Can studying the liberal arts be a "cultural jig?'
Rather, was the concept of "a liberal arts education" a sort of cultural jig, and might it become one again?
I realize those questions make no sense. I write here a bit of a ramble, a set of thoughts that are almost aphorisms for a project I'm working on. This is my first attempt really to get much of it down in writing. (I might say on paper, but I'm looking at a screen.). Of course this will be disorganized.
The "jig" in question is a practice and concept advanced by Matthew Crawford in his book The World Beyond Your Head: Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (2015). In carpentry, for example, "a jig is a device or procedure that guides a repeated action by constraining the environment in such as way as to make the action go smoothly, the same each time, without [the carpenter's] having to think about it." (p. 31) Jigs usually are found in a workshop; jigs can also be made on-site from materials at hand. Hence, "when a carpenter wants to cut a half-dozen boards to the same length, he is unlikely to measure each one, market it, and then carefully guide his saw along the line he has made on the board."(ibid.) Rather, the jig (in this case, a small length of scrap lumber) will guide the saw to cut at the correct length. The carpenter has to slide the saw along the edge of the carefully positioned jig, and the boards will be cut to the correct and uniform length.
The point of a jig is that it stabilizes the worker's environment, limiting a range of free movement in exchange for lightening the burden of care for each action. A worker can undertake a sequence of actions in a uniform pattern without having to think through each action each time. "Jigging is something that expert practitioners do generally, if we allow that it is possible to jib one's environment 'informationally.'"(ibid.)
All kinds of workers use jigs: bartenders, short-order cooks, carpenters, crafters of all kinds. The mental work such a person must perform is reduced an externalized in the arrangements of physical space. David Kirsch writes in The Intelligent Use of Space that experts "constantly re-arrange items to make easy to 1. Track the task; 2. Figure out, remember, or notice the properties signaling what to do next; 3. Predict the effects of actions."(Crawford, p. 32-33) Experts are freed from haltingly thinking through every repetitive action, making things easier by "partially jigging or informationally structuring the environment as they go along." (Kirsch, nos. 1-2)
The expert mentally constrains some degrees of her freedom to keep a skilled activity on track, keeping her attention properly directed in her intersection of spaces and skills. Her space becomes an inhabited space, an extension of herself, and she achieves her purposes with a minimum expenditure of scarce resources of attention. She is required to improvise her skills, tools, and spaces by changing conditions or environments (such as when orders pile up for a short-order cook). Incidental inconveniences simply add a slightly changed condition. This is expert improvisation entirely different from rote industrial production on an assembly line. "In the tension between freedom and structure, which shows itself with special clarity in skilled practices, there is something important to be learned about human agency in general."(p. 34) Jigs keep an expert's attention --the quality of skillful mind that makes an expert an expert--properly directed, focused but not over-determined.
According to some cognitive scientists (or philosophers), human beings can develop "extended" or "embedded" cognition. Andy Clark writes, "advanced condition depends crucially on our ability to dissipate reasoning: to diffuse achieved knowledge and practical wisdom through complex structures, and to reduce the loads on individual brains by locating those brains in complex webs of linguistic, social, political, and institutional constraints." (Crawford chapter 1 fn 2) Advanced (expert) cognition is embedded in an environment and suite of practices the break down complex problems into simpler pieces.
Crawford writes, "The point is that to understand human cognition, it is a mistake to focus only on what goes on inside the skull, because our abilities are highly "scaffolded" by environmental props—by technologies and cultural practices which become an integral part of our cognitive system."(p. 35) In a note, Crawford goes on to extrapolate (following Andy Clark and Michael Wheeler),
" . . . we have inherited certain genetic endowments and limitations, but these [evolutionary developments] are massively underdetermining of the resources that individuals bring to the adaptive problems they face. Culture—the particulars of our inherited linguistic, social, and material equipment—establishes the setting for childhood development and all subsequent learning. In the course of that learning our brains undergo both fine-grained and structural changes that are hugely consequential: changes that depend on our experiences. There are, then three time scales that matter for the question of how we come to be what we are: Darwinian evolution, the history of a civilization, and the life course of an individual." (Crawford, note 4, p, 260-261)
Cultural jigs are an expression for the "triple helix" of genetic, evolutionary inheritance, "the rich soil of historically well-sedimented norms and practices," (p. 39-40) and individual character, the stamp left by individual experiences and personal histories (some of which unavoidably exhibits some elements of "givens" --the particular inborn traits that are spatial, musical, kinetic, and so on. (One need not elevate these to "intelligences" to note the high degree of variability amongst individuals.). The point is that any particular "cultural jig" is not itself infinitely flexible, but can be deployed flexibly by skilled practitioners as they organize their environment, in command of their own actions. Cultural jigs are seen in individuals adapting their skills and environments; "the norms that cultural jigs express and reinforce tend to be reiterated, fractal-like, along different axes of social life; they are robust in that way." (p. 39)
Crawford's examples illustrate his interest in the management of attention. (Remember that jigs keep an expert's attention focused but not over-determined.) Protestant Republicanism, Benjamin Franklin's "be frugal and free," are actions of a socialized individual in a variety of cultural environment. By contrast in any consumer situation an individual's attention is already managed by product placement, web design, and a host of other factors. Attention is the scare resource, and who really controls it, is the question. (The administrative state? Choice architects employed by corporations? An individual or small, face-to-face community?) Individuals in an artificial lab setting, or in front of a solitary digital screen, in isolation can be very poor reasoners: a false premise for many life events, but apt in particular situations. Who is the architect of attention: the skilled practitioner, the choice architect, agents of the state, or—in a very different kind of culture—unchanging and unchallengable patterns of a rigid traditional society? The answer matters for the flourishing of many human activities and attributes.
In my view, a liberal arts education can be considered a suite of cultural jigs that individuals can learn to become skilled practitioners of self-regulation, whether as individuals, or in social contexts—society, culture, and politics in a broad sense. This suite of cultural jigs, further, made sense in previous eras of American history and life. Does it make any sense now? Are the ideas and practices of liberal arts education worth continued practice? If they can be appraised as worthwhile, but simultaneously acknowledged as thoroughly challenged by present conditions, how can they be continued in a society for which they supply a need for skilled practitioners?
Responding to these questions requires a discourse that will be by turns historical, philosophical, and practical. Liberal arts colleges are social and culture institutions in context, both reflecting and contributing to their environments.
I must quickly acknowledge that this inquiry ventures into a conceptual and definitional morass. What is meant by a liberal arts education. If such an education is determined as giving prominent (but not sole) place to the disciplines collectively called the humanities, what is meant by "the humanities?" "Education" as a term is hard enough, "liberal arts" is notoriously slippery, all the more so "humanities." As matters have progressed in the past century, one might well ask whether liberal arts educations have any particular contents at all, much less whether those contents are shared by those who are said to have been educated in liberal arts colleges. What does it mean to study the liberal arts, and what are the institutional context for any such activity, and does it even make sense in the 21st century, beset as it is by severe challenges to any kind of future human flourishing.
This post is merely an introduction to a wider kind of inquiry which I wish to pursue, towards ends I cannot yet fully comprehend. I have a difficult time stating very intelligibly what it is that I wish to pursue. But I have the sense that something important is afoot: the education and practice of creative human attention in time of incentivized and marketable distraction —and distraction from the seemingly impossible contradictions and besetting problems for any kind of recognizable global forms of life in the future. I'm not sure how to get a grip on these questions, on this content.