious and non-religious—who see the university’s purpose primarily in terms of material “return on investment” who will have the hardest time understanding the mission of Christian and church-related universities, plus Christian study centers connected to more secular schools. Nevertheless, those religious institutions should continue to approach study as worship of the invisible Maker of heaven and earth. They should continue to understand education as forming the whole person: mind, body, and spirit. And they should still aim to provide students who “desire a better homeland, that is, a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:16) with ROI more valuable than employment or earnings, success or status.
In short, such institutions must continue to help their students contemplate things more permanent than any of the ephemera of “the real world,” by pursuing study of “all that is, seen and unseen”—including bygone, imagined, and spiritual realms—in light of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In past eras, universities have led the way in this higher calling of education, and they remain one of our society’s best hopes in this pursuit today.
[1] John Fea, Why Study History? Reflecting on the Importance of the Past (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 58-59. A second edition is due out next March.
[2] Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), xii.
[3] C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 15.
[4] George M. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 74, 94-95.
I especially appreciate the broad implicit point that the study of history, art, literature, and so on, cannot involve only the uncovering of power hierarchies (as is the habit of some), but must also entail the imaginative encounter with people, ways, and societies very different from our own. Well done.
I loved the mention of the beauty of science for its own sake.
Nevertheless, as important as education is beyond its utility, the beauty is no more in the journey than in the destination. Both can indeed be beautiful, but the soul knows better and needs something infinitely more important than the tools and minds of the fullest, most robust education. Without the essential satisfaction of the soul directly by and in its Maker, it finds no rest. And it should not and can not. For the Maker in his Word tells the soul as much. The soul must be the center of its education even as the Maker is its.
The author, of course, recognizes this, but it bears repeating.