Robert McHenry: “Great Books” — Hah!
It is de rigueur in certain styles of journalism or circles of academia to strike a mildly disdainful attitude when discussing Britannica. “Commercial” seems always to be the chief criticism, and it is undeniable that “encyclopedia salesman” became a term of some opprobrium for a reason. But the alternative – editors and their colleagues working for years to produce a decent product but with no means or intention of paying for anything, including salaries – was deemed early on to be improbable. Selling the stuff seemed the only way.
The review recalls the dismissal of the GBWW project by Dwight Macdonald in a New Yorker essay. Macdonald, it says, “wittily demolished the pretensions of the enterprise.” This was before it went on to sell as many as 50,000 sets in a single year, and before it spawned some 2,500 Great Books discussion groups across the country. “Demolished” in this sense evidently means “held up to ridicule for the entertainment of people who already agreed with him.” Macdonald was, says the reviewer, “something of a snob,” which is accurate in the way that it is accurate to observe that President Bush is somewhat unpopular. The idea of putting good books in the homes of ordinary citizens rankled.
And there it is, the deed of which Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler stand accused: Putting books, good books, in people’s homes. Quelle horreur!
It was not a crime, of course, nor was it a sin. It was a betrayal. Put a book in an ordinary man’s hands, goes the thinking, and one of two things will happen: He will read it, or he won’t. The one outcome is apt to start him thinking for himself and perhaps thinking less of the Dwight Macdonalds of the world; the other proves that the whole thing was a sham. QED.
The Great Books “craze,” as the review calls it – putting them in the same class as phone booth stuffing and Hula Hoops – eventually faded. It doesn’t say so, but the timing of the decline suggests that we have television to thank at least in part for saving us all from the terrors of text and thought. This reading of so-called “great” books survives only in a few backwaters now, places tolerant of aberrant cults.
Molly Rothenberg, a student at St. John’s in Annapolis, Md., told Mr. Beam of comparing notes when she was a sophomore with a fellow graduate of the public high school in Cambridge, Mass. St. John’s sophomores study works by such authors as Aristotle, Tacitus and Shakespeare. Her friend was attending Bates College in Maine. “She told me they were studying Rhetoric,” Ms. Rothenberg said, “and they would be watching episodes of ‘Desperate Housewives’ and listening to Eminem. They were going to analyze it. I just laughed. What could I say?”
One’s heart aches for Ms. Rothenberg, doomed as she is to an arid life with books, unable to carry on a simple conversation with her neighbors – voted off the island, as it were, and pathetically ignorant of what that phrase means in contemporary America.
Someone should do something, surely. It’s not too late to get those books out of those homes. Some of them may yet be unread.