Seven reasons to study the classics

This morning I read Oliver DeMille’s Seven Reasons to Study the Classics over my toast and scrambled eggs. It’s really, really, really good. In fact, as I read it I wanted to climb to the roof of my complex and shout it out to all who could hear me. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t do that, since it was 6:00 a.m. :) (Among other reasons.)

Speaking of reasons, here are the seven he talks about:

1. The classics help us maintain our freedom and our civilization
2. The classics teach us human nature
3. The classics bring us face-to-face with greatness
4. The classics take us to the frontier to be conquered
5. The classics force us to think
6. The classics connect us to those who share the stories
7. Our canon becomes our plot

It’s all excellent, but my favorite is #5, “The Classics Force Us to Think”:

First we are caused to think about the characters in the story, then about ourselves, then about people we know and finally about humanity in general. At first reading the classics can be a chore, an assignment. If we persist, it eventually becomes entertainment. Then one day (after a few weeks for some, perhaps years for another) something clicks; all the exposure to greatness reaches critical mass. And you, the reader, awaken. Your exposure to greatness changes you: Your ideas are bigger, your dreams wilder, your plans more challenging, your faith more powerful.

The classics can be hard work, and that is exactly what is needed to learn to think. Thinking is hard; deep thinking is not entertaining or easy. Thinking is like exercise, it requires consistency and rigor. Like barbells in a weightlifting room, the classics force us to either put them down or exert our minds. They require us to think. And not just in a rote memory way, either. The classics make us struggle, search, ponder, seek, analyze, discover, decide, and reconsider. And, as with physical exercise, the exertion leads to pleasing results as we metamorphose and experience the pleasure of doing something wholesome and difficult that changes us for the better.

And just before that is #4, “The Classics Take Us to the Frontier to Be Conquered”:

The classics deal with the real questions of life, our deepest concerns: joy, pain, fear, love, hate, courage, anger, death, faith. These issues are reality; they are eternal and more lasting than jobs, careers, school, material things.

In the classics we can often experience other people’s characters more powerfully than in real life because the author lets us see their thoughts, feelings and reasons for and consequences of their choices (which we hardly ever see in others, and often not even in ourselves). Our goal in life is to become truly good, really happy. The classics help us see that quest in others and how their choices fail or succeed. A by-product of this rapport is the erasure of prejudices and ill-founded biases that divide and factionalize us from others. Classics help us connect with individuals whatever their race, creed, age, culture and even place in history.

I agree completely. Next to the gospel of Jesus Christ and my family alone, the books I’ve read have made me the person I am. Through them I’ve learned about human nature, about greatness, about suffering. And I feel more a part of the human race because of it.

Finally, he quotes Allan Bloom:

People sup together, play together, travel together, but they do not think together. Hardly any homes have any intellectual life whatsoever, let alone one that informs the vital interests of life. Educational TV marks the high tide for family intellectual life.

All too true…

I’ll probably be blogging a lot about this (the classics, education, etc.) in the near future, as it’s something that interests me a great deal.

I agree with reasons one, two, and five. I have reservations about reasons three and four (in particular). I’m not exactly sure what is meant by reason seven.

The classics represent where we have been. They represent people’s views on culture, human nature, thoughts, etc. in a time gone, and we are largely a sum of our past (our living past and that of the world). By seeing where we have gone, we can have a better idea of where we are going and where we want to go.

What I’m not so sure on is just what kind of greatness we are exposed to and how much of the unconquered frontier we encounter from the classics. One of the most important criteria for a work becoming a classic seems to me that the author must be dead, or the work to have existed long enough for the debate about it being good or not to have died down to the point where all we remember is the fuzzy, warm glow from its past, made hazy.

What I mean by that is we tend to put on pedestals things and people that have gone into the past. Ronald Reagan was sometimes noted to being somewhat clueless, to driving the deficit sky-high, and being somewhat out of touch. Once he died, all I could find were rosy remembrances of him and his great legacy. Yassir Arafat was regarded as a near lunatic, flirting with terrorists and terrorism, being unbending, and even hateful towards Israel. Once he died, a short while later I would hear talk of the great leader he was, working for his people. Only a few months and years earlier, he was regarded as a menace. A similar thing happened with Ariel Sharron.

A lot of Shakespeare’s works were regarded as sub-par in his time, fodder for the less educated and more base crowd. Many of the plays, indeed, are riddled with sexual innuendos, crude jokes, and inaccuracies, yet these things are glossed over, usually, because of his status as a Great, and his works as Classics. However, authors and works that weren’t given this monumental title are usually whittled away and scrutinized mercilessly.

