“What, really, is a classic and why should we read so-called classics?” Samuel Johnson provides the answer in his Preface to Shakespeare. A classic, he writes, is a work that has survived the provinciality of its own moment in space and in time. If Shakespeare, who wrote in Elizabethan times, continues to appeal to Victorian and modern readers, and to readers outside England, it must be because he addresses universal themes, and in an appealing and enduring way. The literary critic Northrop Frye put it a little differently: A classic is simply “a work that refuses to go away.”
“Even so, why is it important for students to know about a bunch of great books?” It is less important for students to learn about the great books than it is for them to learn from the great books. The great books are about fundamental human questions; indeed, they are a kind of extended argument about these questions. The philosopher Leo Strauss writes, “Liberal education consists in listening to the conversation among the greatest minds. But here we are confronted with the overwhelming difficulty that this conversation does not take place without our help—that in fact we must bring about that conversation. The greatest minds utter monologs . . . and they contradict one another regarding the most important matters. . . . We must transform their monologs into dialogs.”
As Strauss suggests, this is not an easy process, but it is one that can be learned through effort, and the effort is worth it because the result is wonderfully illuminating.
Once again, the goal is not to give students a cocktail-party familiarity with a canon of great works. Indeed, Allan Bloom says it is better that students should be deeply excited, even have their lives changed, by one book. So if you want to embark on this journey, Chris, begin by choosing a writer who really speaks to you, such as Plato or Rousseau. That will get you started on what, I assure you, will be the most exhilarating and long-lasting adventure of your life.
“What is the point of having a static curriculum? Shouldn’t the curriculum change?” Yes, and the curriculum has always changed. When Moby Dick was first published, the book was a failure. One reviewer complained that it was a rather lengthy account of whaling practices in Boston. Silas Marner was once assigned in most great book courses in America. But in time, Moby Dick’s literary stock went up and Silas Marner’s went down. Today, Silas Marner is considered a derivative work, but Moby Dick is regarded as a great book. So curricula do change. But the basis for changing them has always been judgments of merit. What is new is that multiculturalists are seeking changes in the curriculum not based on merit but based on representation. They don’t argue that Rigoberta Menchu is better than Dante; their argument relies primarily on the fact that Dante was a white male and Rigoberta is a Guatemalan female. This is no basis for choosing great works or for giving students a good education.
“Shouldn’t people know something about other cultures?” Yes, but it is even more important that they understand the foundations of their own culture, especially when their own culture is shaping the modern world. If you met an educated fellow from China who had never heard of Confucius but was an expert on Mark Twain, this would be odd. People are expected to have a basic comprehension of their own culture. Similarly, American students should be reasonably well versed in the Federalist Papers, they should know the arguments that led to the Civil War, they should be familiar with the New Deal and the Great Society, they should be acquainted with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Otherwise they will remain aliens in their own civilization.
“But what does Western culture have to say to blacks and other minorities?” Western culture is the only culture to take diversity seriously. Only in the West has there been a serious questioning of ethnocentrism, of the notion that “my way is the best way.” The Greeks were ethnocentric, in a fashion, but their greatest thinkers realized that truth is the property of no culture. The Greeks were interested in diversity not for its own sake, and certainly not to affirm the self-esteem of anyone. The Greeks didn’t have, for example, Persian History Month. But the Greeks studied other cultures because they wanted to discover what is universally true about human nature. The Greeks recognized that human nature comes draped in the garb of culture and convention. Only by carefully and critically examining other cultures in relation to their own could the Greeks hope to discover what peoples had in common, and how they differed. The Greeks investigated the evident diversity of cultures to uncover the hidden truths about human nature.
“Give me an example of a Western classic that has something to say to a black man.” I can think of several, but let me give the example of Shakespeare’s Othello. Allan Bloom wrote a wonderful essay on this play for a book he co-authored with Harry Jaffa, Shakespeare’s Politics. In Bloom’s reading, which I am following here, Othello is a play about a dark-skinned man, a Moor, who is trying to become a full citizen of Venice. The problem is that Venice is a relatively closed society, an ethnocentric society, and it does not easily grant membership and recognition to foreigners. Othello is a convert to Christianity and he is a military hero, but this is not enough to give him entry into the inner citadels of Venetian society. So what does he do? He marries. He marries the fairest and most beautiful woman in Venice, Desdemona. And what does she see in him? She certainly does not marry him for looks because she says herself that she considers him ugly. Her attraction to Othello is that he tells wonderful and moving stories about faraway places and the grand exploits in which he has participated. Desdemona is a young and intelligent woman who feels restricted in the narrow, formal world of Venice. Othello represents for her a new world. But their relationship is based on a deep mutual insecurity that neither of them recognizes. The only person who recognizes this insecurity is the villain of the play, Iago. He uses it to bring about Othello’s destruction.
Think about this: A man wrongly suspects his wife of adultery, kills her, and then kills himself. Allan Bloom has remarked that if this were a Greek play, it would certainly be a comedy. But there is nothing comic or ridiculous about Othello. Even though he makes horrendous errors of judgment and destroys himself, Othello is a great man. The play can be read as a tragedy of assimilation, as a profound look at the vulnerability inherent in a person who seeks to become a full member of another society. Moreover, Shakespeare’s dignified portrayal of Othello, even as Iago and other characters make fun of his blackness, shows that even a work written in the sixteenth century is capable of magnificently transcending the ethnocentrism and prejudices of its time.
