A Good Conversation?

A theme that I think may be lurking in the background of some of the discussions I've been having with people and things I've been reading lately about education for civic engagement (sometimes, more dramatically described as "saving democracy"), has to do with the question of how much people need to understand in order to be suitably grounded in the shared culture? Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins famously claimed that a main goal of the Great Books program was to invite regular people to participate in the Great Conversation of Western Culture and to provide them access to the foundational works that create the shared vocabulary and provide the themes, questions, and answers upon which this Conversation is based. But is it really true that in order to participate in American culture and support our democracy, one actually has to read all these books?

I am not suggesting that people should not try to read as many of the Great Books as they can. But let's at least admit it's a pretty high bar. Not everyone is going to reach it. Even people who diligently work away at it, will need about a decade to complete the work, if they do it on Adler's suggested schedule. I’ve had my 1952 first-edition set since the year began, and I’ve read only The Illiad and part of The Odyssey so far (I also went on a tangent to Beowulf and considered adding Gilgamesh, but that’s another story for another day). I'm very happy to see there are a lot of people working away at these books and writing about it on Substack, and this suggests to me there are probably a lot more folks quietly reading and not blogging about it. This is a very hopeful development.

But what about the huge number of people who can't make the commitment to a ten-plus year reading project? Because they have other responsibilities, perhaps. Is there nothing available for them, to help them understand their culture more deeply and become better participants in it? Is there no way to leverage new media? Aren’t there any options at all for a busy adult who might really like to learn more? Or a young person who finds this type of "Humanities" content isn't even remotely part of what they're expected to learn for their degree?

Imagine students attending a college class -- let's say physics or history. They're not actually expected to do most of the experiments and remake the discoveries of physics, or to read all the primary sources and pore through archives in an introductory history course. A professor and a textbook provide background and tell them the things they need to know in order to adequately "understand" the subject. If they want to become professional physicists or historians, obviously they'll need to actually learn the techniques and practice the discipline themselves. But most people who take introductory surveys or even upper-level undergraduate courses only flirt with that type of work. Can we create an equivalent process to try to bring people into the Great Conversation?

Yes, this could result in people with less than a complete understanding of the Great Books. And I understand and agree that, especially in the case of literature, the actual words on the page are part of the value; not just the theme or a plot summary. Actually, I believe this strongly enough that I did not read the translations of Homer in the Great Books volumes, but upgraded to Emily Wilson. However, to the purists who might object to what's lost when people fail to squeeze all the juice out of the oranges of Aristotle or Marcus Aurelius or Hume or Darwin, or even Milton or Shakespeare: isn't a little juice better than none? Especially if these sources are really all that stands against the failure of the West and the end of Democracy? I wonder whether it might be useful to look at how the Great Books Foundation developed the Junior Great Books? Don’t these readers read excerpts or shorter works, to get a sense of the authors’ voices? Wouldn’t this be similar to the way I have excerpted primary sources for my students and edited them down to digestible portions that still enable students to experience the voices and perspectives of the past? Or for that matter, how my father developed his undergraduate surveys in world literature? These might be models, I think.

Can we invite everybody with the time, inclination, and resources to join the Great Conversation, but at the same time offer other folks an opportunity to join a Good Conversation? One reason I ask this is, it’s 4:28 AM on Friday July 26th and I’m getting regular text updates from my daughter and son-in-law in the hospital, as she is about to give birth to my (first) grandson. How different from the way I informed my own parents of the birth of even their youngest grandchild, seventeen years ago!