The biggest problem I have with classics is that its attainance is almost purely subjective. What one person regards as acute to the human condition, as great, or whatever else, another person will see it as rubbish. I believe that it’s only with a lot of politics and indoctrination that we have the classics that we do, and we tirelessly go to them as a sort of crystal ball.

The classics have insights into humanity, yes, but so does each person. I cringe when I see when I see people adopt the viewpoint of a classic simply because it has that status and not because they put thought into it themselves. I also cringe when I see the viewpoint of another work completely rejected simply because it wasn’t a “classic” or accepted by one person or circle. And when something doesn’t have what we want on the surface, we “read into” it to find the deeper meaning we want.

Reading has largely made me who I am today as well, but the biggest factor has come from the discussion and even debates I have had with other people. Often this is over an idea from a book, classic, or “great”, but many times simply from the exploration of a subject on my own. These debates have been just as valuable, and maybe even just a little more than the work from whence it originated because they are dynamic. There’s give and take, there’s exploration, there’s discussion, there’s thought. A book or past item is very limited. It’s already written. You can’t debate with a book, you can’t challenge its position, you can’t think with it, and it will never change its mind. You can’t ask it what it thinks about a situation now because it doesn’t.

I may have come down a bit hard on books and if that’s how it seems, it isn’t quite what I intended. It’s the notion of classics always having so much more worth than non-classics that I don’t like. Books are invaluable and much can be gained from them. But it’s all of them, not just the classics. To abstract the concept a little more, it’s ideas and concepts that are invaluable. I think of it as research. Even from the most ill-executed, the least thought out, and most botched research will come information and benefit. In the end, we are better for having it than for not having it.

Exposure to classics is good, but one needs exposure to other things just as much and it is no substitution for one’s own thoughts. I think it’s best to expose oneself to a whole variety of things, including things we disagree with, hate, or even are offended by. An idea that converges with one’s own idea, or with commonly accepted truth is strengthening, but nothing will challenge a person to think more than idea they don’t like, hate, or are offended by. And sometimes they even end up agreeing with it.

I just found this article on the Internet (through the Dilbert blog, actually) and thought you’d like to read it.

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/departments/elementary/?article=WhatEffectReadingHasonOurMinds&GT1=8236

I would be interested to see a continuation of the study to see if people who read and frequently discussed/debated what they read knew more than people who just read (at relatively equal levels). Even so, I find the conclusions to be interesting.

Ah, but that’s the whole point! It’s not that we should read only the classics, or that the classics are a substitute for one’s own thinking. The problem (which reading the classics remedies) is that too many people only read junky modern novels which don’t offer much except a thrill. Or they don’t read at all, instead getting their information from that oracle of wisdom, the television. ~sigh~ (And that article is really interesting, by the way. Its findings jive with me, but what do you expect — I’m a bookman. :))

Many of the books that have survived teach us more about the human condition than a lot of the superficial dross being peddled today. Reading Dan Brown is like eating cotton candy, but reading Tolstoy or Dickens or Goethe is like a roast duck with mashed potatoes and garlic bread.

More directly, when I read Dan Brown, I get an exciting plot with a bunch of art history or cryptography thrown in (but due to the nature of his research, I can’t actually believe any of it without verifying it elsewhere), but that’s about it. It’s shallow.

On the other hand, reading War & Peace or Pride & Prejudice or Jane Eyre teaches me about what it means to be human. Sure, the books aren’t perfect. But even so, they rise above themselves, and that is what has earned them a place among the classics. Through these books I’ve found a deep, vibrant well that fills me and sustains me in this journey of life. They are different. I’ll say it again: they are different. Grand, noble, and uplifting, these good classics are miles above the Clancy and Grisham novels of today.

Yes, there are “bad” classics, those that aren’t worth our time. Mere oldness does not equal greatness, for there was garbage then as there is garbage now. On the other hand, however, many of the books which have stood the test of time do have great things to offer us; the drivel of old was long ago washed out to sea and hasn’t been seen since. As a whole, the classics are indeed worth our time and effort. Especially if we’re wasting our lives away watching the sewage that seeps up out of the TV.

Adopting philosophies wholesale without examining them and proving them to oneself is folly and is the mark of the unwashed masses. What’s important is that classics enable us to think more clearly, more expansively, more intelligently. They are emphatically not a substitute for original thought, or for discussion or debate. They do help provide a foundation, however, and they enrich and enlighten those discussions. I certainly don’t think that our modern insights into humanity are all bunk. If that were the case, I’d give up writing forever.