My conclusion is that not only do great works such as Othello have powerful and important things to say about prejudice and ethnocentrism—issues of special concern to minority students—but also such works demonstrate the universality of knowledge and greatness. Such universality was once the goal of leading African Americans such as scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, who envisioned a world in which “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously, with no scorn nor condescension.” It is in the great works of the Western tradition that minority students, and indeed all students, are most likely to discover the liberation they are seeking.
8
How Reagan Outsmarted the Liberals
Dear Chris,
From your e-mail, and its accompanying attachment, I see that you looked up Rigoberta Menchu on the Web and discovered that she won the Nobel Peace Prize. “Why, then,” you ask, “do you portray her as such a buffoon?” My friend, you have a lot to learn about those wacky Swedes who hand out Nobel prizes. Being a buffoon is by no means a disqualification. Remember that Rigoberta won in 1992, the five-hundred-year anniversary of the Columbus landing. The Swedes were determined to show their political correctness by giving the prize to an American Indian. But who? Chief Sitting Bull was dead, and Russell Means was a bit passé. So the choice seems to have come down to Rigoberta Menchu or the actress who played Pocahontas in the Disney movie. And Rigoberta won
, although thank God it wasn’t for literature!
There is a further postscript to this story. In 1998, an American anthropologist, David Stoll, revealed that many of the incidents described in I, Rigoberta Menchu were fabricated. Stoll’s allegations were checked and verified by Larry Rohter of the New York Times. For instance, in one of the most moving scenes in her book, Rigoberta describes how she watched her brother Nicolas die of malnutrition. But Stoll and the New York Times found Nicolas alive and well enough to be running a relatively prosperous homestead in a nearby town. According to Rigoberta’s own family, as well as residents of her village, she also made up an account of how a second brother was burned alive by army troops as her parents were forced to watch. Central to Rigoberta’s story—and the supposed source of her Marxist beliefs—is her account of how her impoverished family, working for slave wages on plantations, was oppressed by wealthy landowners of European descent. According to the locals, the dispute was really a land feud that pitted Rigoberta’s father against his in-laws. “It was a family quarrel that went on for years,” the mayor of the town told the New York Times. “I wanted peace, but none of us could get them to negotiate a settlement.”
You might think that, after these revelations, Rigoberta Menchu and her book would have been cast into outer darkness. But such is the leftist mind that even facts cannot violate a morality tale! The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that many American professors who teach Rigoberta Menchu’s autobiography intend to continue doing so, and they are angry with David Stoll for having humiliated an already-victimized woman of color. One of her American academic devotees said that even if Rigoberta did make stuff up, her memory must have been distorted by years of oppression! Personally I believe that I, Rigoberta Menchu has a place in the liberal arts curriculum. The book should be taught in courses that survey celebrated literary hoaxes.
Moreover, for her ingenuity in pulling off such an ingenious hoax, who can doubt that Rigoberta Menchu deserved a prize?
But enough about Rigoberta. Let us move from small things to large. Your letter makes a very interesting reference to Ronald Reagan. You remind me that you were much too young to remember Reagan as president. You grew up, poor fellow, in the Age of Clinton. Thus, instead of remembering Reagan’s Challenger speech, or the signing of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Mikhail Gorbachev, what you’ll probably remember is your mom’s turning off the television to shield your little brother from the sexually explicit parts of Clinton’s impeachment hearings. No wonder you are curious about what it must have been like to grow up with a real president. “What was Reagan really like?” you want to know. “What difference did he make? How will he be remembered?” Actually, the issues you raise are discussed in my book Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader. But I see that you are trying to save yourself $16. Very well, I will try to answer your questions.
Ronald Reagan seemed to be a very ordinary guy. He lacked all the basic credentials that our political science textbooks say are needed in a president. He was a C student at Eureka College. He spent most of his career as a movie actor. He was not a scholar or an intellectual. He had no foreign policy experience when he was first elected president. He put in a short day at the office, and allegedly took naps. He appeared to be an unserious, whimsical fellow who spent much of his time cracking jokes. To the liberal mind, and even to some conservatives, it seemed unlikely that he would prove an effective leader.
Yet even liberals know with hindsight that important things happened in the 1980s. The Soviet Union began to collapse, and socialism was discredited. Today, there are probably more Marxists on the faculty of our elite colleges than there are in all of Russia and Eastern Europe. The American economy, after being in the doldrums throughout the 1970s, went into high gear. The technological revolution really took off: Suddenly computers and cell phones were everywhere. A generation ago, John F. Kennedy told Americans who were young and idealistic to join the Peace Corps. Public service was seen as the embodiment of American idealism. But by the end of the 1980s, most young people would rather have started a new company than pick coffee in Nicaragua. The entrepreneur—not the bureaucrat—became the vehicle for youthful aspirations. This cultural shift had policy implications. The welfare state, which had expanded since the 1930s, stopped growing. The era of Big Government that began with FDR in the 1930s seemed to have come to an end in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Was this not the “Reagan Revolution” that the old boy promised?
