culture

Are the Great Books truly great?

University of Dallas
Southern Methodist University
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale

Ryan Murphy

Southern Methodist University

January 11th, 2022
Professor Wilson tells us that the Great Books “inspire readers with their depictions of human nature or their reflections on truth, goodness, and beauty” and ask enduring questions, like “What is the role of the individual within society?” Assume that these are important goals for tertiary education. But why assume that the Great Books are the best means of achieving those goals?
The correct way of framing the issue is that there is a limited pot of student time and effort that we are able to use for the purposes of education. Our objective is to maximize the amount we convey to students, whether that means “asking enduring questions” or “learning a programming language.” (Note – if something is especially inspiring or interesting, interpret it to mean there is less of a hurdle to reading it.)
With the Great Books, you spend a significant portion of that limited pot on what does little to fulfill that objective, if for no other reason than because they are difficult to read. Is there no work that asks a question like “What is the role of the individual within society?” in a more digestible form that is also more relevant for students today? I am not saying “dumb it down.” But a reading doesn’t become smarter or more praiseworthy because it is more difficult to read.
Regarding grounding debates historically (“knowing what came before”), well, no one knows what actually came before because our best guess is that most works of antiquity are lost. And at any rate, if we are unable to summarize the takeaways from, for instance, Plato, necessary to contextualize modern political philosophy for almost any undergraduate in 3-5 pages, the system is even more broken than I thought.
One recent back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that 90% of the people who ever received their PhD were still alive as of 2015. Before recent history, you had to be the “right” gender, race, and class to even be in the position to contribute to the frontier of human expression and knowledge. There are now upwards of eight billion candidates to contribute. Population and the number of minds out there are, in the words of Julian Simon, the ultimate resource for progress.
Are we even allowed to progress beyond the Great Books, or is that closed off by assumption?
For us to devote our scarce time and effort reading the Great Books, these works need to compete with modernity, not assert privilege. Being the first to say something is not a trump card. You can throw out 98% of what is being produced by academia and the arts in the last half century as trash and it doesn’t matter. The numbers are too big. Whatever it is you wish to experience with the Great Books, there is something else out there today that does it better, and it will be informed by our present forms of scientific knowledge, more comprehensible with modern writing conventions, and in closer dialogue with our contemporaries.
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