Education Facts—Part ?? (Great Books—Part I)

1. The study of great books is usually contrasted with the use of textbooks and other technical books. It is contrasted, in other words, with study of the studies that show us what we most need to know as productive beings in a free, middle-class society.

2. It’s inevitable on our society that most people will think they don’t have time to read such books. They’ll even condemn, with some good sense, reading such books—like Plato’s REPUBLIC or Shakespeare’s TEMPEST—as a waste of valuable time. When they read, they want to be entertained, and that means that books should read like movies. That’s why they love John Grisham—whose charm disappears with careful or even repeated reading. Or they want books to provide practical advice in a user-friendly form. The best-sellers are often self-help books—chicken soup for the soul or how to avoid an audit or diabetes. Lots of people want to read about celebrities—who are more psychological accessible than great heroes and full of vices that most of us might have if we had the money. (Today’s example is Tiger Woods, and admittedly the cases of Elvis and Michael Jackson, bizarre people with singular talent, are more complicated.) These observations may seem condescending (because they are), but they’re not really critical. If you really are performing responsibly the duties given to you by middle-class life, there isn’t that much time to read. (I, for example, have been told, with justice and on behalf of charity, that I think I have more time to read than I really do.)

3. Even the author of the greatest book written on America, Alexis de Tocqueville, didn’t think most Americans should read the great books written by the Greeks and Romans. He said there’s no higher education in America, because there’s no class of people freed from work for leisurely contemplation. And democratic middle-class people aren’t proud enough to believe that they’re essentially more than beings who work. So they don’t regard philosophy, science, and theology as pleasurable pursuits. Science is useful for making work easier and more productive and for making lives more secure and comfortable.

4. In an obvious way, Tocqueville seems to have been wrong to say there could be no higher education in a middle-class democracy. In A CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, you can read that more young people than ever are in colleges and universities—the education we call higher—today. But you can also read that a higher percentage than ever of students have basically technical majors—from pre-med to exercise science to marketing or public relations to turf management—than ever. They’re reading boring but effective textbooks full of information reinforced in the class’s power point presentations, doing very practical group projects (often in labs), and being challenged by detail-driven objective tests. Much of what’s left of the humanities seems based—in a postmodern way—on the allegedly candid self-awareness that what they teach is worthless or whimsical or a mere assertion of personal identity. Quantitative assessment dominates what’s called higher education more than before. It’s power or productivity that can be measured, and the people who come up with the measurements aren’t poets or even rocket scientists (most often they’re professors of education). What about pure science or theoretical physics (as opposed to merely experimental physics—I was reminded of the deep significance of that distinction from watching THE BIG BANG THEORY)? America has the cutting edge programs! That’s true, but there’s a real dearth of actual Americans benefiting from those programs. For a real multicultural adventure, walk around some physics building at MIT.

5. For aristocrats, science and so forth are for the soul, Tocqueville says. And that’s why aristocratic science tended to be proudly sterile or productive of nothing. From a democratic view, aristocratic scientists, very short on both justice and charity, don’t do anyone any good. And it’s true, Tocqueville shows us, that we really should use our brains for their benefit of our bodies. Everyone, even the nerdiest scientist or most refined aristocrat, has a body. Fewer people than ever in a techno-democratic age live in hopeless drudgery; they’re less oppressed by their bodies. It really is a maxim of democratic justice—one confirmed by the Bible—that nobody should be above or below being a free being who works. That includes philosophers, who, as the Bible says, are not exempted from the duty of charity. And nobody exists merely to work for another; the many don’t exist to provide leisure for the few.

6. So the reason, Tocqueville explains, that most Americans shouldn’t read the Greek and Roman authors is that they celebrate aristocratic ways of life—philosophers, warriors, statesmen, and such. They arouse in people a longing for nobility that can’t be satisfied in a democracy. Most people are going to have technical jobs and ordinary families. They aren’t going to rule over others or die glorious deaths in battle. Nor are they going to walk around all day asking people questions about justice, piety, and all that don’t really have answers. Socrates ironically said he had no time to go to work, perform his civic responsibilities, or spend quality time with his wife and kids. It’s hard to see how Socrates could be a democratic role model or even provide self-help for the free being who works.

7. But didn’t Socrates live in a democracy? Not really, Tocqueville explained. The Athenian democracy was a kind of aristocracy of free citizens built on slavery. And so we learn, for example, from THE FEDERALIST or from Hobbes that the Athenian assembly was filled with vain and contentious men, men animated by sometimes cruel and often violent aristocratic pretensions.That “democracy” did have the characters or the institutions to support a just and stable middle-class way of life. So it’s not surprising, Tocqueville goes on, that even Greek philosophy seem to have been distorted by an aristocratic prejudice: Most human beings are necessarily chained to the “cave” or process of socialization of a particular community, and only philosophers are truly free. The appeal of Socrates—the hero displayed by Plato—is basically aristocratic. And Aristotle’s ETHICS is all about working with the fact of aristocratic prejudice, which is enlarged and refined without perhaps being fundamentally transformed.

So the case for teaching great books in our time comes next.