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?
I sympathize as an Ivy League grad, but I beg to differ on one issue: prevalence. I think you’ll find that America has far more deep readers of Great Books in absolute numbers AND as a percentage of the population. The college educated upper middle class has exploded in size since the 1960s. The issue I think is that MOST of these people want a lifestyle that non-technical, non-corporate careers simply don’t offer anyone. So, in many ways, nothing has changed. Only trust fund kids can major in English, write and read and earn no meaningful income. Their trust is their medieval patron. I went to school with them. The rest of us were teased with the fantasy of a Philosopher’s life because our Dads could pay for elite educations.
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?
Still think the best selling point is:
You have questions about your life and Life;
And, across time and space, the Great Books
Are the best collection of human attempts at
Answers that you will ever come across.
A Repository of Wisdom.
I sympathize as an Ivy League grad, but I beg to differ on one issue: prevalence. I think you’ll find that America has far more deep readers of Great Books in absolute numbers AND as a percentage of the population. The college educated upper middle class has exploded in size since the 1960s. The issue I think is that MOST of these people want a lifestyle that non-technical, non-corporate careers simply don’t offer anyone. So, in many ways, nothing has changed. Only trust fund kids can major in English, write and read and earn no meaningful income. Their trust is their medieval patron. I went to school with them. The rest of us were teased with the fantasy of a Philosopher’s life because our Dads could pay for elite educations.