Educating for the Vacant Middle: The Virtues of the Educated Amateur

Tradition is only democracy extended through time; ...  Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. - G.K. Chesterton

From The European Conservative

By Ted V. McAllister

We need to educate people to understand that the culture they have is a product of human history and choice, and to see that, beyond gratitude to their ancestors, they also have obligations to those who will come after them.

“To seek everywhere the element of utility is least of all fitting for those who are magnanimous and free.”—Aristotle, Politics, Book 8, Chapter 3

In Democracy on Trial, Jean Elshtain stresses the need for what she calls “democratic dispositions,” which include a willingness, or perhaps even eagerness, to act with others toward shared purposes, to compromise, to converse, and to understand one’s unique life as embedded in a skein of relationships that help constitute one’s distinctive personhood. The maintenance of these dispositions is a necessary condition, it seems, for preserving the civic virtues of “sobriety, rectitude, hard work, and familial and community obligations.”

What Elshtain calls democratic dispositions are, by my way of thinking, habits that temper and moderate democracy rather than express its inherent nature. The “savage instincts of democracy,” to use Tocqueville’s phrase, tend toward despotism rather than freedom, toward barbarism rather than toward civility. Unchecked democratic instincts encourage people to withdraw into an intensely private sphere and to see the world from the narrow perspective of their own self-interest, crudely understood. Disconnected from public obligations, having come to think of individualism as a virtue, the democrat sees only his own small world of family and close associates, and then the abstractions of nation or humanity. The rich world of political and civil associations in between these two extremes are invisible to him.

For Tocqueville, the logical end of democracy left to its “savage instincts” is an administrative regime that oversees infantilized individuals. In his chapter on democratic poetry, Tocqueville emphasizes that equality reorients human consciousness by destroying the middle ground between the individual and the broadest abstractions, leaving the person with something very small to contemplate—the self—and something too vast to comprehend—humankind. He tends to understand the latter in relation to what he knows about the former, but in order for this to work, he must assume an abstract idea of the human; thus, being a human whose nature is universally applicable to the species, he can look inside to his own nature to understand the whole of which he is a part.

Thus, the un-moderated democrat—the one who lacks democratic dispositions—makes a virtue out of indifference. Typically, he will say ‘who am I to say’ how some other person should live, thus implying that he operates with an expansive openness to his fellow citizen, while undermining any real relationship—antagonistic or otherwise—that might require meaningful social and political engagement. So long as most ‘public’ matters are really administrative matters, which require the individual to appeal to the government directly for redress, then there is no context for robust political and civic life.

This un-moderated democrat will recognize few obligations to people or institutions. Confining his life to those most like himself—often in lifestyle enclaves—he has no reason to care about those who aren’t like him. Meanwhile, this democrat will love humanity and will traffic in self-evident abstractions, which both establishes his command of universal truths (and therefore his standing as a citizen) and provides him with the vocabulary by which to engage in political speech that requires no particular concrete political knowledge.

The point is that democratic instincts destroy the middle ground between the individual and humanity, and the democratic dispositions about which Elshtain writes are the primary means by which individuals enter into public life. If voluntary associations, mediating institutions, and robust local politics help form citizens who are capable of civic virtue—who can at a minimum operate with self-interest rightly understood—then we must pay attention to how Americans form the habits of self-rule, gregariousness, and, most importantly, serious conversation and compromise.

Most of the conversation about this problem focuses on the decline of civil society, the decline in voluntary associations, the retreat of certain forms of religious engagement, and the relative decline of local and state politics in favor of the administrative state. But there is a very complex relationship between these institutional arrangements that allow or even foster democratic dispositions, and the deeper social and cultural forces that give us the desire to participate meaningfully in our self- governance. Designing our political world to encourage the growth and development of both localist politics and mediating institutions requires that people actually want such arrangements—and that they prefer the messy adventure of self-rule to the comfortable slavery of the administrative state.

For people to devote themselves to others, to accept duties and obligations of a broad nature, they must first accept that their lives are part of a larger story, that they participate in something much greater than themselves. They must step out of nature and into history—which is to step out of a barbarian mode of life and into a more civilized one. Barbarians, as defined by George Santayana, live without a sense of their own history, as though all that they have is no more than a part of the natural world. Human language, technology, and morality are no more than expressions of natural instincts rather than the products of a long development that require conscious effort to maintain. Consequently, they live without gratitude or obligation. Their ancestors and descendants are largely hidden from them. The horizon of their lives and their moral judgments is thus very small.

Broadening this horizon, altering this limited sense of self, and deepening one’s grasp of the larger story in which one participates—these are among the primary obligations of higher education in a democracy. These are also the basic tools required for the development of the democratic dispositions that are necessary to tame the individualistic excesses of democracy.

But rather than make my case, as one might reasonably expect, by talking about the importance of a liberal arts education, I want to draw from my experiences as an historian at a graduate school of public policy.

Schools of public policy emerged (with a few exceptions) with the Great Society Act and had, as their raison d’être, a number of assumptions that we connect with that era. For those behind the public policy movement, the key word in Great Society was ‘Great’—meaning large and too complicated for citizens to fathom. Because most of the pressing policy issues were, they believed, too complicated for political resolution, they wanted to foster a scientific analysis of policy that would, at the very least, inform politicians about the likely consequences of their choices and help them calculate costs and benefits.

Public policy sought to make more efficient the administration of government and to have an army of experts in various fields whose competency allowed them to isolate problems and solve them— preferably before they became politicized. To one degree or another, this form of analysis was hostile to inherited forms of knowledge (a fast-changing world means that previous answers to problems are, by definition, ill-suited to the current environment) even as it accepted a narrow, universal definition of human nature and human good. While some in the field smile indulgently at folk like me when we note this (as though we simply can’t see the beauty in their models), they are trapped by a vocabulary of utility that makes no allowance for the highest human faculty: imagination.

