It’s unreasonable to expect cultivation to be purchaseable. You can only buy that which can be separated from its producer. Achieving health, love, and knowledge will always be fundamentally personal, uneconomical endeavors.
A political philosopher’s stances are often a result of whether they think human beings tend to choose what is good or what is evil. If you believe human beings tend to choose the good, you’ll support democracy. If you believe human beings tend to choose evil, you’ll favor tyranny. And if you believe human beings tend to choose evil unless they’re trained to recognize and choose the good, you’ll support monarchy or aristocracy.
Bizarrely, modern illiberal conservatives believe, or at least profess to believe, that human beings tend to choose the good, unless they’ve been trained (by our progressive educational system) to choose evil. This is my understanding of the right-populism of, say, a Patrick Deneen: the right-thinking masses need to overthrow the government and reorient our educational system. And without the distorting effect of progressive education, we’ll soon see that there is no true disagreement over what is good and what is evil.
What motivates right-populist thinkers is their intuition that the good is obvious. I think one reason transgenderism has become such a talking point for them is that they believe it is obviously, self-evidently bad. Other obvious bads also exist, like promiscuity, hedonism, and divorce. It’s certainly not an uncommon belief that a human being’s purpose must lie outside themself, ergo any inward-focused goal (self-actualization, sex changes, pursuit of pleasure), that is pursued in itself, rather than instrumentally (i.e. because it makes some other goal possible) is bad.1
I also quite often find myself thinking that the good is obvious. For instance, I don’t get particularly worked up about “death of the humanities” articles, because I know that the humanities are inherently good. People who are seeking the best that life has to offer will always be drawn to the humanities. I strongly believe people will still be reading Plato in a thousand years.
But what if they’re not? After all, a thousand years ago, very, very few people were reading Plato: he was unknown in the Catholic West (aside from a Latin translation of a single dialogue, the Timeaus) and almost unknown in the Islamic East (aside from a few things about him that they’d reconstructed from their reading of Aristotle). He was only known by a few beleaguered scholars in Constantinople. It’s not at all impossible that, if a few things had gone differently—if Georges Plethon hadn’t been sent on an embassy to Constantinople and explained about this guy Plato, and if Ficino hadn’t gotten support from Lorzenzo d’Medici to translate the Platonic corpus—that we wouldn’t read Plato today!
So Plato could obviously be lost, but I think the impetus that made these Renaissance philosophers curious about this little-known philosopher, and that led Ficino to champion him—I think that particular impetus cannot ever die.
Except if the goodness of Plato—and the ability of human beings to respond to that goodness—are eternal, then what is the point of my project? Why extol the Great Books at all? Either something needs support, or it doesn’t. Either it needs preservation, or it doesn’t.
Well, it’s a bit of a mystery, isn’t it? I think so much modern thought is wrapped up in systems: if we educate people correctly and if we design the right constitution and if we wrap it up with the right institutions and checks and balances and create the right methods for redistribution, then we will be safe, and society will be just and good.
And it’s true that individual human beings are almost powerless before the colossus of modern society. When I was a kid, I learned that if you march and chant and sit-in, then you can awaken peoples’ better angels, and they’ll pass civil rights bills and all that stuff. But no amount of marching has stopped the steady erosion of trans rights.
Recently, on the advice of
I read this Reinhold Niebuhr book, Children of Light and Children of Dark, written in 1944, about how all these social and political movements, whether it’s democratic liberalism or communism, are driven by the desire to create a utopia. But that these movements ignore the fact that human beings have both a good and an evil side. Human beings have selfish desires. They have a will to power. No system is so perfect that it can’t be destroyed by human competition.Niebuhr said that fascism had arisen because of the failure to find utopia, and that fascism was a movement that explicitly didn’t aim for utopia, but instead aimed at mere dominion: it was a political and social movement that explicitly appealed to the worst and darkest amongst people.
We all know, I think, that human beings are not inherently good. Some evils are simple: nobody thinks getting drunk all the time is a good thing to do, but if you’re getting drunk all the time, your time horizons are just so shrunken that you longer have the foresight or planning horizon to choose the good. You don’t even think of it in terms of “getting drunk all the time”—you just think “I’m going to get drunk now”. Because getting drunk once or twice isn’t evil. A lot of evil lies in precisely that difference between occasional and continuous action: something can be neutral to do once or twice, but bad to do continuously. Everyone ought to get angry when they’re wronged, or people will continuously wrong them, but if you get angry all the time, that’s bad (I know, I am just recapitulating Aristotle’s Golden Mean, but it’s a classic for a reason).
