The Loss of Liberal Learning

Commentary

A free society cannot endure without citizens capable of serious thought. The work of self-government demands habits of mind and character that are neither inherited automatically nor created by bureaucratic decree. They are cultivated—slowly, patiently, and imperfectly—through engagement with difficult ideas, disciplined study, and the expansion of the imagination. These are the fruits of a liberal education.

Yet we now find ourselves in a season where such cultivation has yielded to something more troubling: a public life shaped not by thoughtful disagreement but by ideological fervour. At the University of Victoria on Dec. 2, Dr. Frances Widdowson was arrested for trespassing. Her offence? She attempted to speak on campus—at a public university, ostensibly dedicated to the free exchange of ideas—about Canada’s alleged genocide against indigenous peoples.

Widdowson, formerly of Mount Royal University, sought to engage students in a discussion of a controversial historical claim. The university deemed her event unsanctioned, cited boilerplate concerns about “safety,” denied her access to campus, and—when she appeared nonetheless—had her arrested. This is what we have become: a society that arrests professors for seeking scholarly debate on university grounds.

We have entered a new and distressing phase of public life. We no longer engage directly with our political opponents’ ideas. The calm exchange of reasoning has been replaced by self-righteous condemnation that refuses dissent. What we increasingly witness is not honest debate but a kind of performative contempt—a politics driven by outrage rather than argument.

This tendency reflects something deeper than mere partisan enthusiasm. It signals the loss of what literary critic George Steiner called the tragic vision of life—the recognition that human nature is flawed, that politics cannot perfect the human condition, and that wisdom lies in acknowledging limits rather than pursuing utopian certainty. The tragic sensibility accepts that reasonable people may disagree, that error is part of the human condition, and that political life requires humility in the face of complexity.

Yet humility is precisely the virtue most lacking in our public discourse. In its place, we see confrontational certainty—a self-righteousness so assured that it rarely considers the possibility of being wrong. Disagreement is no longer a natural feature of civic life; it is treated as an existential threat. Those who dissent are not merely mistaken but portrayed as malicious. Their arguments are dismissed not as intellectual errors, but as moral failings. Increasingly, their very presence is treated as intolerable, prompting calls to silence, sanction, or expel them from the university—the same institution once considered a sanctuary for inquiry and the free exchange of ideas. A place that once celebrated open debate now recoils from it.

What dominates our public debates today is not the language of democratic citizenship but something older and darker: the language of purification and moral absolutism. When ideology claims total truth, and appeals to righteousness justify censorship, the conditions for genuine conversation collapse. What remains is cheap insult, tedious moralizing, and the secondhand embarrassment of watching adults throw public tantrums over subjects deserving of thoughtful consideration.

The consequences go beyond optics, though the spectacle is disheartening enough. When citizens cannot distinguish between reasoned critique and caricatured villainy, they lose something essential to self-governance: the ability to respect the dignity of those who see the world differently. When a university—an institution meant to foster intellectual growth—arrests a professor for initiating academic discussion, we move past political dysfunction into something more dangerous: the suppression of free thought, which is essential to the pursuit of knowledge. We neglect this foundation at our peril. As Orwell reminded us, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Recovering democratic discourse begins with recovering intellectual humility—the recognition that we might be wrong and that our opponents might be right. It also requires renewed commitment to the life of the mind: reading widely, thinking carefully, and submitting our own certainties to the test of serious inquiry. Finally, it demands a return to the tragic vision: understanding that human nature will always frustrate our grandest ideals, and that the best we can hope for is a decent, imperfect ordering of our common life, built on compromise rather than crusade.

These are not fashionable claims. They offer no promise of utopia, no assurance of triumph, no satisfaction of righteous fury. But they remain the surest foundation for a free society—one not rooted in ideological purity but in the fragile achievements of human reason, tempered by experience, constrained by humility, and protected by the freedom of thought that defines democracy.

The real choice before us is not between left and right, liberal and conservative, but between a politics that respects human complexity and one that reduces citizenship to team loyalty and moral posturing. A free society demands better. Whether we can summon the intellectual and moral resources to deliver better remains the question of our age.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.