Month: May 2019

When I started submitting things here I mentioned that I was fond of quotes – then rarely used any since. I’m going to make up for that today with something I read recently:

“…We are as concerned as anybody else about the headlong plunge into the abyss that Western Civilization seems to be taking. We believe the voices that may recall the West to sanity are those which have taken part in the Great Conversation. We want them to be heard again – not because we want to go back to antiquity, or the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, or the Eighteenth Century. We are quite aware that we do not live in any time but the present, and, distressing as the present is, we would not care to live in any other time if we could. We want the voices of the Great Conversation to be heard again because we think they may help us to learn how to live better now.

…We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object of propaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangers to democracy. A prevalent notion is that the great mass of the people cannot understand and cannot form an independent judgment upon any matter; they cannot be educated, in the sense of developing their intellectual powers, but they can be bamboozled. The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats upon the citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long mean either that democracy must fall a prey to the loudest and most persistent propagandists or that the people must save themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves.

Great books alone will not do the trick; for the people must have the information on which to base a judgment as well as the ability to make one. In order to understand inflation, for example, and to have an intelligent opinion on what can be done about it, the economic facts of a given country at a given time have to be available. Great books cannot help us there. But they can help us to that grasp of history, politics, morals, and economics and to that habit of mind which are needed to form a valid judgment on the issue. Great books may even help us to know what information we should demand. If we knew what information to demand we might have a better chance of getting it.

…the idea that liberal education is the education that everybody ought to have, and that the best way to a liberal education in the West is through the greatest works the West has produced, is still, in our view, the best educational idea there is.”
Preface to Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World, “The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education – Robert M. Hutchins, December 1, 1951.

It would appear that we’ve done little better than bail water for nearly 70 years – while the water in our collective boat has steadily risen. What is this great conversation that offers salvation? In its most simplistic terms the great conversation is nothing more than western history’s ongoing dialogue with the present about what is and what should be. Hutchins describes the tradition of the West as:

“…embodied in the great conversation which began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day. …The goal towards which Western society moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue. The spirit of Western civilization is the spirit of inquiry. …Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined. The exchange of ideas is held to be the path of the realization of the potentialities of the race.”

Hutchins adumbrates our time with this sentence:

“…To put an end to the spirit of inquiry that has characterized the West it is not necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is leave them unread for a few generations. On the other hand, the revival of interest in these books from time to time throughout history has provided the West with new drive and creativeness. Great books have salvaged, preserved, and transmitted the tradition on many occasions similar to our own.”

If there was ever a time to salvage, preserve, and transmit, now is that time.

So what exactly am I trying to say here?

I suppose all of this is leading up to some sort of prescription. We find ourselves in a desperate situation. Never has the need for an informed citizenry been higher while our dialogue so far from civil. Conservatives will read the words “liberal education” and in their minds translate that into “doctrination into being liberal” when what is being referred to is hardly that. Liberal education in this sense means nonvocational, nonspecializing education in the Western tradition. Hutchens describes liberal arts students as liberal artists, able to learn how to:

“…read, write, speak, listen, understand, and think. He learns to reckon, measure, and manipulate matter, quantity, and motion in order to predict, produce, and exchange. As we live in the tradition, whether we know it or not, so we are all liberal artists, whether we know it or not. We all practice the liberal arts, well or badly, all the time every day.

…The liberal arts are not merely indispensable; they are unavoidable. Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant, undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining. The question, in short, is whether he will be a poor liberal artist or a good one.”

A liberal education spans the history of western thought: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Here you will find St. Thomas Aquinas wrapping his arm around Aristotle and Newton hungrily accepting the work of Kepler even as Ptolemy lifts a head no less proud for his error. A good liberal education acquaints one with the universal questions and troubles of all mankind and a great liberal education seeks to develop minds not only capable, but eager to form independent judgments in service to the true and good. A liberal education allows one to know, as much as possible, just what is true and good. Or failing that, at least what is false and bad.

The lamentation of the death of a liberal education has been echoing off the stone walls of the American educational system for at least as long as 1951. I know this because I can still hear Mr Hutchins’ wail in the pages of his preface of a collection of works which provides just such an education. Fortunately, we live in a time when it’s even easier to obtain a liberal education, material wise, than it was in 1951. The complete set of Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World spans over 2500 years of western civilization, with great care taken to select titles that were, in the Advisory board’s mind, indispensable to the Great Conversation.

I was gifted this set recently and it is a wonderful spotlight into the cracks and chasms of my own education. Not only that, it offers a guide to tackling these works, meant to be read without synopsis or preface excepting the one which precedes the collection itself. The reader is encouraged, indeed, must, read these authors for herself, without an intermediary telling her what to think. As later authors respond to, contradict, supplant, or deny their predecessors’ view on a particular subject, the reader is provided a string of thought which winds through the centuries, leaving her to ponder just where she is now.

Up until this point, I’ve danced around prescribing everyone engage in their own course of self improvement, to become, as Hutchins put it, a good liberal artist. But of course that’s exactly what I’m saying. Few of us tread so high we avoid all the sludge. It is unfashionable nowadays to prescribe a canonical list of dead white men that everyone “ought” to read.

Too fucking bad:

Homer

Aeschylus

Sophocles

Euripides

Aristophanes

Herodotus

Thucydides

Plato

Aristotle

Hippocrates

Galen

Euclid

Archimedes

Apollonius

Nicomachus

Lucretius

Epictetus

Marcus Aurelius

Virgil

Plutarch

Tacitus

Ptolemy

Copernicus

Kepler

Plotinus

Augustine

Thomas Aquinas

Dante

Chaucer

Machiavelli

Hobbes

Rabelais

Montaigne

Shakespeare

Gilbert

Galileo

Harvey

Cervantes

Francis Bacon

Descartes

Spinoza

Milton

Pascal

Newton

Huygens

Locke

Berkeley

Hume

Swift

Sterne

Fielding

Montesquieu

Rousseau

Adam Smith

Gibbon

Kant

American State Papers

The Federalist

J.S. Mill

Boswell

Lavoisier

Fourier

Faraday

Hegel

Goethe

Melville

Darwin

Marx

Engels

Tolstoy

Dostoevsky

William James

Freud

The set ends with Freud even as we understand that the conversation continued and does so until today.

