#442 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Monday August 29)
Good morning,
The New York Times has a column in the weekly book review where they ask famous authors about their favorite books, their favorite reading experiences, books they might give as gifts, etc. Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of March (the imagined story of the father of the Little Women who is largely unseen in that book while he is off at war), was asked what book everyone should read by the age of 21. Here was her answer:
“I taught writing at Harvard last year and half my students had never read a Shakespeare play. That set my hair on fire.”
It sets my hair on fire too. In all of our arguing about what to teach in schools and which books to ban, we seem to have lost track of some of the important things we must teach. We must teach about our common, remarkable, rich culture—its literature, its art, its music, its philosophical advances, its political evolution.
THE WESTERN CANON LIVES
Cornel West was on television a few weeks ago, discussing how important western civilization and the western canon are to our society and our humanity. He proclaimed, in the midst of the incivility of the current Russian nightmare that “Chekov lives.” He reminds us that there is greatness in Russian literature, even if not in the current Russian state. He hearkens back to the proclamation, “Goethe lives,” in the rubble of Nazi Germany.
THE ARGUMENT FOR THE WESTERN CANON
Here is part of a seminal opinion piece by Professor West and Jeremy Tate, from April 19, 2021. It is refreshing and a call to arms about why we need liberal arts education and we need to study the western canon. It is powerful. Here it is in its entirety. I was deeply moved when I first read it and it remains just as powerful today. It should be required reading in every high school and college. It is brilliant:
“Upon learning to read while enslaved, Frederick Douglass began his great journey of emancipation, as such journeys always begin, in the mind. Defying unjust laws, he read in secret, empowered by the wisdom of contemporaries and classics alike to think as a free man. Douglass risked mockery, abuse, beating and even death to study the likes of Socrates, Cato and Cicero.
Long after Douglass’s encounters with these ancient thinkers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be similarly galvanized by his reading in the classics as a young seminarian — he mentions Socrates three times in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”
…Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.
Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.
The Western canon is, more than anything, a conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices and the excellence of voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else in the world. We should never cancel voices in this conversation, whether that voice is Homer or students at Howard University. For this is no ordinary discussion.
The Western canon is an extended dialogue among the crème de la crème of our civilization about the most fundamental questions. It is about asking “What kind of creatures are we?” no matter what context we find ourselves in. It is about living more intensely, more critically, more compassionately. It is about learning to attend to the things that matter and turning our attention away from what is superficial.
…[There is] a massive failure across the nation in “schooling,” which is now nothing more than the acquisition of skills, the acquisition of labels and the acquisition of jargon. Schooling is not education. Education draws out the uniqueness of people to be all that they can be in the light of their irreducible singularity. It is the maturation and cultivation of spiritually intact and morally equipped human beings.
The removal of the classics is a sign that we, as a culture, have embraced from the youngest age utilitarian schooling at the expense of soul-forming education. To end this spiritual catastrophe, we must restore true education, mobilizing all of the intellectual and moral resources we can to create human beings of courage, vision and civic virtue.
Students must be challenged: Can they face texts from the greatest thinkers that force them to radically call into question their presuppositions? Can they come to terms with the antecedent conditions and circumstances they live in but didn’t create? Can they confront the fact that human existence is not easily divided into good and evil, but filled with complexity, nuance and ambiguity?
This classical approach is united to the Black experience. It recognizes that the end and aim of education is really the anthem of Black people, which is to lift every voice. That means to find your voice, not an echo or an imitation of others. But you can’t find your voice without being grounded in tradition, grounded in legacies, grounded in heritages…
Engaging with the classics and with our civilizational heritage is the means to finding our true voice. It is how we become our full selves, spiritually free and morally great.”
Have a great day,
Glenn
From the archives: