A liberal education where one is exposed to all manner of views should confirm whatever is right and good. In college, studying Plato confirmed my faith because it lined up in its arguments with the Bible. Studying the Buddhist scriptures confirmed my Christian faith because it seemed very far-fetched that a real man would have been born to a princess with 200 ladies in attendance and a white elephant passing by at the very moment of his birth. Books postulating strange sociological experiments, such as Walden II, proved useless me practically and emotionally when I got pregnant during my freshman year of college. The Bible, on the other hand, comforted me and Christians supported me.
Allan Bloom expressed concern in The Closing of the American Mind back in the 1980s that students were coming to college not to have their minds broadened through the great thought of the millenia but to be confirmed in their own agendas by dismissing those great thoughts out of hand simply because the authors were white and male and, ergo, privileged. I have had discussions with my scary-smart teenage niece who said, in so many words, that because the classic authors came from a privileged class of white men, they should be dismissed as irrelevant to our culture.
Her argument in 2020 is not new. Bloom was running into it forty years ago. However, culture is transient. The 2020s American culture is different from the 1980s culture, which is different from the 1950s, from the 1920s, from the 1880s. Morality, which is the subject of all great thought through the ages, is universal in every culture. How do I relate to God? How do I relate to my fellow man? What is the nature of good? Is man capable of being good? No matter where or when you live, these questions govern our lives and must be studied if we are to be more than animals. Classic literature, old lessons, address these, no matter who wrote them. Questions of race or sexism are secondary to those issues but progressives would make them primary. Why do you think they would skip over the primary issue — “how should I behave toward my fellow man?” — to the secondary issue — “how should others behave?” Isn’t it so that they can continue to do as they please while other people are required to change?
Alan Paton was a white South African who wrote anti-apartheid novels while running a reformatory for black South African youth in the 1960s and 70s. He was addressing how people should treat one another — an issue of morality — and, as a white man, his books admitted a need for whites to treat all humans equally.
Ghandi, in a famous speech given in South Africa (you can see it in the 1982 film, Ghandi) said, “I am willing to die for what I believe. I am not willing to kill for it.” While he was trying to change how society treated each other, the most important issue for him was, “How do I behave toward my fellow men?”
This is all part of the Synthesis that your children will go through as they determine what is important to them and how they will live their lives. Our job as parents is to be an example that change starts with me, not the other guy. Whether it is Socrates’ argument to his disciples against escaping Athens illegally when he had been unjustly condemned to death, or Tolstoy’s juxtaposition of a life lived for others as opposed to a life lived for self in Anna Karenina, Shakespeare’s argument for mercy in The Merchant of Venice — because if we live by the law, every letter of the law must be followed — Jane Austen’s observation that the more prideful one is, the more prejudiced one is both for and against his fellow man, or Tolkein’s lesson that even the smallest person doing the right thing can change the world, the classics address this question: “What must I do?” It is the greatest of all the Old-Fashioned Lessons. If someone makes the point of their education all about themselves — “How should the world treat me?” — what a small world it would be! “How should I treat others?” causes us to look out instead of in. It broadens our world. How I treat my fellow man is a pertinent question anywhere in the world, on a farm in Wisconsin, in downtown Tokyo or in the Amazon jungle; progressives of all stamps are only pertinent in their own environments. Racism against blacks or Hispanics disappears if they move to different countries where the majority of people are black or Hispanic. Radical feminism is the most prevalent worldwide in countries where women have the most freedom to express themselves. I have not heard of a huge movement of American feminists taking action in Saudi Arabia or Iran for those women’s rights. Switzerland, the last country in the western world to grant women the right to vote, was the only country to do so by referendum — which means that MEN voted for women to have the right to vote. The point being that culture as a focus of education is destined to become irrelevant wherever it is.
Allan Bloom asked his Introduction classes, “What books really count for you?” A few people said, “The Bible,” but the students rarely studied it after leaving home. Books don’t matter to us, anymore. They should. We know what someone means when they call someone, “a Scrooge,” or “Eeyore-ish.” This is because of a common literary tradition that gives depth of feeling as well as of moral understanding. Allan Bloom says that classic literature gives students models of good and bad and, “. . . a fund of shared experiences and thoughts on which to ground their friendships with one another.” (Bloom, Allan; The Closing of the American Mind; Simon and Schuster; New York; c. 1987; p. 344.) We can’t communicate with each other on a deeper level if our entertainment is limited to pop culture through TV, movies, pop music, the latest vampire romance, dystopian novels, or agenda-steeped social media. All those things are light, shallow, fleeting. Unless your media has passed the test of time, its influence on the world is insignificant. It is the difference between dipping out a puddle with a spoon or dipping out a pool with a bucket.
Look how much time we spend on all that fluff! It’s not as if people haven’t been writing or painting or composing fluff over the millenia in dozens of languages, but only the great lasted, the stuff that truly is life-changing. Even great authors rarely produce uniformly great books. Shakespeare’s hack-and-slash play Titus Andronicus, simply doesn’t match up to Hamlet or Julius Caesar. Herman Melville wrote a couple of popular sea adventures, then wrote Moby Dick, which Mark Twain considered to be the only great book of world literature ever produced in America. It was a financial failure, none of his other books were worth much, and he died in poverty working as a customs agent. Even Jane Austen’s books, which are unusual in that they are all still in print, include Northanger Abbey, a farce on contemporary gothic novels which is a little bewildering to the modern reader.
How many great French books can you name? Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Spanish? Don Quixote. German? Mostly poets — Goethe and Schiller — and philosophers such as Kant and Nietzsche. Russian? A little more there: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov. There is just not a lot of literature that can be called great. So instead of spending our lives on mountains of trash that add nothing to our lives, we should study great literature, the lives of great people and see what we can learn from them. They will give us a solid foundation.
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