Other evils are much more complex. A lot of evil comes through ignorance, but it’s a willing ignorance. For instance, if you really thought that unsuspecting kids were being “transed” by the medical establishment, you’d naturally be against that phenomenon. It takes some effort to do the research and figure out, well, no, there’s not a lot of evidence that that is happening—detransition rates aren’t higher, the number of people medically transitioning hasn’t increased that much, the number of top surgeries for minors is vanishingly small, etc, etc. But people don’t do that research: the evil is that they’ve chosen ignorance.
That’s why we can’t have utopia! Our worst impulses are crafty, and they use our human reason to get at us. Hence the phenomenon of “drunk logic” (I’ll get sober tomorrow; I’ll take one last drink; I need to have a really bad hangover to motivate me to drink less; it’s a weekend, I can’t get sober on the weekend; it’s a weekday, and it’s too hard to get sober during the week; etc, etc).
The mystery of human life is that the good is so obvious, and yet evil is so frequent. But that’s because the good is only obvious in aggregate, and people don’t live in aggregate. When it comes to the Great Books, the frustration is that it’s obvious that these books are good, but it’s unclear who they are good for. What people ought to read them? Why? And using what free time?
The institution of the university seemed to provide an answer: we will pay a corpus of professors to preserve our literature. And yet, universities have come to operate more and more along principles of free enterprise, with departments competing internally for resources on the basis of who can attract students, and for whatever reason, English departments have stopped attracting students well.2
It’s not surprising that the Great Books would be unable to compete on a brute, economic level. We know that what is good is usually not popular or accessible. If that wasn’t true, we really would live in utopia, because capitalism is very good at giving us what is popular. I am pretty pro-capitalism, because it’s produced lots of good for people: it’s produced ease and plenty (compared to pre-capitalist eras). But ease and plenty, because they can be quantified and denatured from their producer, are much easier to produce than things that are inextricably bound with their possessor’s wisdom and cultivation. Capitalism can sell us porn, but not love. Capitalism can sell us gym memberships and it can sell us health food, but it can’t sell us health itself. Capitalism can sell us books, but it can’t sell us knowledge.
In a society that seems to produce only what is most popular and most accessible—where every niche steadily gets exploited and eroded by the need to popularize the niche, make it accessible, and make more money—it’s believable that the Great Books will not survive. In other words, it is believable that certain good things simply won’t be chooseable, or at least not easily chooseable, anymore.
But I find myself pretty un-depressed. Because, historically, the things that’ve been hard for humanity to do are the things we now find easy. Surviving to the age of 5 was hard. Living through a long winter or a pandemic was hard. Getting through childbirth was hard. And all the supposed failures of capitalism seem to arise from lazy thinking. It’s fundamentally unreasonable to expect cultivation to be purchaseable. You can only buy that which can be separated from its producer. Achieving health, love, and knowledge will always be fundamentally personal, uneconomical endeavors.
I don’t think people are inherently bad or inherently evil. I think the essence of life is that we have to choose between good and evil. Right now, in 2023, the main choice is, one of the main choices is, how do I spend my time? Do I read and watch and eat what is bad for me or what is good? And that’s kind of miraculous. Like, one of our main moral choices is…how healthy will I be? How wise will I be? How knowledgeable will I be? And everyone more or less knows that this is the choice. I could pull any random person off the street, and ask them, “Is it good to be on your phone all the time? Is it good to watch The Real Housewives all the time? Is it good to eat only junk food?” And they’d say, “No, those things aren’t good.”
So, yes, bad exists. People continue to choose it. And I think they always will. We’ll never reach utopia. We might not even move forward at all—we may very well move backwards. That’s inherent in the whole concept of moral choice. What we choose matters. We can choose what we know to be good, or we can choose what we know to be bad.
Now…where does this put me in terms of political philosophy? Am I in favor of democracy or aristocracy or monarchy or tyranny? And how would I make society a better place, where people are more likely to choose good than evil?
My answer is…I don’t really know. Since I have democratic instincts, I’d like to say that educated people are no more likely to be good than they are to be evil. But, unfortunately, given my own personal moral intuitions and political beliefs, I’d have to say that educated people tend to be morally superior to uneducated people. For instance, educated people are more likely to support trans rights, which is, in my view, the objectively correct opinion. And along a broad variety of axes, educated people are more likely to have political and social opinions that agree with my own.
