Who Decides Which Books Are “Great”?

If you were a student of Socrates, you would find the education meant wandering around having conversations about justice, truth, piety, and so forth. No laptops. No pedagogical techniques. Just a mentor, a group of peers, and great questions. If you look a little closer at the records that his student Plato kept for us, you’ll note there’s rarely a conversation that does not draw on examples from history, stories, myths, and even yes, poetry. Implicitly, great texts are assumed and discussed, though the interlocutors rely on their memory to access them. Over the centuries, whatever was beneficial was passed on from student to student, as the great conversation continued around the Mediterranean and later throughout central Europe and to the Americas.

In hindsight, Westerners often misappropriate this passing on—the tradition—as primarily a Western phenomenon. The first university was in Bologna in 1088, founded by Catholics in Italy, so it goes—forgetting the University of Al Quaraouiyine founded in Morrocco by Fatima al-Fihri, a woman who wanted to establish a Muslim educational center. When we describe the beauty of Christianity and how Christ’s teachings celebrated human dignity and the church-saturated culture in the West, we should remember that it was a diverse church, not a European one. “By the end of the first millenium,” Robert Wilken notes, “Christians lived (with some notable exceptions like Armenia and Ethiopia) in… Syriac and Arabic Middle East; the Greek and Slavic East; and the Latin West.”[1] In other words, the first thousand years of Christianity reached beyond merely Rome. Thus, when we think of the canon of the great conversation, we should be eager to discern ways certain groups have omitted writers or texts that do not fit the “West is Best” narrative.

We often do not realize the ideas that we have inherited, and it is only by researching history that we uncover assumptions and worldviews that led us to where we are. For those who today esteem the great books tradition (I raise my hand here highly; I am a great books professor!), do we know the history of the movement? If not, I’m afraid we may pass on ideas that are not central to its flourishing and perhaps even harmful to its students. At the turn of the twentieth century, a professor at Columbia University, John Erskine, created an honors course to aid immigrant students in knowing the foundation of American culture. According to Roosevelt Montás, the current director of Columbia’s Core, “Erskine drew up a list of about seventy-five books, guided by the remarkably ecumenical principle that ‘a great book is one that has meaning and continues to have meaning, for a variety of people over a long period of time.’”[2]

If we think of books like people, we should desire a company that sharpens us, as iron sharpens iron. Click To TweetOne of Erskine’s students was Mortimer Adler, who went on to found the Great Books of the Western World program at the University of Chicago. When determining his list of great works, Adler devised three more limits than Erskine had in his definition: a great book must be pertinent to contemporary life, worth re-reading, and speak to the great ideas (he lists 102, including human nature, God, ways of knowing, etc.).[3] There were approximately 100 titles in this original list, which premiered in 1952 as a complete set of books (costing almost a million dollars to publish) with its first copies received by Queen Elizabeth II and Harry S. Truman.[4] Noticeably missing are women, writers of color, and any writers outside of the West. In 1990, when the list was updated, it still only added four women, a few twentieth-century writers, and no black writers. When interviewed regarding these oversights, Adler insisted, “All this business of quotas—so many blacks, so many whites, so many women, so many men. It’s all not relevant.”[5]

There are those who continue to side with Adler on this point. The burden of proof is on the women and writers of color to prove that they have anything worthwhile to say. From Adler’s descendants, the argument is: if women and persons of color would have written great books, we certainly would have passed them on. When scholars like myself go looking for these women and writers of color, we’re seen as drinking the poison of critical theory and infecting the well of classical education, liberal arts, or great books programs. However, if Alder made his list during the height of post-war and anti-communist propaganda, wouldn’t it make sense that he ignored Japanese and Chinese contributions to the conversation? If Adler made his list during the Jim Crowe era, should we not find it suspect that he claims (up until 1990, by the way) that “[Blacks] didn’t write any good books”? And, in 1952, so many works by women had not yet been discovered, translated, or correctly attributed (women couldn’t even have credit cards until 1974 in America; why would Adler consider such second-class citizens worthy of writing great books?).

So, while I agree with Erskine’s and Adler’s criteria for great books, I believe we should be looking for the “best that has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold’s words, from across the globe, across time, and without regard to race and sex. I’m no more interested in quotas than Adler was, but I am devoted to filling gaps in my own education and discovering the true, good, and beautiful works of those writers neglected by the movement for far too long. “Here, at last,” writes Anna Julia Cooper, in a conversation with Milton, Dante, Virgil, Homer, and Sappho, “can be communion without suspicion; friendship without misunderstanding; love without jealousy.” It is a high aim but an attainable one.

Read the entire article here.

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Notes:

[1] Robert Wilken, The First Thousand Years, 355.

[2] Roosevelt Montás, Rescuing Socrates, 24.

[3] Anne Perez, “Experiences of the Great Books.”

[4] https://content.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601520317,00.html

[5]Elizabeth Venant, “A Curmudgeon Stands His Ground: ‘Great Books’ editor Mortimer J. Adler rejects the growing challenges to his list of Western readings.”

Photo Credit: Peter O’Connor