The noble things are difficult
Online Great Books and the power of the Great Conversation
“Always read. Read a few pages every single day. Do not read ‘to go to sleep.’ We read to be more awake! Do this on your lunch break, in the waiting room, in parking lot before you go in. Three pages a day is over 1,000 per year. Read GOOD stuff. You won’t live long enough to justify the time spent on garbage. Read the greats. Read stuff that is ALMOST too difficult for you. Push yourself. We aren’t reading for a past time. We are reading to transform ourselves.” - Online Great Books
The humanities have moved off campus, announced Victor Davis Hanson in his 2008 article for City Journal. University classical and traditional liberal arts education has eroded, he lamented, signaling the university's abandonment of their role as cultural custodians. The goal of these programs, as Hanson described, is to help "students understand our present values in the context of a 2,500-year tradition that began with the ancient Greeks." But more and more, college students are being deprived of opportunities to receive such an education.
Roosevelt Montás, in his book Rescuing Socrates, makes the case for maintaining a core liberal arts curriculum centered around classic texts, specifically the Great Books, in colleges and universities, even for students who go on to complete the rest of their coursework in professional schools. For Montás, reading canonical Western texts is about education of the self for liberation and understanding one's place within a particular tradition and history. An education that is not only fit for the elites attending prestigious universities, but for all who live in a free society and need to be prepared to make the best use of their liberty.
William Deresiewicz shares Montás' admiration for and promotion of a liberal arts education. In his article "Soul-Making Studies" for Liberties, Deresiewicz defends the inclusion of classical texts and Great Books programs in higher education and takes the critics of such programs to task, primarily those who argue that a formal education should be practical not theoretical. Certainly, he argues, students should be equipped with the means to achieve their ends, but they first need to discover what those ends are, a process that is at the core of modern-day liberal arts education. As Montás and Deresiewicz describe, such an education “lives in the questions, not in the answers.” For young people entering adulthood, the questions boil down to: “What is worth striving for? What should I do with my one precious life, so that I do not waste it?” Answering these questions enables one to then determine the means to reach such ends.
But these questions aren't reserved only for college students; they are questions that we all must contemplate—often, and throughout life. Higher education institutions may be abandoning the liberal arts, but the study of the Great Books and the contemplation of the big questions that they raise has not been lost.
Online Great Books, or OGB as it is lovingly called, is "an online community developing classically educated men and women using the Great Books of Western Civilization." They offer an opportunity to engage in the Great Conversation that has taken place among great thinkers spanning from ancient Greece to the 20th century, and from Athens to the United States. They provide a liberal arts education in the midst of its decline on university campuses.
Hanson described off-campus efforts to offer a classical education, such as recorded lectures, which have increased dramatically since the publication of his article—YouTube and podcast platforms provide endless opportunities to learn about the Great Books. But the benefit of receiving any sort of education in a formalized setting like a university is the ability to learn in concert with others—to ask questions, share ideas, and better understand how others experience the texts and the world. As Auguste Meyrat points out in his Acton Institute article, "Does College Get in the Way of Education?," an education in Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas is difficult to undertake on ones own. The Great Conversation accompanies the Great Books for this reason. The writers of the Great Books are in conversation with each other—debating, critiquing, and refining ideas over the course of history—and those who read the Great Books converse with each other to better understand the lasting ideas presented in the canonical texts.
Meyrat is correct that philosophers like Aristotle put forth ideas that are difficult to process and, left one's own devices, are often abandoned, even by those who can see wisdom in the texts. One roadblock is the extent to which someone is a good reader, as in can move beyond taking the author's words at face value toward properly analyzing a text—the ability to understand the author's terms, recount their arguments, and then either agree or disagree with them based on logic, not opinion. Meyrat suggests reading a book by a founder of the Great Books tradition—Mortimer Adler's, How to Read a Book—before starting a classical, Great Books education. That's exactly how the Online Great Books program begins, by reading Mortimer Adler.
The difficulty of reading the Great Books on one's own is not lost on the founder of OGB either. When you join the program, you are assigned to a seminar group who will read all of the texts along side you. Everyone in a seminar has the same reading goals from week to week and month to month. And each month, seminar groups, modeled after Socratic dialogues, meet to discuss the shared texts. Each person may have a distinct understanding of the text; they may have found standout, explanatory quotes that others didn't catch, or interpret the texts differently due to their context and life experiences—age, geographical location, political persuasion, religious affiliation, experience in the military, trades, corporate life, and so forth. But all are seeking answers to the big questions: What is virtue? How does one achieve the good? What is the nature of happiness? What is the ultimate purpose of life?
Seminars are led by seminar hosts, all of which are on the same journey as the readers. Although they may have read the text once, twice, or three times before, they are not experts, but seekers just like Online Great Books members. They are grappling with the same questions and trying to figure out the meaning of these texts that have endured through time and space. And they are facilitators aiding seminar groups in their discovery of the depth and complexity of the texts being read and the questions being asked. They offer encouragement, especially to endure and see value in the most difficult texts.
