Careerism vs. Great Books
Why Does the Middle Class Prefer Netflix to Aristotle?
Everyone with a desire to learn, grow, and think about the meaning of their life, should read Great Books. Historically, this was something that very few people got to do. For some time, we adopted an egalitarian sensibility that anyone could do this. Today, we are more or less back to where we started with the difference being that even most oligarchs themselves act like plebs rather than patricians.
There was a mid-century moment in U.S. History when it was thought that reading Great Books was not just an important part of a fulfilling life, but a requirement for good citizenship. To be an engaged citizen one should be able to think. To think one should read Thucydides, Polybius, Machiavelli and Hobbes and understand the history of government and governance. That moment is largely gone. Citizenship has become a term of naiveté. Meanwhile, many professors say the chief obstacle to humanistic study as they experience it is not political correctness, but careerism. When you’re paying $50-80k a year for a credential that may or may not translate into a good job at the end of four years, who has time and motive to read Homer or the Bible? Only those who aren’t motivated by economic and/or status anxiety.
Aristotle thought that philosophy required leisure. The dynamic optimism of the post-WWII era took Aristotle’s view and sought to make it more egalitarian—technological growth could give the middle class leisure, allowing them to build wealth, and then make time for the finer things in life. Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno and a handful of postwar intellectuals were curmugeonly about this prospect. They assumed that the rise of the petit bourgeois would not lead to more thought, but more consumerism. They were right. The result of more free time for the masses is not more leisure, as Aristotle conceived it, but more time to scroll social media, flick through online dating profiles, binge on Netflix, and/or work on what Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha call “The Startup of You” (a form of self-care that largely focuses on hustling, building employable skills, and cultivating a network, but not carving out time for open-ended enquiry).
Liberal arts learning, as it stands, is unable to compete for “mindshare” amidst so much noise. The result, although it is inappropriate to say is that Aristotle was in many ways right: liberal arts learning remains the provenance of Aristocrats. Even at Ivy League schools where admissions are need-blind, the egalitarianism trends towards STEM, not humanities. The narrative is that anyone can and should code, not that anyone can and should read Aquinas. There’s a cold truth to this, because on the flip side one can argue that higher ed is a racket that overcharges for content that could just as easily be consumed for free on Youtube. People are paying for the designer-name to put on the resume. What they learn is effectively irrelevant. I want liberal arts to have a more egalitarian reach, but the irony is that they are unpopular even among the new crop of elites.
One way to make the case for liberal arts is to accept the careerist premise and work with it: it’s better for one’s long-term career to be a thinker than to be solely focused on pragmatism and execution. Look at your heroes: Buffett, Jobs, Gates, etc. They all read and think reading is really important.
Another is to offer people the promise that they can look forward to studying Great Books in retirement, at least giving them a kind of aura.
A third is to offer liberal arts learning in smaller, bite-size amounts. You don’t have time to read the Gorgias, but maybe you can read a page a week.
A fourth is to offer learning opportunities under the auspices of something practical. Here, take this class on how to communicate well and earn trust, and by the way we’ll be discussing Sun Tzu, Lao Tzu, and Aristotle.
Those who know the beauty of the liberal arts have two battles to fight. One is persuading elites to emulate the encyclopedic aspirations of 18th century aristocrats, and not to become shallow technocrats. The other is persuading non-elites that they can and should enjoy what was once reserved only for aristocrats, and that this is both good for the soul and a path to greater worldly success.
As one who went to Columbia, the beating heart of the great books movement, in the early 60's, the height of the great books era, I think you exaggerate the impact. There were certainly a minority who were natural generalists and loved it, me included, and those among the various forms of driven careerism -- upward strivers, obsessed geeks, entrepreneurs, trust funders even -- who saw the value for their futures of generalist education. But we were minorities or minorities within minorities. The rest did it because you had to, like passing the swimming test, and moved on as if it never happened. There are many ways into wisdom. Great books are one. But even though, as WC Williams said, people die every day for lack of what is in them, the Greats don't save everybody.
How do you adapt advocacy for Great Books to the fact that there are just so many more options available to us than there were in the 18th century?
And I don't just mean lower-brow options, I mean genuinely Great Books. A lot of great stuff got written on the last 250 years and a lot of great earlier stuff that would never have come to the attention of Western intellectuals now does. The fraction one person, even if totally leisured and passionately committed, can reasonably read is thus way down, and we face both a paradox of choice and an opportunity cost that our ancestors did not. The impact of the biases of curatorial authorities is magnified too, which tends to undermine their perceived legitimacy.
So does an advocate for the liberal arts say: yes here is this huge menu, it doesn't really matter what you pick off of it anymore, just pick something, even at random? Or do you try to keep curating and prioritizing and ranking and recommending, and defend the value of that in spite of the inevitability of your bias?