At the heart of this agenda is the claim that policy experts, trained in the science of policy, produce usable knowledge that citizens qua citizens cannot have or even understand. By generating such knowledge in the public interest, experts—and the administrative system generally—can relieve citizens from the task of knowing what they cannot know. Citizens are thus free to focus more on their private lives, and the experts—who themselves only know their narrow field of policy and so are not really engaged in a robust public life—can escape from meddling citizens.

This project fits nicely with democratic instincts but not with Elshtain’s democratic dispositions. Is it possible to educate policy leaders to think less as experts and more as informed participants in the democratic process? Is it possible, in other words, to substitute educated amateurs for trained experts?

Every year, I ask incoming students to write an essay examining Aristotle’s treatise about education, which culminates in this wonderful quotation: “To seek everywhere the element of utility is least of all fitting for those who are magnanimous and free.” To my students, this beautiful philosophy of education is puzzling. They are confronted with the claim that the purpose of education is to shape the person—to make him free. I’ve found that even those students who enter the program claiming to reject utilitarianism in all its aspects will nonetheless struggle to think about freedom as the product of a well-ordered soul.

Every year, they also wrestle with Aristotle’s claim that a good citizen is one who can rule well and be ruled well—that the good life is a political life. By raising the question of the soul, they are brought to ask whether their common-sense understandings of utility or the good are adequate. It just so happens that they are asking these questions at the same time they are plunged into micro-economics and all of its methods of providing usable knowledge for public policy. Implicitly, they must question whether knowledge of the soul is usable knowledge or a waste of time and energy. More than that, they are brought to examine whether humans are essentially private, self-interested beings (as they might suppose from certain economic models), or whether they are political animals who require some shared, if contested, sense of purpose in order to live well. Economic man or political man?

My students are, generally, eager to think about such questions, but I’m struck by how few of them have ever confronted them. Prone to make sweeping claims about some presumed ‘real world’ of autonomous, self-interested, calculating individuals, they begin my Great Books class thinking of it as a useless exercise. But the fact is that few have engaged in anything approaching an empirical examination of human nature or human good—they rely on supposedly self-evident claims, unquestioned abstractions that substitute for thinking. And yet, a serious, sustained questioning of these self-evident claims can perform miracles—a genuine examination of what had been settled prior to thought.

A steady stream of students insists on more of this questioning, seeking classes that open up these issues in different ways. To that end, I have designed a class that confronts the claims to usable knowledge now dominant in the discipline—challenging it with a competing form of analysis and knowledge: history. Because it goes to the heart of my claim about what education ought to do in a democracy, a few paragraphs from my syllabus are illustrative:

One of the deeply embedded questions of our investigation concerns how we should think about the role of experts in a democratic society. Narrowly trained experts claim mastery, based on methods and knowledge, of a narrow sliver of public policy. Part of the reason that the great un-washed masses of experts have colonized our public life is that modernization has given us such a complicated and rapidly changing environment. Rather than depending on received knowledge (from experience, custom, and tradition, as well as a well-wrought education), we have thought it necessary to develop methods of analysis that abstract one part of life from the whole and apply ‘rational’ or ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ calculations that produce knowledge about costs and benefits.

Dependence on expert knowledge is not fully consistent with the democratic belief in the non-specialized knowledge of ‘everyman.’ In a democracy we depend on the competence of every citizen to make choices and to have the kind of knowledge that allows them to make judgments about public matters.


Between the technical training of the expert and the common-sense wisdom of everyman, we can imagine a kind of knowledge of the educated amateur—not trained in one discipline but educated as a humanist to see the world with an imagination well stocked by historical, literary, and artistic knowledge. In some ways this class is about the possibilities of such an education (especially in history) in improving policy analysis and policy making in our modern democracy.

Such a task, I suggest, is part of a necessary but insufficient effort to revitalize the democratic dispositions so necessary to democratic virtue. We need to educate people to recognize the rich middle ground between the individual and the state, to understand that the culture they have is a product of human history and choice, and to see that, beyond gratitude to their ancestors, they also have obligations to those who will come after them. Seeing the middle ground allows one to recognize one’s life as inextricably connected with many individuals—some dead and some not yet born—as well as institutions. It is in the middle ground where we meet as part of a story not wholly our own and where we play our part in shaping the story that others will inherit and inhabit.

Note: The piece “Educating the Vacant Middle” beautifully illustrates the trademarks of Ted V. McAllister’s scholarship and character. The essay was initially given as a lecture in 2011—and yet, in many ways, it predicted the tyranny of ‘expert knowledge’ that was to emerge nearly ten years later. Indeed, the fact that Professor McAllister worked through the arguments of this essay while teaching a Great Books course in the public policy department of Pepperdine University—and not, say, in an English department or as a general education requirement for undergraduates—merits further commentary. He foresaw, well before the public policy crisis known as COVID-19, that the self-appointed technocrats embedded in policy institutes and think-tanks of both the Right and the Left lacked a knowledge and a wisdom that was well beyond their technical expertise. He recognized that, while they needed the knowledge of the soul as provided by the Western Tradition, they lacked the kind of wisdom of the everyman upon which the less glamorous politics of the township and local self-rule rely. One could argue that it is precisely the “vacant middle” alluded to in McAllister’s essay that has now risen up against the arrogance of our technocratic elites and which has fueled the populist movements seen across the West today. May he rest in peace, and may his ideas acquire even more life as the vacant middle rises up to stake its rightful claim between the atomized individual and the enlightened bureaucrat.— Kurt Hofer, contributing editor