Book Review: A Great Idea at the Time

[osprey_archer]

I read Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books as if it were a box of bonbons. The whole story is just peak mid-twentieth century America: the boy wonder college president, the brain trust (largely his classmates from Yale!) who picked out the works for the Great Books of the Western World, their absolute self-assurance that this was the best that had ever been written and thought and the almost messianic belief in the power of Art and Culture to save us all.

”I’m not saying that reading and discussing the Great Books will save humanity from itself,” Hutchins said, “but I don’t know anything else that will.” Later in life he became obsessed with creating a one-world government to control the threat of the atom bomb, for which he felt a tormenting guilt, as the first tests that eventually led to the bomb occurred on the University of Chicago campus during Hutchins' tenure as president (on the grounds of the old football field, available for testing because Hutchins had disbanded the football team).

Given this incredibly high ambition, both Hutchins (the boy wonder college president) and Mortimer Adler, his right-hand man, died convinced that they were failures. Beam mentions discussing this with Charles Van Doren, who knew them both, and Beam commented, surely that's not the case?, and Van Doren replies gently, "No, I think they were right." Certainly in both cases their reach far exceeded their grasp.

(And yes, this is THAT Charles Van Doren, who acquired national infamy as a quiz show cheat. After his disgrace, Mortimer Adler stood by him and gave him a job as an encyclopedia salesman to help him get back on his feet, which is a lovely and human moment from the famously abrasive Adler.)

In general, though, most people connected with the creation of the Great Books were phenomenally successful. My favorite is Beam's commentary on Benton, who in 1945 became “assistant secretary of state for what the United States would never call propaganda - he oversaw the United States Information Agency, among other things…”

The Great Books were enormously popular (in the sense of sales if not, perhaps, in the sense of actually being read) through the 1960s, but as the counterculture gained steam they fell out of favor. However, Beam points out, they have had a long, long afterlife, during which they remained a hobby for a fervent though graying part of the population - he describes his attendance at a weekend Great Books conference, where the book discussions sound delightful - and the curriculum (with some emendations) ​at the tiny college of St. John's.

I find St. John's enchanting. A year or two before I went to college, Smithsonian magazine published an article about St. John's, and its eccentricity thrilled me so much (the Johnnies' game of choice is croquet!) that I actually considered applying. But upon further consideration, the book list defeated me. I could have gotten on board with the ancient Greek classics, but I just couldn't with reading Newton and Lavoisier and various other centuries-old scientific thinkers.

(This was apparently a stumbling block for Hutchins' Great Books, too: many, many people, including a large portion of the committee!, thought the inclusion of outdated scientific works was ridiculous, no matter how ground-breaking they had been at the time. Other parts of Aristotle's work might be for all time but his physics certainly were not.)

I still find it enchanting, though, and I did feel a bit wistful about the might-have-beens as I read it. When some Johnnies got arrested during the Civil Rights Movement, they scrawled ancient Greek graffiti inside the jail cells. How cool is that?

This is, of course, more or less the kind of college that Hutchins wanted to turn the University of Chicago into; he had only a very peripheral involvement in St. John's. It is certainly an irony of his life that his vision was realized so fully by someone else. But there is something beautiful about the fact that this vision was realized by someone.

Comments

[asakiyume]

I have some friends who went to St. Johns (if my memory isn't playing tricks on me... but I think I'm right)--the writer/editor Julia Rios (of Mermaids Monthly fame, and also Bridge to Elsewhere, which I was shilling so hard a bit ago) and her husband.

a fervent though graying part of the population --hahaha, love that.

[osprey_archer]

Mermaids Monthly is EXACTLY the sort of thing that I would expect a St. Johns grad to come up with, tbh, in being such a follow-the-beat-of-your-own-drum publication.

Beam's description of the Great Books weekend he attended reminded me of the time I went to a line-dancing event at a local social club, where I was the youngest person in the room by about forty years. Everyone was very nice! But I did feel a little out of step.

[kore]

Yes she did! We didn't overlap, but I know her through a circle of other Johnnie acquaintances. Johnnies are BONDED FOR LIFE because you all go through the same experience, which nobody else outside SJC does.

[asakiyume]

Wow, that's great! I didn't know you were an alum too ^_^

[kore]

Oh yeah! LONG time ago, tho.

Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque

[kore]

Reading the outdated science and chemistry stuff actually really works for a while, because what you're doing is the history of science and thought really -- freshman/sophomore year is the undeclared History of Atomic Theory -- and you can see how scientific theory actually evolves through the centuries and how it gets to Copernicus basically being able to flip Ptolemy around and go "Ah, yes." And Newtonian physics is still pretty accurate in its context. Lavoisier in particular has a lovely translation in the Dover edition and after you've slogged through a lot of nonsense about the aether, reading his theories about "fucking the air out of the tube" (there's an SJC t-shirt with the long s on it) is kind of delightful.

But the SJC lab equipment was HORRIBLE, at least when I was there, and if you don't have any experience in physics experiments, it's extremely frustrating. What actually really didn't work was junior year, you study electricity and magnetism -- and electromagnetism -- leading up to Maxwell's equations, and that was hard as fuck and you study from a lab manual written by the faculty, not a textbook, and lots of people dropped out rather than face it because that's also the year you read basically nothing other than Kant and Hume and a lot of hardcore political theory. Hobbes, Smith, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, I could go on. Most of that seemed really fucking useless to me, because it was all written in jargon and as far as I can tell 20th century philosophy turned into a total dead end and why do you only get to read THREE novels that year?? Even if one of them is Don Quixote.

(NOT THAT I'M BITTER.)

The bigger controversy re SJC is they don't track classes in which you do need actual training and can't just sit there doing the blind elephant thing -- you know, like math, language, lab, even some music reading/analysis -- and that's even before getting into the fact that even if you don't sacrifice the whole Great Books idea, there are many women and POC authors they're just ignoring, like Frederick Douglass for example -- I didn't get to read his autobiography til I was in a grad school Early AmLit class, and it just knocked me out. It would fit perfectly into the Program! But they'll never add it. They do have optional classes ("preceptorials") and all-college seminars which are much, much more diverse, but they're not part of the core.

Re: Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, I remember also the article mentioned that all the teachers are supposed to teach all the classes, including Greek and French where it might, in fact, be considered desirable to have a teacher who knows Greek or French... Ultimately it was just a bridge too far for me. But given my love for reading lists and general eccentricity, it has remained an alluring Road Not Traveled.

Re: Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque

[kore]

Yeah, I had a freshman year language tutor who knew NO Greek, and it was terrible ("I'm learning along with you!" No, NOBODY is learning here). You could choose your own schedule to a pretty big degree, since everyone was studying the same thing and the curriculum was fixed, and most people would try to game for the professors who knew the subject the best. (I got the actual composer Lawrence Cave, a dear friend of my mom's, for sophomore music tutorial, and that was amazing.)

Re: Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque

[osprey_archer]

When I was in college, our benighted linguistics department would rope in the language teachers to teach linguistics classes, and I took Intro from Linguistics from a woman who was presumably very competent in her actual department (Japanese) but did NOT know much about the formal study of linguistics. Horrible. Shockingly, it is often helpful to actually know something about a subject when one teaches that subject!

[kore]

Oh yeah, I think Stringfellow Barr also hated SJC by the end (he called it a "wind-egg," which I think in Plato is like this idea of hot air). Or maybe that was Scott Buchanan, lol. It is considered EXTREMELY Johnnie that the founders of the New Program mostly flounced off declaring it a failure, because failure is actually a sought-after mode at the college. It's not seen as always a terrible thing. Which can make for some very weird resutls, but it's like the total opposite of most colleges with tests, grading, final exams, &c &c. It's also considered very Johnnie to LOATHE or at least look down on Mortimer Adler. It is a pretty idiosyncratic place.

[osprey_archer]

Beam is clearly trying hard to be fair to Adler, and he does find a few nice moments, like when Adler gave Charles Van Doren a job - I've noticed that extremely abrasive people often do have this streak of loyalty, perhaps because it's a way to bind people to them that doesn't involve being pleasant. (Maybe that's cynical.)

But on the whole Adler comes across as an obnoxious blowhard who never shuts up and had, by the end of his life, some jaw-droppingly racist opinions. When the Great Books relaunch in 1990 was criticized for its total lack of works by authors of color, he came back with something like "No Black authors have written any Great Books." (Which is horrible in itself and also completely sidesteps the issue of "Why none of the great Chinese classics?")

[kore]

YES INDEED

Altho SJC does have the Eastern Classics GI program! Which I always wanted to do, but it never worked out. Some Johnnies go right from SJC undergrad to the Eastern Classics grad program, which is neat.

Saul Bellow was also a big proponent of the Great Books Program and said something incredibly racists like, "When the Zulus have a Tolstoy, we will read him." SHUT UP, DUDE.