Aristotle's Metaphysics is a stumbling block for many in the Great Books journey. And the seminar hosts know this, as one stated in an effort to help a group persist: "Metaphysics is very tough. It is probably the most difficult thing you will ever read. It is also very important, maybe the most important." Whether one conclusively agrees or disagrees with an author, analyzing their arguments to the point where one can express agreement or disagreement is a reward unto itself. The ideas presented in Great Books have permeated not just Western, but also non-Western societies, and struggling, then succeeding, in grasping the concepts presented in the texts is the honor for the journey.
But the ultimate reward stems from absorbing the words on the page and assimilating them into one's day-to-day life.
An education does not end with the Great Books. They are a door to other texts that aren't included in the canon and to the pursuit of self-advancement in other domains. Online Great Books conversations occur in organized seminars, but also in reader-directed Slack channels and Zoom meetings. Some learn Latin, others Greek, and many readers meet and discussion poetry, music, mythology, geometry, and American classics omitted from the cannon. Homesteaders share knowledge about growing crops, raising livestock, and the art and science of living a self-sufficient life. Knitters, crocheters, sewists, and woodworkers share their journey as makers, the crafts they produce, and tips to support each other in their endeavors to make beautiful and useful things. Writers congregate to apply what Socrates and other great thinkers teach to writing—Socrates for the art of question asking and Plato for the art of dialogue. These are just a few examples of how the OGB community has formed around the Great Books.
All Online Great Books readers are seeking an education, one that many were deprived of in formal schooling. And the question of what it means to be educated is a recurring theme. One group meets to address this very question, but all OGB readers return to and set out to answer it for themselves.
Some quote Charlotte Mason, a popular voice among homeschooling parents:
Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.
Others defer to Aristotle and his conception of learning to love what is lovable:
Education must form us to love the good in its totality.
Lovable things are only that which is good, pleasant, or useful. Education has to form us to make judgments about what is actually good, pleasant, or useful as opposed to what only appears to be lovable.
Learning to love is learning to be whole, with all that is rational and irrational in the body and soul. We should love truth, whether it is mathematical or moral, because truth is comprehensive in nature. Love is simultaneously an open sense of wonder towards truth, and a firm judgement about truth. Not every equation works; not every form of justice is good. Education has to form human beings to make these judgments, and point them to what is lovable.
Education is the harmonization of knowing the truth and loving the truth.
And still others draw from a variety of ideas and experiences to form their conception of education and what it means to be educated:
An educated person acts and thinks in a certain way depending on a given set of cues, and education should instill habits, which shape how one acts and thinks.
Education forms a just character and a well-reasoned intellect.
Education is the process of acquiring a type of habit, which allows one to acquire knowledge.
Education should attend to both the fact that instincts are irrational and habits are rational; otherwise, it fails to care for human beings.
The human condition is a consistent topic of conversation among Online Great Books members and within the community at-large. A recurring sentiment is that humans have gone unchanged since the days of ancient Greece. Perhaps not all OGB readers share this sentiment, but enough do that it comes up as a topic of conversation with some regularity. As an OGB reader myself, the unchanging nature of humans initially struck me while reading Aristophanes, and my mind has not been changed since. The comedic playwright made me laugh, and I thought to myself: How could someone commenting on human behavior in the 5th Century BC possibly say something that would make me laugh? The answer: Because human oddities and quirks remain the same, human problems remain the same, the basic qualities that make humans humans remains the same. Reading Aristophanes comes towards the end of the first year of the program; one OGB reader had the realization that humans don't change while reading the very first book of the program: the Iliad.
Thucydides gives an account of the Peloponnesian War, a war during which the Olympic games were politicized. Cicero warns about those who signal virtue, but aren't virtuous. Plutarch profiles Caesar, who gained popularity by telling people what they wanted to hear and giving them what they desired, while Cato was admired for his principled approach to politics, but ultimately not as popular among the people. Themes that are echoed in modern-day societies.
The Great Books not only tell us about the durability of human nature, thus the relatedness of humans across time, they also show us the pitfalls of history to avoid. Self-liberation and self-improvement are one reason OGB members read them, what can be learned about history is another.
The liberal arts are not being thrown into the trash bin of history because colleges and universities are abandoning those programs in favor of professional and vocational education or a more diverse curriculum. The humanities may be leaving campus, but they are not gone. They are alive and well in spaces that are, perhaps, more suitable for such an education. Online Great Books draws people from various stages of life who are interested in a liberal arts education, not in taking required courses at a university. They are dedicated; they take time every week to read challenging, thought-provoking texts when they could be doing an endless number of other things. Things that perhaps would be less fulfilling, but easier. They are doing a tremendous amount of work, not for a letter grade, but for their own intellectual linear progression. They are striving for noble things, and as the back of OGB’s signature t-shirt proclaims, "the noble things are difficult."