As detailed elsewhere, I started as a pre-ministry major at Concordia Lutheran Junior College in Ann Arbor, switched to philosophy at Cal State Long Beach, transferred to political science at Columbia, stayed on for JD and MBA degrees, dabbled in other coursework over the next two decades, returned for a master’s in social work at a different Columbia (i.e., University of Missouri), finished that degree back in Ann Arbor, this time at the U of M, and got thrown out of three different PhD programs (Indiana: Parks & Rec and Social Work; Arkansas: Educational Statistics and Research Methods).
The shorthand explanation for those PhD episodes is that I am a white male, living during a racist and sexist phase in American higher education, and as such was readily discarded when my presence proved inconvenient. The previous paragraph’s links lead to longer explanations, for those who lack more edifying reading material.
That shorthand explanation may seem to imply a conservative political orientation. I’m not sure that my views fall neatly into a single political category, but at least in this area the better characterization would be socialist, as reflected in this excerpt from an article on the World Socialist Web Site (2001):
By defining “diversity” solely in terms of race, the university [of Michigan] obscures the enormous class inequalities in the educational system. Why does it not enrich the educational environment by allowing working class youth of all races to attend? In addition to ensuring greater racial diversity, such a policy would undermine the privileges accorded to the economic elite ….
The aim of creating diversity and equality in higher education is a legitimate goal. This goal, however, must be based upon granting to all youth of all races the ability to pursue an education.
I provide those introductory remarks for context. I try to read articles on various subjects from across the political spectrum, and for some time have been mulling over the many references to the “Western canon” that I have seen in such sources as The American Conservative (TAC). As an undergraduate in Columbia College, I was one of those young adults whom TAC (Gonzalez, 2019) speaks of:
Columbia University is distinctive for continuing to teach the Western canon to its students. The Core Curriculum, commonly referred to as “the Core,” is compulsory for all Columbia undergraduates; it includes mandatory courses in Western music, philosophy, literature, and art. …
[I]t is important to read the canon because its texts, from the Bible to The Wealth of Nations, have shaped the world in which we live …. [contributing (to) such concepts as] “democracy,” “national self-determination,” “civic equality,” “reason,” “scientific innovation,” “free inquiry,” “abolitionism,” “individualism,” “human rights,” and “the rule of law.” …
Whether that heritage is “net good” or “net bad” is a secondary concern. More important is possessing the knowledge needed to trace the genealogy of the ideas in the world around us, to understand the history of the intellectual trends (from Christianity to the Enlightenment) that created our surroundings, to have a point of comparison between our current circumstances and those of the past societies that most shaped the present.
I first became acquainted with the concept of the Western canon in 1967, I think, when I migrated from the one-room Lutheran elementary school to the public junior (or possibly it was the senior) high school, whose library had a copy of The Great Books of the Western World. The dozens of authors represented in that 54-volume set started with the ancient Greeks and continued to the early 20th century. According to American Heritage (Mcarthur, 1989), that Great Books series grew out of Columbia’s very first Core literature course (1919), in which Professor John Erskine inaugurated the format that I experienced: each week, the class would discuss a single classic.
In those roots, we encounter several problems in the concept of the Western canon. First is the extent of that canon. The Great Books of the Western World series grew from 54 to 60 volumes in its second edition, with broader inclusion of 20th-century writers. But others have been more ambitious. Open Culture (2014) describes Harold Bloom’s famous Western Canon (1994) as “tightly focused on only 26 authors” – but then says that, “in a series of four appendices, Bloom lists the hundreds of other names he considers canonical.” Stretching the concept to its limits, Goodreads indicates that (at this writing) its members have shelved a total of 6,922 books in the “western-canon” category.
Even among the relatively small list of authors covered in The Great Books of the Western World (GBWW) series, there is a problem of selectivity. Note that, in the foregoing quote, TAC (Gonzalez, 2019) speaks of “texts, from the Bible to The Wealth of Nations,” and of “intellectual trends (from Christianity to the Enlightenment) that created our surroundings.” One might ask what happened to the last couple of centuries. According to Wikipedia, The Wealth of Nations and the Enlightenment were already a part of history more than 200 years ago. Gonzalez may like the Bible, but it’s not in GBWW. On the other hand, his fellow writers at TAC – for example, TAC (Zubatov, 2021) – dislike what they consider Marxist or neo-Marxist ideas of recent decades:
[According to Bauerlein,] the moral relativism and universal skepticism of French theory opened up a vulnerability in the academic humanities, which stripped them of their role as fora for weighty intellectual combatants to wage a contest of visions …. [Yet] students remained eager to learn—indeed, still sensed intuitively—that something deep and significant was at stake in the great artifacts of the Western canon. Neo-Marxist theories swept in to fill that void.
