Recently, a strange, mercurial community of self-described, sometimes externally attributed, “conservative” academics engaged in a wide-ranging discussion of the “Great Books.” Luke Burgis, author and founder of the Cluny Institute, set off the tweetstorm with what on the surface seemed like a simple question: “What is the strongest argument from the political Right AGAINST Great Books programs?”
Sages immediately descended from their ivory towers — or rather, nerds on the internet bruised their fingertips in an attempt to answer Burgis’ prompt. With the question, many of the most well-known “thought leaders” provided tiresome retorts — far too various and exhaustive to even begin to list out here.
A few, however, did provide some good summations.
Pavlos Papadopoulos, a professor at the Great Books-focused Wyoming Catholic College, listed out a number of past, and present, academics, each providing a “right-wing (or at least non-leftist) critique” that asserts academics have wrongly “fetishized” books, or else have students lacking “experience” with “reality” and thus cannot take on the full “context” of a teaching.
The infamous anonymous account @FisherKing simply offered that “the culture is against reading and thought.” Another nameless stranger online agreed with an assessment “against the ‘great books’ as the entirety of a student’s education.” Still, Jennifer Frey, herself a professor of philosophy, asked why conservatives “have spent the past few days railing against great books programs?… Good luck with whatever you think is better.”
When it comes to intellectual discussions online, especially among those of the “right-wing” or “conservative” persuasion, there will never be agreement.
It is a “paradox, at worst a contradiction in terms,” Alex Priou, UATX political philosophy professor, quipped during this drawn-out discussion. The precarious mix of ideologies and personalities creates “odd bedfellows,” he added. “There’s room, but you have to have the stomach for unforgettable conservations.”
The Great Books have had a tremendous impact on my own life. But unlike the majority of those in this great debate, my academic career did not include a thoughtful engagement with them. My journey was autodidactic, self-taught (albeit with the assistance of a graduate school education), guided by my personal curiosity. The mixture of great minds with a life of great experiences produced a cocktail of perspective, wherein I am fully intoxicated by how to think about what’s actually worth thinking about.
Controversy over the Great Books remains ripe. Like I mention, I didn’t have any sort-of “great books” curriculum in school, and neither did many of my friends. For myself, I had to rely on secondary literature, YouTube, and podcasts, and I even took a brief stint studying — gasp — postmodernism. This was all woven together with time spent in the real world and not some vague suspicion of it.
This is not to say that standpoint trumps all. The scoundrel, the fool, the drunk — they all have experience too. And often, a life of pure experience produces cynicism, bitterness, and confusion. A man will more easily suffer injustice when he has never even considered what the nature of justice is. He may experience heartbreak without reflecting on Eros. We will all face death, but have we contemplated the good life?
But, setting aside all other caveats, I could better understand the inverted tragedy of Hamlet because of my own inspiring bravado with the opposite sex. I could better understand Aristotelian phronesis through the stretching of my own will against reality. I could better understand Machiavelli’s effectual truth because I had spent enough time around politics to know that men rarely speak openly about their true motives. I could better understand the positive nihilism of Nietzsche because I witnessed my own rhetoric conceal the will for power.
The value of great experience and the Great Books, as it is meant to be understood in liberal education, is in their harmony. The books teach what to look for, while experience supplies the objects of desire. Together they produce the gratification of genuine virtue.
Yet, our most herald institutions of supposedly “higher education” have continued to bluster. The campus culture wars of the ‘60s and ‘70s were about about books “written by dead white men” held sway, while the conditions that produced this hostility continue to fester.
What has it led to?
Syracuse (not the one Plato failed to shepherd) sees Classics majors as having the same worth as Ceramics — and that major has been banished. Same with Toledo (which axed its philosophy undergrad offering) and the University of Chicago, which is pausing graduate school admissions for classics studies.
The Great Books debate has produced too many tear-soaked keyboards. Thomas Jefferson hoped a “natural aristocracy” would rise from our education system as a way to produce “the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government.” Instead, we got critical theory, diversity initiatives, bureaucratic “experts,” and an entire corpus of PhDs who are heralded for rewriting Homer through a feminist lens.
Higher education has become bleak. The Greeks, Strauss reminds us, had a term for lack of experience in things beautiful: apeirokalia. For his student Allan Bloom, education was, or should be at its best, “the movement from darkness to light.”
Perhaps the most ironic feature of this whole debate is that the Great Books themselves are contradictory. Nietzsche spends his entire lifetime picking a fight with Plato. Machiavelli triumphantly overturns the ascendency of Aristotle. Kant announces he has discovered reason, and Hegel soon after says he has ended history. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau all declare clarity on the proper order of man, the state, and nature. Yet there is no consensus.
What these Great Books do offer is an opportunity for engagement and for struggle. They are themselves in conflict. And the ideas collide with reality.
It is difficult task to become wise through reflection alone. Books, whether they are considered great or not, remain vital. So too is our experience with them. God knows there are more than enough people ignoring both.
