The Telos of Higher Ed

I've been thinking about Plato and Jonathan Haidt lately. Specifically the latter's writings on the telos of higher education. 

Haidt believes that social justice is an important component of an education, but the ultimate purpose, or telos, of a college should be the pursuit of truth. He goes on to write that, in many colleges, the telos has become social justice and that a college can only have one telos and they should be clear about which one they espouse: truth or social justice.

I agreed with him until recently. I wonder if social justice is just a poor characterization of what these colleges are doing. Would it be better to say their telos is ethics?* When you pit ethics against truth (which is basically science), it becomes harder to make a choice. In fact, it seems that colleges try to pursue both.

I think of Plato's concepts of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. We tend to get into trouble when one concept overwhelms another. Ken Wilber said that the Good, or ethics, is something we decide as a community. The True requires something independent from the human experience (the scientific method).

Haidt's binary choice forces people to choose one over the other when they are probably both necessary. The True shouldn't usurp the Good, they should coexist. Isn't that what a liberal arts education is supposed to be about?

Where I think he's right is that ethics isn't taught as much as one branch of ethics, social justice, which places care for the oppressed as the ultimate goal toward leading a moral life.

Haidt has talked about how a college should give students many lenses to view the world and social justice only gives one, the lens of power**. The problem with the multi lens path is that it's essentially moral relativism and competing ethical systems is what is tearing our country apart right now.

It would be great if colleges taught multiple ethical systems, how they have been deployed in our culture, and attempted to find a way synthesize them in a society so students can learn to live alongside different tribes.

Colleges can then tell students: "Here are the lenses. Now go out and find a community that holds these ethical values but also be sure to interact with other tribes since you have to share the same physical and political landscape as them."

In a post-Christian world, we need to fill the void of ethics and community. This means people need to sort themselves into clearly defined tribes who share an ethical code. This involves routine face-to-face interaction, ritual, and reflection. Facebook Groups and Sub Reddit threads ARE NOT an effective replacement. People need more options and this will help with social isolation.

It also means we need routine interaction with other tribal communities, so we see them as Americans too. We don't solve problems by growing and mobilizing our tribe, but by building coalitions.

*After listening to Haidt's lecture again, it appears he was criticizing social justice's attempts to achieve equal outcomes in all instances and inferring all forms of racial and gender disparity are due to prejudice. Any attempts at using truth to suggest prejudice might not explain the disparity but something else gets shouted down without reason.

**Haidt actually said this about intersectionality, not social justice. Although you could argue that social justice is about the lens of power as well.