At the moment, America is a country created by people who agree with me, and it has an educational system designed to create more people who agree with me. It’s hard to see what more could be done in the realm of education or mass propaganda to make people agree with me.3
I’m tempted to say those who disagree with me have chosen evil instead of good. But, sociologically, it cannot be so simple: if I was born a white Evangelical Christian who dropped out of Pepperdine after two semesters, I’d probably be anti-trans too! And yet, isn’t that sort of the mystery of morality? It’s absolute—what is good is always good. And yet, it’s also relative. When it was profitable to own slaves, very few people were anti-slavery. The instinct inside people that recognizes “This is wrong” doesn’t change, but their ethical and political beliefs are usually adapted to their social climate. Nobody thinks violence and compulsion are good, but plenty of people think spanking your kids is good.4
This is the complex thing about goodness. On the one hand goodness is supposedly natural—it is a result of the inherent nature of things—and yet it can also be misrecognized. The comparison here is to science: gravity is a function of the nature of time and space, but it’s rather common for an individual to not understand how gravity works.
The complication is that if goodness is gravity, then at the moment nobody really understands how goodness works, nor is it clear that people ever can understand it the way we understand gravity. The universes in which goodness would be studied are contained not even in our brains, but within human consciousness, and as such are forever barred from outside observation. When it comes to goodness, we have a direct experience of it, just as we have of gravity, but nobody else does. It’s like we go into a closed room, drop some balls, and then come back and describe the experiment to someone else. And they’re like, “Do some balls drop faster?” And you’re like, “Hmm, seems like it.” And they’re like, “When I do the experiment, the balls drop at the same rate.” And it’s impossible to ever really directly compare our inner worlds to determine if they’re truly the same.
Given that I think education makes people better, I suppose I ought to be in favor of aristocracy, which is anyway the system we are fast approaching, given the ossification of wealth and class. But the idea is rather distasteful to me. I still think that people ought to be ruled by persuasion, and that it ought to be possible to explain the good to people in such terms that they can understand and accept it for themselves. This is where the idea of man’s inherent goodness comes in. Is it possible that a person could refuse to recognize what is good? This comes down to good faith. If a person says “What you are saying is good does not resonate with me. I, in fact, know it to be false, though perhaps I can’t totally describe why…” then to what extent should we believe them? It’s foolish to pretend that people aren’t motivated to lie or feign ignorance or purposefully refuse to understand. At the same time, progress requires believing in peoples’ good faith. The world is full of people who claim to believe things that are so outrageous that I cannot imagine they believe them in good faith (i.e. if you claim to sincerely believe the medical establishment is making cis kids transition, it’s hard for me to accept that you’re not simply lying, or that you don’t have some unspoken bigotry that is motivating this willing ignorance). If society can only move forward through consensus, then disagreement becomes a frustrating and insuperable philosophical problem, and it’s very tempting to demonize those who disagree with us, especially when we know some of them are in fact demonic. But that’s life, isn’t it? Some people who disagree with us are sincere but ignorant, some are acting in bad faith, and some are just genuinely correct, at least in their own context, and we are in fact the wrong ones! It’s tempting to take this into Whig history territory: truth will win out! Progress will prevail! Utopia is coming! And I suppose that is in fact what I believe. It’s not simple or easy, and it might take place over a timespan of millennia, but surely truth has some advantage over falsehood, and any advantage, no matter how small, will surely accrue over time. This doesn’t help us in the short term, of course, but I do think we will make, and have made, progress.
To circle back around to the Great Books, I don’t think it is simple to explain their appeal, but I do think it ought to be possible to describe them in such a manner that people understand that reading these books is inherently good.
I suppose that I could say the Great Books are our record of peoples’ internal attempts to measure what is good and bad in their own personal universes. But I’m not certain that reading the Great Books does in fact make people better (though, given the political opinions of English professors and the way they tend to accord with my own political opinions, the idea that these books make someone more moral does have a certain appeal). I think the choice of whether to be good or evil is still an individual one. And I think we cannot really know whether a person has chosen good or evil—nobody can know what is happening inside a person, and what temptations they faced. Maybe in the afterlife we’ll discover that Jeffrey Dahmer, in holding off on committing his first murder (he lay in wait, meaning to club a biker, but finally didn’t) did more good, given his own impulses and mental capacities, than did Gandhi or Mother Teresa. I can’t say.
I think some of the cynicism around the Great Books comes from the idea that the juice really isn’t worth the squeeze: doing good is easier than reading The Canterbury Tales. Reading Shakespeare in order to learn what is good is like enrolling in the Culinary Institute because you want to spice up your family dinners.
But so what? That’s only to say, what is good for some people isn’t good for everybody. Nobody would argue that these books are good for everyone, but I am surprised at the number of people who don’t seem to think they’re not good for anyone—who think that nobody out there is curious about the nature of the good, and that, absent compulsion or social reward, nobody will choose to read them.
