Treasures from the Wreckage

It's fine to debate the canon, but don't let infighting keep us from saving civilization.

If you want to stir a tempest in a conservative teapot, here’s a good way: trash the Great Books. You can always enrage someone by goring that sacred cow.

Patrick Deneen played this card several years ago with a piece “Against Great Books” at First Things. Deneen noted that “great” books are the source of bad ideas as well as good ones (indeed, one of the primary sources of bad ideas!), and that sliding them all into a single curriculum can turn people into moral relativists. More recently, Alex Petkas took a similar line with his essay on how “’Great Books’ Is for Losers.” Though a bit less bruising than Deneen, Petkas isn’t much inspired by scholars sitting in seminar rooms discussing a text. He wants to lean into Great Men with their manly, thumotic virtues. Warriors! Heroes! We should be making our sons into Achilles, not Aristotle! (And our daughters… well… Petkas is far less interested in the education of daughters.)

Last week this topic raged on Twitter again, with Aaron Renn amplifying critiques similar to Petkas’; he thinks the Great Books are too pedantic and ill-suited to address many of the challenges of our own age. (“Please do study them if they are of interest,” he says, while acknowledging he doesn’t consider this necessary.) T. Greer complains that the traditional canon is too narrow, too “Western” (but not German enough), and inattentive to the East and to the post-WWII era. Naturally, many others weighed in; Ross Douthat for instance worries that Great Books programs often short-shrift the American contribution.

I mean… maybe? Let me make an obvious point, then a less-obvious point.

The obvious point is that young Americans are so ignorant, their reading skills so poor, that it would be exceedingly foolish to spike almost any initiative that successfully persuades people to read books that are 1) old and 2) hard. It’s honestly quite confusing to me that Renn doesn’t see the urgency of this. Smothering ignorance and a five-second attention span aren’t a problem for the young? I’ll consider exceptions on a case by case basis (Islamic Terrorist School?) but I think old and hard is truly the place to start: “Old” breaks them out of their algorithm-and-bureaucracy-engineered bubble, and “hard” puts their brains through the paces in a way that their entertainment machines just won’t do. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter whether the kids read Homer or Aristotle or Victor Hugo. Just that any of the above will put them ahead of most of their peers.

In fairness, many of the above critics would agree with this. Petkas would kind of agree (while indulging in a lot of snide remarks that make Great Books stalwarts like Hutchins and Adler sound like pathetic weenies), but I’m guessing Greer and Douthat would very much agree and I’m not a bit bothered by rousing debates over the old “what should the canon include” question. That’s part of the fun of a Great Books curriculum! We get to fight about what should be in it!

Don’t lose the forest for the trees, though. If we were living in the kind of society where young people were taught to parrot the Wisdom of Ancestors by rote, with a reverence that smothered all critical reflection and debate, it might be fine to engage in bruising critiques of “the wrong kind of Great Books program.” That’s not our situation! We’re more like the Robinson Crusoes of modernity, trying to salvage whatever treasures we can from antiquity. Our society is hurtling heedlessly forward with very little sense of what lies behind. Letting go of the wisdom of the past will leave us severely vulnerable to repeating its mistakes. But the ironic upside of sweeping ignorance is that paths to remedy are extremely numerous. It’s only reasonable, therefore, that those who recognize the larger-scale problem should try, as far as possible, to stay friends, acknowledging that someone else’s approach might have its own merits.

Inevitably though, we do tend to look for paradigms to help us select the worthiest fragments. I would simply advise this. Teach the things that matter. Let those decisions be made in the context of our own good-faith efforts to use the past to answer the looming questions that are currently most pressing, most arresting, most defining of our age. I don’t know that there’s a “right answer” as to whether we should think most about “great men” or “great ideas,” closely analyze texts or look for sweeping themes, read quietly or revel in dramatic oratory. All of those things can be good! What’s not good is sitting down and deciding What Kids Should Know based on some idealized vision of the society we’d like to have. We need the Great Books to enrich and inform a dynamic conversation about where we are and where we’re going. Our instruction should initiate our children into that same conversation.

A new kind of world is emerging. None of us presently sees it with much clarity. It would be pure hubris to think we could engineer the world we want through the things we teach our kids. Or, if the goal is to closet them away in BenOp bunkers, that’s both foolish and naïve. They’re going to have to live in this still-emerging future, and ideally help in forging it. A Great Books curriculum should be drawing them into that effort, equipping them with the tools that, in our own best evaluation, seem most needed.

The harsh truth is that there isn’t a canon anymore. There is no agreement in our own time about what educated people should all know. They should surely know something, including some knowledge of things that happened or were written before they were even born (gasp!), but from there we have a lot of decisions to make and our own prejudices and concerns will necessarily guide the selection. Which will lead to some mistakes. But I think it’s better to accept that than to try to program our children with something we’ve persuaded ourselves is Objectively Correct. If we’re honest, we should acknowledge that we aren’t in a great position to discern that.

So maybe that does add up to an argument for “educating for liberty,” probing the works that laid the foundation for free societies. Or maybe it explores the human condition through a deep examination of both morality and the self, in the spirit of Charles Taylor or Alasdair MacIntyre. Some people have basically devoted themselves to reinvigorating once-vaunted, traditional canons (think “stuff aristocrats would have been expected to know a century or two ago”), which does actually make real sense. (There’s an integrity there, and a weight of long-considered judgment, that we from our present vantage point would struggle to recapture.) Or maybe we try to awaken the kids’ humane sensibilities through a recovery of beautiful things, or to instill thumotic virtues through dramatic oratory, as Petkas wishes to do.

I’m basically supportive of all such efforts, but my enthusiasm wanes as the dynamic pursuit of excellence devolves into “a program,” whether that’s manhood training, a virtue agenda, or whatever else. Be honest. We’re a little bit adrift here; we don’t really know what tools will prove most crucial for our kids in years to come. If scholars in seminar rooms are engaging the young with the texts they genuinely value, that’s far more real (even manlier?) than some of the silly suggestions I read from self-styled educational reformers who seem to want to train our children like seals. (And the boys shall skin animals! And the girls shall milk cows! Not making this up, friends. Some people really are recommending those things.)

Trashing the Great Books is contemptible. It’s a short-term clickbait tactic that exploits the uncertainty and fragility that necessarily accompany all efforts to draw wisdom from the past, in an age that is largely uninterested in it. Don’t be that guy. But if you do want to assist in the effort, my best advice is to keep in mind C.S. Lewis’ distinction between “propagation” and “propaganda” in The Abolition of Man. The poultry-keeper raises young birds into whatever he wants them to be (plump and juicy, probably), but older birds seek to initiate fledglings into their own pattern of life. One wants to eat the kids; the other wants them to fly. Let’s teach them to fly.