Seriously.

As an English professor, I find that people tend to think English classes are all about grammar, spelling, and details like punctuation. I say “people,” because it’s true of almost everyone, even strangers I used to meet when I used to go to parties when I used to have a life. “You teach English?” quips Ms. Someone, “I’ll watch what I say.”

And indeed, the ability to use hyphens and capital letters correctly, this little party trick I seem to have, should be part of every graduate’s repertoire. Spelling is useful as well, lest Campus Beautification Day should become Campus Beatification Day, forcing us to call in bishops and cardinals to pronounce this place St. Rosie of the Slide Rule. More importantly, the practical knowledge of how sentences are built, with attention to stress points, vulnerability to warp and shear, sentences’ touch and tempo, timbre and tremolo, their dynamic range—such knowledge makes it possible to have richer, more interesting thoughts. The word “sentence,” after all, stems from the same root as “sense” and “sentience.” Careless sentences often betray careless sense. A sentence is a tool for thinking, and the inability to use this tool properly makes one susceptible to those who can.

The real payoff of college English, however, goes beyond the utility of commas and clauses. It has to do with keeping culture alive. (The rules of spelling, despite their being bugbears, generally preserve linguistic origins; the patterns of poetry do something similar). It has to do with the pursuit of greater flexibility and precision of thought. It has to do with elegance, yes, but as much to do with reason in all its rigor and humanity.

Like science, like ethics, like religion, language is a human invention, a technology for apprehending the world—and each other. It was our forebears who invented the Experiment, the Categorical Imperative, Dietary Laws, and the Paragraph. Sometimes it pays to be reminded: we don’t exist for science’s sake, or for the sake of the Sabbath or the split infinitive. We made them, not the other way around, and can use or change them when necessary—probably not individually, but en masse and over time we can, and do. Science is our tool, as is language, as are the rules of ethics and the guide of religion. (That’s not to say that Nature and God are our inventions, too. They may be, but that’s for another time.)

Why am I saying all of this? Because it is altogether too easy for us to become, as Thoreau says, “the tools of our tools.” It’s easy to adhere to—or protest against—religion for its own sake, or the rules of grammar for theirs, just as it is too easy to say, with recent Paustenbach Lecturer John D. Graham, that we must ground our society’s decisions about whether to accept or regulate new products entirely on science-based risk analysis.

The idea is foolhardy and it’s shortsighted. It makes us tools, not tool-users. Dr. Graham claimed in his lecture, for example, that bioengineered seeds have been proven to increase productivity (which is debatable, but that’s for another time). He implied that other nations were therefore foolish to reject these, our homegrown American products. The assumption is that, if increased productivity can be scientifically determined, and if controlled studies can verify the health of subjects who eat bioengineered produce and hormone-treated beef (more often these are uncontrolled experiments on an uninformed public), then hormone dosing and bioengineering are themselves Officially Safe.

The flaws in this logic are both scientific and beyond scientific. It shouldn’t take an English teacher to point out that “safety” doesn’t reduce to the health effects of individuals’ consumption of one product. “Health” doesn’t automatically follow “increased yields.” We have to ask: healthy and safe for whom? Cattle? Soil? Rural communities? Third World farmers who find it increasingly hard to save seeds that haven’t been patented by one of four international conglomerates? (It’s worth noting that as people around the world are rioting over grain prices, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland reap record profits.) How can we determine, scientifically, that Monsanto’s Roundup is “safe,” for example, when it’s hard to find an acre in America that’s 100% glyphosate-free, to use as a control?

If we continue to insist that we should base our acceptance and deregulation of the altering and patenting of genes—it’s patenting I find truly dangerous—solely or even primarily on scientific evidence, we are guilty of a scientific idolatry that cheapens who we are. It’s not so much that this idolatry offends against God and Nature. (That discussion, too, is for another time.) But it certainly offends against who we are.

At the very, very least, we should remember that, thanks to culture and forebears, other tools are available to help guide our decision-making, tools Dr. Graham neglected to mention. Religion and ethics can help us determine whether a product or process is likely to be just or unjust. Language, too, can help. If we can talk properly about a thing and call it by its real name, then perhaps we can more readily dismantle corrupted logic, and build a stronger and more humane reason of our own. We won’t just watch what we say, like Ms. Someone, but how we reason.