The Life We Have Together
Review by Paul Weinhold
Zwerneman, Andrew. The Life We Have Together: A Case for Humane Studies, A Vision for Renewal. Cana Academy, 2022.
Andrew Zwerneman has written an inspiring devotional book for the humanities that aims to heal present-day divisions by recovering an older, better way of seeing.
Why do I call The Life We Have Together a devotional book? Because Zwerneman’s own lifelong devotion to the craft of teaching shines through each page of this slim volume. Cana Academy, where Zwerneman serves as President, is a missional organization dedicated to the support of teachers, and that same sense of mission extends to this, his most recent book. Its tone is urgent and prophetic, with a palpable zeal to evangelize—or to reignite a fire that may have burned down to embers in the hearts of his fellow teachers. He aims to win our devotion to the humanities—our devotion to seeing with keenness, to feeling with sympathy, and to dwelling in a society that pursues the common good. For a lifelong devotee of the humanities like me, this book was soul-stirring.
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There is a moment in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, that reminds me of what Zwerneman is doing in this book. A man and his son discover an unopened can of Coca-Cola while scavenging for food amid the desolate aftermath of some untold catastrophe. For the man, this Coke is the distillation of a world his son can never know and a reminder of all that has been lost. So he does what fathers do. He gives the Coke to his son. In a moment of rapture, he smiles as his son gulps down the one and only soda that he will ever have. If our contemporary cultural landscape is reminiscent of The Road, then this book is like the can of Coke. It is a synecdoche of civilization, a rare and concentrated gift given by a good man who views the humanities as good news to be shared. It is an encapsulation of Zwerneman’s nearly four-decade-long career of teaching in the humanities, and it is effervescent wisdom from the friends whom he has kept within his memory: Aristotle, Michael Polanyi, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Abraham Lincoln, Remi Brague, Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler, Terence Malick.
Zwerneman is far more hopeful than McCarthy, of course. His aim is to create a flourishing and relational way of life, not merely to survive. He’s planting seeds, not handing out single-use cans of soda. The book makes this hopeful case for the humanities in several senses. The first is straightforward: the book addresses the subject matter typical of the humanities: history, imaginative literature, philosophy, painting, film, and the Bible. Yet in a deeper way, Zwerneman’s vision fixes on the humane relationships that develop through the humanities. Each discipline is thus framed as robustly personal. History is not the study of oppressive forces as Howard Zinn would have it (paid link) but the study of persons whose choices were made in a particular context. Imaginative literature is not properly the object of ideologically-driven moralism, but a way of deepening our sympathies. Philosophy is not radically subjectivist or atomistic, but a dynamic interplay of personal and collaborative relationships. The fine arts achieve meaning not through the shocking or the banal, but by relating us to the world. The parable of the good Samaritan, Zwerneman’s Scriptural exemplum, is a call to action, a command that we relate to one another as good neighbors. Taken altogether, the humanities renew humanity by granting us the capacities that we need to relate to one another well.
Relating well entails human freedom, which Zwerneman argues is also cultivated through the humanities. History is the study of free, responsible agents who made real choices in their particular contexts; imaginative literature frees readers by expanding their sympathy; philosophy frees us to know the world as it really is; the fine arts free us to see meaning amidst brokenness; and the example of the good Samaritan frees us from self-concern and opens us to a life of charity. That freedom is won not through activism, but by clear-sightedness. Zwerneman, like Seamus Heaney, concerns himself with seeing things (paid link).
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As a student of the liberal arts, I would be interested to read Zwerneman’s take on grammar, logic, and rhetoric’s role in our shared life together. Did he exclude them because he views them as propaedeutic? Aristotle, at least, views rhetoric as an art of seeing the available means of persuasion, which suggests that it belongs on Zwerneman’s list of “seeing” disciplines. Though he certainly models persuasive writing himself and gestures toward the rhetorical in a chapter on Lincoln, he never treats rhetoric thoroughly. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that he’s going to write another book!
In these days of unrelenting culture wars and scalding politicization, our life together has been difficult to see. Zwerneman never pulls punches or backs away from controversial issues in this book. But his engagement in cultural debate accomplishes through fair-mindedness a deepening field of vision where others often perpetuate facile binaries, spurious vilifications, or self-aggrandizing generalizations. This is a book that meets our present moment and that classical educators, leaders, and parents need to read.
Paul Weinhold has been a teacher and leader in classical education movement for the last twenty years. He is Director of Continuing Education for Great Hearts America and Founder of ClassicalEd Review.