It is by no means an exhaustive list and interested readers are encouraged to add their own recommendations.

As a final note of encouragement, be undaunted by the scope and number of these authors. They were merely men seeking to understand the world around them, attempting to put forth their ideas in a way that everyone ought to be able to engage with. Getting through all of these authors is not easy, even when accounting for the inevitable skipping of interminably dry stretches that exist in many of these works. But even the discretionary exercise of skipping is part of what makes up the skill set of a liberal artist. Separating the wheat from the chaff is a necessary part of reaping the harvest.

In this age of specialization and special interests the future needs as many generalist liberal artists as we can get. Try and learn something new everyday and don’t let anyone tell you the ancients have nothing to contribute.

Frankly, we need all the help we can get.

Four feet of steel met extradimensional weirdness and from all appearances, prevailed. Which is to say, when Niall’s sword met the orb’s outermost fringe, a pitched squeal rose raggedly and rapidly as its tattered curvature rushed towards the northern pole, where it promptly winked out of existence with a briefly blinding blue flash.

Niall had expected whatever witchcraft this was to repulse his blow, or at best, perhaps yield a satisfying crack. But beyond the noise and the flash, it offered surprisingly little resistance and like stepping down on a stair one expects but does not exist, the king overbalanced – his sword hurtling towards… was that a man in a bed? Before Niall could blink confirmation, his eyes stung with blue light, his ears rang with otherworldly chaos, and with a deft flick worthy of a master swordsman he flipped the blade to the flat.

Manx Horgan awoke to what could only be a stack of Marshall amps strategically placed all around his bed – turned up to eleven. Covers pulled up tight with one arm tucked under head and chin, his shout of startlement was drowned out by Jimi Hendrix feedback. Manx’s eyes opened immediately after a bright blue flash to see a man swinging a very large sword directly at him. He curled into a ball so quickly he banged knees against chin as a king’s sword met a king sized down filled comforter.

Manx’s bed was an effective stop for both King and sword – although not in that order. The strength of the blow combined with Niall’s momentum and an unexpected king sized Temperpedic mattress caused his highness to lose his footing and fall, faceplanting on Manx’s bed and rebounding backwards onto his recently made royal backside. The sword made a soft whuf and remained on the comforter, even as Niall did not.

The area described by the circumference of the now vanished bubble encapsulated Manx, his bed, both end tables next to the headboard and a good stretch of what was once his bedroom floor, up to and including the entrance to the bathroom, where walls disappeared over the doorway in a tight arc. These tipped over with a low thud, with only what remained of his bathroom counter, sink, and a closet on the other side keeping them from collapsing to the floor entirely.

Thankfully Manx did not sleep in the nude, or for that matter, pajamas. He went to bed that night on a warm spring day, so he wore his favorite faded grey NASA t-shirt over black boxer briefs. He felt the weight of Niall’s sword at the foot of his bed as he sat up, swinging his legs over and out of bed, attempting to blink sense into what he saw around him. Everything around him screamed authenticity – from the stone walls of the castle, the short stairs leading up to an oak throne just behind his headboard, to the equally stunned expressions of the crowd just beyond the foot of his bed. Not to mention a smell that he could only describe as medieval. The man lying unceremoniously on his back shook a head with a crown on it. Instinctively, Manx grabbed the sword by the guard and laying the blade (carefully!) on his opposing forearm, offered the sword back hilt first.

Niall scrabbled unceremoniously aloft as he took the blade back. He kept the point of his blade trained as he rose to stand above the man sitting in his bed. He took in the remains of what was obviously a ruined bedchamber. This sprawling bed of a rich man or prince, the tables at the head, they in turn supporting objects both strange and familiar. The odd material of the floor it all stood on, not to mention the man himself – tall and well fed, with a closely shaved face, and as the man smiled hesitantly at him, the straightest, whitest, most complete set of teeth he had ever seen.

Manx looked about nervously, the first tendrils of fear beginning to bloom. He was in trouble and he didn’t have any idea what to do about it. Then he heard the soft click of his (battery backed up) radio alarm clock and the first clean piano notes of a song Manx knew well from his childhood. The acoustic property inside the stone walls carried each note perfect and true. Startled faces looked around and at each other. Adrenaline pounding, Manx immediately knew what he had to do. Ignoring the man with the large sword pointed at him, he leaped on his bed and turned to the royal audience. Grinning widely, he hit the first sentence on the mark: “I wanted to be with you alone…and talk about the weather…”

As he lip synced to a British band that wouldn’t be born for many hundreds of years, Manx did his best to sell his performance using every technique he could recall. He danced in place (they didn’t know how badly). He made eye contact. He smiled where he could. He encouraged the crowd to sing along during the chorus of “La, la, la, la, la” that’s repeated five times. He thought he caught a few joining in but couldn’t be sure. By the time he got to the final line, “Isn’t it funny how time flies…” he’d jumped off his bed and was standing, one hand outstretched in his best Freddy Mercury pose, the other resting on the off switch of his alarm clock.

The song ended and Manx pressed the off button as he dramatically lowered his outstretched hand.

Dead silence echoed off the walls.

King Niall spoke one sentence.

As the guards moved in, Manx supposed he wasn’t in a musical after all.