Decline and Fall

Most of Glenn Greenwald's posts are indispensable, but this one is especially so. As usual, I can find nothing to contribute to it. I endorse the whole thing. So go read it.

One thing that struck me about his post was the easy way he invokes Adam Smith to describe the affinity that the warmongering classes have for wars fought far away and at very little personal danger. Here's the passage he cites, a spot-on description of all of my right-wing friends who love to sit around and watch videos of terrorists getting killed by our superior firepower:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies . . . .

They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.

What struck me about that was how impossible I once thought such a reference could be. People like David Horowitz often claim that the Universities aren't teaching the classics* anymore, and that if students read more classics, they would learn to embrace traditional values, whatever those are. The Right has claimed the mantle of the "defenders of the classical tradition" in the campus cultural wars, but when you read passages like this, you wonder if those crusaders have actually read the books they are hawking. And yet here's a bona-fide librul, quoting a dead economist who isn't Marx or Keynes, and getting the quote right!

A decade ago I, a studious young conservative who took the ISI's admonitions to heart, began working my way through the canon. What I found then, and when I subsequently got serious about the classics at St. John's College, where that's all the students read, was that there was nothing particularly "conservative" about these books.

There's no unified set of "values" running through the great books; in fact, one of the things that makes those books so great is the way they bucked the orthodoxies of their time and pushed the debate along by the sheer force of their arguments in the face of the absurdities of their ages. Reading through the likes of Aristotle, Descartes, Hume and Kant is much more likely to cause the thoughtful student to question whatever traditions he's embraced than to cause him to instinctively reject radical changes. He's more likely to give thought to the arguments of the reformers than to shun them instinctively, as Russell Kirk might have expected him to. In short, a grounding in the classics will usually serve to make a student more skeptical of received wisdom and thus more objectively liberal (though less radical) than he would have been had he simply been fed a diet of Bill Bennett's moralizing bedtime stories.

That was certainly what I found, and what happened to me, when I went to St. John's. I entered a conservative, came out a confused moderate, and am now settling into a skeptical leftism, thanks primarily to the "orthodox" education in the classics. Perhaps I extrapolate too much from my own experience, but you can see for yourself if you ever visit the campus: the student body is as left-wing as any in the nation, despite the ringing endorsement of St. John's in the National Review College Guide. Most the alumni I know are left-wing as well.

None of this is to say that any given classic will strike the modern reader as especially liberal in the modern context, nor that Greenwald hasn't engaged in a bit of quote-mining here, but I would at least like to see the reverential intonation of the great books removed from the wingnut campus agitators' bag of tricks. The fact that a lefty such as Glenn Greenwald could so easily employ the great expounder of capitalism in one of his hateful, unpatriotic and no doubt communist posts should at least give the lie to the idea that an education in the great books lends support to conservative orthodoxies.

* I use the term "classic" and its derivations throughout to refer to the whole of the Western Canon, not just the Greeks and Romans.

Labels: academia, conservatism, reason