Nor does loving and reading the classics mean that we eschew all other books. But all too often in today’s society we’re stuck in the now. Pop culture is ephemeral, and for many people that’s all the culture they know. Some of it will last; most will not. If all we read is Dan Brown and John Grisham, we’re cheating ourselves. As C.S. Lewis said in “Learning in Wartime”:

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village…[and one] who has lived in many times … is in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

This is important. In his essay “On the Reading of Old Books,” Lewis said:

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books…. The student… feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand…. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that first-hand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than second-hand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire…. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

I recommend Dominic Manganiello’s article “Why Read Old Books?” on the Augustine College website. Quoting G.K. Chesterton via Manganiello:

These works remain “original, not in the paltry sense of being new,” Chesterton points out, “but in the deeper sense of being old: [they are] original in the sense that [they deal] with origins.”

That is a very good point. I tend to denounce classicism in the elitism in generates. However I think it’s important to note that part of what it is to be human is the droll, commonplace material found all around. The trash novels do still teach one important thing, and that is the power of pathos.

But rather than say it’s the classics that bring greatness, I think it’s something much broader. It’s interacting with something that challenges the way you think, which forces you to look at a viewpoint you otherwise wouldn’t consider. It’s exposure to great writing. It’s exposure to a variety of ideas and thoughts. The classics are what they are because they were usually the first steps in their fields, but modern literature shows you what those things mean today.

There is a lot of push for the now-now-now, undoubtedly, but what is happening now-now-now is also what is forming tomorrow. When it becomes a quest to entertain, it’s of little help, but when it becomes a quest to know and how to change, then reading of modern as well as classical writing is essential. After all, every classic was at one time out there with, and sometimes even a part of, the good-for-nothing trash crowd.

The problem here is that you are responding to a list of topics that were covered in a talk, by Oliver DeMille, then inserted in his book in 2000, and the book was revised in 2006. There is so much in this chapter. I read the 2000 edition about 6 times.

Yes there is a list, but it is a starting point, not the end. DeMille encourages people to create and define their own classics. He feels a classic is any work that you can experience again and again that you learn something every time you experience it, and you are better for that experience. A musical piece can do that, art can do that, a person can be a classic, movies can be classics, board games can be classics, and definitely, the temple is a classic. There are probably many other types of classics. Too often we go through life just being “entertained to death, spiritual death.” Yes, people can fall in love with the entertainment value and revisit a work, over and over again and not be changed. Just because a book is on the list, does not mean he agrees with it. he wants people to ponder what they are learning and discuss it with others.

Read both the 2000 and 2006 edition of A Thomas Jefferson Education by Demille, and compare. There is so much there. You may even understand how your canon becomes your plot.

Another thing about classics covered by DeMille, is that every field has its classics. These were the great minds, that asked the great questions, and their pursuance of those answers, laid the foundation of that field. He encourages scholars to study the masters, instead of their students.

Classics do bring us face to face with greatness, he did not say face to face with perfect, infallible people. Reagan was a man. He did good things and he made mistakes. I look for the good and things worthy of emulation things. Sometimes it is what you learn not to do that is important.

Shakespeare seems coarse to our modern eyes, so do parts of the Bible, especially the Old Testament. In fact, the best way to read Shakespeare is with the Bible in one hand and Shakespeare in the other. He was great at holding a mirror to society’s hypocrisy and the flaws of human nature. I never enjoyed Shakespeare more than after I studied it through George Wythe College.

I believe DeMille leans more toward Harold Bloom’s How to Read a Book and Why, than he does toward Adler’s how to Read a Book.

I don’t know that I’d call it a problem, Donna. :)

The problem comes in responding to a list that Shaun has no idea what was intended by the author and what stands behind those ideas. I feel the thought behind those points were helpful in understanding them.

Ah, my bad. :)

[…] I ought to be in bed, but I couldn’t resist this. Earlier this evening my elders quorum president randomly brought over this book list (he knows I crave books almost as bad as drug addicts need their fixes ;)), and it was like Christmas had come early. The list is apparently entitled “One Hundred Selections from the George Wythe College Required Classics List,” and it’s from Appendix A of Oliver DeMille’s A Thomas Jefferson Education, © 2000. (For more of this flavor, see Seven reasons to study the classics.) […]