Turned over to the care of theorists who resented everything the landmark canonical works represented, interpretation was no longer about discerning the actual or potential aesthetic and intellectual insights infused by great creators or even about finding “the hidden roads” that lead from one installment in the Tradition to the next, to quote the great literary critic Harold Bloom. It became, rather, about ferreting out the power relations and systems of oppression and domination of which such works were held to be emanations.
But Marx is in GBWW, and are these not texts that – to quote Gonzalez again (above) – “have shaped the world in which we live”? Zubatov (better, McWhorter, 2021) may be right in contending that some of these new ideas manifest a religious commitment to belief at the expense of reason – that, basically, you can’t talk to these people, because they already know what they want to believe. Still, these are ideas that one must understand if one is to achieve Gonzalez’s goal of understanding “the history of the intellectual trends … that created our surroundings.”
So, within the uncertain scope of the Western canon, there is a problem of selectivity, where people who trumpet the importance of that canon are hostile to parts of it – elevating the Bible, in many TAC articles, and denigrating Marx, as just illustrated. There is also a problem of inscrutability, where – as I discovered when I first began paging through GBWW – a lot of that stuff is damn technical. I still remember my bafflement at Aquinas’s Objections and Reply Objections and so forth. To my Jesus Freak mindset, the operative question was, What does this have to do with the Bible? That, however, was only a sampler of the antiquated and/or obscure verbiage pervading so many other works in that series. One must wonder: have these people who are so loud and proud about the Western canon ever actually tried to read it?
The answer seems to entail another form of selectivity. Truth be told, nobody is reading Schopenhauer. Nobody is reading Plutarch. Nobody is reading Rabelais. Even within the works of better-known writers, as I learned in my many literature and philosophy courses over the years, nobody is reading much beyond a few well-known high points (e.g., Descartes’s cogito ergo sum; selected passages in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason). You could flush a very large portion of GBWW down the toilet (assuming it were printed on appropriate paper), with little to no consequence beyond requiring a small number of inordinately recherche reports to fall back on secondary sources. I am no stranger to the fascination of ancient works. But on the question of what constitutes the core of our culture, please, let’s be realistic.
There is a difference between what is preserved and what Gonzalez et al. are praising. Not every old manuscript is worth reading, not even if it played some role in leading to something important. Keeping that clutter merely dilutes and distracts from the canon’s legitimacy. The primary reason why academia has not been more excited about the Western canon is not that the feminists or multiculturalists took over (e.g., National Review, 2021). The primary problem is that the canon’s defenders have been trying to defend the wind – more precisely, the hot air of so many archaic texts. If you want people to fight for something, you have to make it worth fighting for.
What’s worth fighting for? The question begs another: for what? There must be some objective or ideal at stake, else we would not bother. The sources cited above are predominantly concerned with acquainting undergraduates with key writings. So let us dispense with two competing scenarios. First, for the general public – and also for college students studying ideas rather than works – it might be feasible (and it would surely be more effective) to distill the canon’s millions of words into a network of digitized, linked, clearly stated questions and propositions, so that people could get to the heart of an issue on a realistic timeframe. Second, for the lifelong learner or the student in anything more advanced than a general-purpose survey course, it is not clear that a canon is helpful. If I want to explore Plato’s philosophy, I might appreciate pointers to which of his works would be most relevant for my purposes; but even in that, I should be led by scholars and by curiosity, not by an inflexible canon.
For purposes of introductory undergraduate education, the Western canon calls for yet another level of selectivity. With limited exceptions, what excites people about the canon is its works of fiction, not of nonfiction. Melville and Hemingway, yes; Montesquieu and Harvey, no. Some people may be talking about book-burning, but this is not that: this is just a question of what a college education should include, where the inclusion of one item means the exclusion of another. With few exceptions, this seems to be the primary message of canon devotees – as in, for instance, Bloom’s Western Canon (1994).