The liberals refused to believe it. Since Reagan was such a simple, dumb, sleepy, unqualified fellow, he could not possibly have directed the vast changes of the 1980s. This was the premise of Edmund Morris’s official biography of Reagan, Dutch. Morris was selected to write about Reagan because Reagan’s aides thought that a man who had written favorably about Teddy Roosevelt was bound to like Reagan. After all, TR was an outdoors guy and so was RR. What Reagan’s aides ignored was that Teddy Roosevelt was also an aristocrat from an old moneyed family. And he was an intellectual who invited historians and anthropologists to the White House for learned debates on the fine points of scholarship. These are the aspects of TR that impressed Morris.
But Reagan was not like that. On several occasions, Morris visited the Reagan ranch in Santa Barbara. He probably looked on Reagan’s bookshelves for the works of Thucydides and Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill. They were not to be found. Instead, Morris would have seen copies of Reader’s Digest and Arizona Highways and the novels of Louis L’Amour. Morris seems to have decided right then that Reagan was an unsophisticated boob. Throughout his biography, Morris beats himself over the head to figure out how such a plebian could have achieved the great things that occurred during Reagan’s tenure. And ultimately Morris becomes so frustrated with solving this Reagan puzzle that he gives up, and instead of writing about Reagan he starts writing about himself. Never has a presidential biography failed so ignominiously to provide new insights into its subject. What a missed opportunity.
But let me tell you about my own experience with Reagan. I am part of a generation of young people who became interested in politics because of the Reagan Revolution. We saw Reagan as a cheerful, forward-looking guy. We loved his self-deprecating humor. Yet we also saw that, beneath that jocular exterior, Reagan was a determined man who was making some big and important claims. Indeed, he was taking on the big idea of the twentieth century, which is collectivism. Reagan wanted to halt the growth of the welfare state at home, and he wanted to dismantle the Soviet empire abroad. These were enormously ambitious goals. Many people, including most conservatives, considered Soviet Communism to be irreversible. So, too, Republicans such as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford had made their peace with the welfare state. Reagan was the first person to say “Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.”
Many of us young conservatives—including a small battalion from the Dartmouth Review—came to D.C. excited by Reagan and eager to be part of his revolution. In short order, many of us found ourselves working for the Reagan administration. There was even a Dartmouth Mafia in the White House. We were able to get these jobs because Reagan didn’t want to hire the old guys who had worked in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Reagan had run against Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, and many of these guys had viciously attacked Reagan. “Who needs them?” Reagan figured. “Yes, they have experience, but it is experience in screwing up.” At the age of twenty-six, I was appointed senior domestic policy analyst in the White House.
This was exciting for many reasons—big salary, big office, car and driver, the chance to make an impact on policy—but an important consideration for me was that I would finally be able to convince my family that I was doing something important. My parents had expressed concern when I chose not to attend the Wharton Business School and instead came down to Washington, D.C., to be a writer. Not only were they worried that I would starve but they weren’t sure what it
was that I actually did. My attempts to explain the mysterious contours of American politics were particularly ineffective. So finally I mailed my parents a photograph showing me side-by-side with Reagan. I figured that even if they still didn’t know precisely what I did, they would have to reckon that it was something significant. I found out later that just as my parents opened the package, my grandmother hobbled into the room, took one horrified glance at the photograph, and then exclaimed, “What is my grandson doing with that scoundrel Richard Nixon?” Since this incident, I have given up trying to raise the political consciousness of the D’Souza family.
The Reagan White House was an endlessly fascinating place. Walk down one hall and you’d see the Sons of Italy. On another floor a representative of the administration would be meeting with a group of Catholic nuns. Soviet émigrés with long beards sometimes showed up for a meeting with the president. On occasion, I saw Afghan children whose limbs had been blown off by Soviet mines. Every administration, I suppose, develops its own character according to the types of people it attracts. In the Clinton administration, I suspect you would have seen an entirely different crowd: union bosses, witches, transvestites, and so on.
In America, Reagan is today bathed in a warm glow of affection. Conservatives revere him, and even liberals claim to have developed a kinder, gentler feeling for the guy. This is in stark contrast to the 1980s, when liberals treated Reagan with loathing and contempt. For instance, Eric Alterman of the Nation described Reagan as a “pathological liar” and an “unbelievable moron” with a “heart of darkness” that showed a “fondness for genocidal murders.” Normal people would be unsettled by such allegations. Think of Dan Quayle, who has labored for years to dispel the public’s suspicion that he is an idiot. Reagan, by contrast, never exerted himself to rebut his critics. He even agreed with them. Once, when asked about his light work schedule, Reagan quipped, “They tell me hard work never killed anyone, but why take the chance?” During a speech at Eureka College in the mid-1980s, Reagan confronted the allegation that he had graduated from a third-rate school with a C average. Reagan mused, “Even now I wonder what I might have accomplished had I studied harder!”
Letters to a Young Conservative Page 5
