Reading Obnoxious Sources

Originally posted 1/3/2024 to LL

Something popped up in my Readwise daily review this morning that I wanted to comment on, even thought I’m not quite ready to review this entire book. In A Great Idea at the Time, Alex Beam quoted Mortimer Adler saying in a TV interview on William F. Buckley's Firing Line that Allan Bloom "and his master, Leo Strauss, teach the Great Books as if they were teaching the truth. But when I teach them, I want to understand the errors." Beam said Adler "railed, as if public television viewers had the faintest idea who the German-born philosopher Leo Strauss was, or what errors Adler was talking about." This strikes me as a perfect example of the problem I had with Beam's approach, which I think was mean-spirited. He completely missed the point that Adler was making to complain about the obscurity of a reference.

However, the rest of the passage I highlighted also illustrates why it is valuable to read sources that aren't completely satisfying or that you don't agree with. Beam went on to say, "'They indoctrinate their students with the ‘truth’ they find in the books,' Adler continued. 'Strauss reads Plato and Aristotle as if it was all true, i.e., women are inferior, and some men are destined to be slaves'." (pages 127-8 in the Kindle version) This is a very valuable bit of information about the difference between the way Adler seems to have understood "The Great Conversation" and how some conservatives promoting the "Western Canon" were deploying it. Too often we lump everybody together who says we ought to read the classics and say they're all a bunch of fogeys trying to revive the golden age of Anglo-American empire. Adler's remarks on Firing Line suggest he was more open to complexity and less committed to a unitary truth than some others. This is useful to understand.

It would be interesting to listen to the actual interview and hear the context in which Adler said this. Unfortunately, Beam did not cite his sources (I know, right?), so I'll have to try to find it myself. Adler appeared several times on Buckley's show that are available on YouTube. Although I'm probably more interested in his other ideas rather than specifically in his reaction to Allan Bloom, I'll let you know if I run across it. And I'll post a more complete review of Beam's book soon. I'll try to focus on what I learned from it, not what annoyed me about it.