But even when you narrow the canon down to those Western works of fiction that have been exceptionally influential or compelling, you still have a problem of having far too much material to cover within the 30 weeks of an academic year, at the rate of one per week. It would be more realistic to assign one work per week for the four years of a college degree – yet even that would not carry students beyond the many books recommended on various “100 best” lists.
And then there is the problem of what it means to “cover” or “discuss” a work within a single week of an undergraduate course. Consider, for instance, Columbia’s current syllabus, which includes Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Wikipedia presents that novel as an important influence on psychoanalysis, existentialism, and suppression of dissent in the Soviet Union. These are broad and important topics. But how well are undergraduates prepared for them? Note that last example, involving suppression of dissent. Within this very article, we see TAC (Gonzalez, 2019) arguing for the importance of the Western canon – and yet dismissing classic writers, like Dostoevsky, whose works came into existence after the Enlightenment. Even Gonzalez gives signs of not internalizing what Dostoevsky tried to tell him.
Let us not overestimate what actually happens in college education these days. Crime and Punishment runs to 430 pages. Do you think most college students will even read that, in one week, never mind being prepared to discuss its intellectual import? I wouldn’t bet on it. Over my many years of study in quite a few universities, my observation was that, even at the graduate level at the University of Michigan – indeed, even in my PhD-level classes at Indiana University – the situation is what Gorzycki et al. (2019) found:
[U]ndergraduates report that reading is valuable, yet their noncompliance with reading assignments suggests otherwise. Undergraduates report that they achieve their academic goals with little reading and that they perceive reading as too voluminous and irrelevant to class outcomes. The data highlight a misalignment between conventional academic expectations that undergraduates will read in scholarly ways and their actual academic reading practice. Qualitative analysis illustrates that students do not experience academic reading as a venue for scholarly engagement in disciplinary discourse. Whereas the academic reading literature proposes that students develop along a continuum from novice to expert reader, findings suggest that the undergraduate experience of academic reading is not representative of that continuum.
That finding echoes many others (e.g., Gorzycki et al., 2016; Kalbfleisch et al., 2021; Howard et al., 2018). Olney et al. (2017) found that only 32% of college freshmen read at a 12th-grade level – and that, at that level, students have only a 69% chance of passing the reading portion of the GED high school equivalence test.
I had the gratifying experience of having my Columbia Core literature professor apologize to me for the quality of my classmates’ participation. I had several advantages: I had been in college longer than they had; I had spent most of that prior attendance as a philosophy and religion major, which tended to have something to do with most of our readings; and I hadn’t yet discovered women. Be that as it may, plainly that professor was not impressed, overall, with our engagement with the topics of intellectual interest that arose as we discussed books on the level of Crime and Punishment. As I would later observe in more detail in reading, writing, and math coursework, there was an enormous gap between what professors would tell themselves they were doing (or at least trying to do) and what students were actually getting out of it.
The purpose of this post is not to suggest that The American Conservative or other conservative outlets are simply wrong. To the contrary, I hope I have signaled some degree of sympathy with some of TAC’s priorities. I merely suggest that general-purpose blathering about the Western canon is likely to be ineffectual.
We are most likely to value and retain a set of shared works when they are in some sense meaningful to us. First and foremost, we have to be able to read and understand them. Even at the college level, that tends to mean fiction rather than nonfiction; and if it must be nonfiction, it has to begin where we are. Most of us are not literature or philosophy majors. We are not going to travel to where the nonfiction writer begins his/her tale. Even if we do, in later years we are not likely to remember how we got there.
If professors want people to go beyond the story to the important or controversial sociopolitical idea, they must allow time for such development. Rather than a cheap one-year rip through thousands of years of literature, by which Columbia seeks to make every student a dilettante, students should be expected to participate in (and to use in their other classes) a constant, every-year relationship of classic works to current studies and activities.
A Western canon should not and probably cannot survive as an end in itself, mounted on an inscrutable pedestal. The pursuit of women (in my example); the limitations of reading (compared to e.g., fine arts or team sports) – these and other real-life imperatives call, not for a superficial dabblings in abstruse notions for ephemeral amusement, but rather for engagement with the best of what past and present generations can teach us in hard, practical terms in real time.
Improving Higher Education 