That, to me, seems far too pessimistic. The point of capitalism is that, in creating an excess of those things that can be bought, we have freed people to pursue those things that cannot be purchased. In the last hundred years, we’ve created two fifteen-year swatches of life—young adulthood and retirement—which are devoted to doing nothing more than pursuing knowledge and new experiences! And I think that somebody out there will always discover that, for them, their good is wrapped up in these books.
Human freedom is, I think, not the enemy of what is good. Given enough freedom and money and time, I don’t think everyone will read these books, but some will. Some certainly will.
Addenda:
Writing two posts a week is hard! I’m finishing this up at 11:31 PM on Wednesday night. I assume it gets easier with time, but if it’s anything like writing novels, it’ll only get harder
I’ve made substantial progress on a new novel! A science fiction novel this time! It’ll likely fall apart, the way all my sci-fi novels do, but it’s good to be working on something fresh
I’ve just seen the cover for my literary novel, The Default World, it is gorgeous! Excited for this.
Books
The last day of The Decameron is by far the best. Generally, the Decameron is good-natured, but cynical. The last day of the Decameron is devoted to stories of generosity, and it is off the hook. These stories are insane. One dude is competing with another dude to see who can be the most generous, and he gets so frustrated with losing that he decides to kill the other dude, and the other dude is like, “Sure, take my life.” Then in this other story, one dude is in love with another dude’s fiance, and the other dude is like, “Bro, just take her, marry her. You’re my bro, and I want you to be happy.” Then the final story is the story of Griselda, which is rather famous. It is nuts. I can’t believe I wrote my whole post about magnamininity before listening to the final day, which is all about that very theme! I can’t help feeling that Boccacio really came into his own with the final day.
Am currently listening to Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queene, which is actually really odd and beautiful. I’m in the first book, where the Knight of the Redcrosse and his lady Una are separated by a foul apparition sent by the evil Archimago. They’ve just stripped naked the witch Duenna, who had tricked the Redcrosse Knight, and now they’re off to save Una’s kingdom. The audiobook is really good and has, in my opinion, a perfect early modern accent, which is really doing wonders for my early modern pronunciation. After I finish this, I think I’ll have a much better ear for Elizabethan language. You know, you don’t think accent makes a difference, but when you can ‘hear’ the original accent in your internal ear, it’s a lot easier to appreciate poetry. Without that, you just get tripped up in mild atonality. I’ve been following along with the audiobook on Project Gutenberg, and it’s just a matter of stresses and stuff. Like I can hear how in the line “In warlike feates th'expertest man alive” the narrator pronounces the vowel sound in “per” so it sounds like “pair”, which completely changes the sound of the whole line. If you pronounce ‘per’ the way I pronounce it usually, the line feels clunky and awkward.
I do find both The Faerie Queene and, more generally, poetic romances to be strangely devoid of life. Maybe it’s the stark contrast with The Decameron, which was bursting with chatter and characters and cities and towns and social relations, but poetic romances always seem to take place in the forest, with pairs of knights and ladies just sort of running into each other. The Faerie Queene is, so far, even more lifeless than most, because there hasn’t even been a good feasting scene like the one that opens Gawain and the Green Knight.
I don’t think a person’s purpose lies outside themselves. A person trapped on a desert island might still have a purpose—merely to endure, for the sake of enduring. I would, in fact, say that a person’s purpose necessarily lies inside themselves—but of course, it’s not something you discover through pure reason, it’s something that arises as a result of your response to circumstance.
There are also internal incentives that make specializing in the Great Books less appealing—it’s hard to attract notice as yet another Milton scholar—but there are countervailing incentives that go the other way as well—the world always needs Milton scholars—so ultimately I think it’s a bit of a wash.
An illiberal conservative would say that people are propagandized or brainwashed into agreeing with me, but that seems to assume that brainwashing is possible, and that if they could just gain control of the levers of power, they could brainwash people in the other direction. Perhaps that is true to some extent, but I have my doubts. The truth has more legs than falsehood does. You can convince people that communism or fascism will work out, but ultimately reality will get in the way. I sound now like a conservative, don’t I (“You can convince a boy that they’re a girl, but eventually reality will get in the way”). I do think, however, that I am right, and that the illiberal conservatives substantially undervalue the amount of freedom of expression possible in a liberal society (their own profoundly distasteful speech is more than possible, it’s positively encouraged, for instance), and they undervalue how much people are attached to their freedom of expression. Thinking for yourself and saying what you think is an absolute pleasure, and one that people won’t soon forgo.
I am hesitant to say that spanking your kids is always, everywhere, an evil thing. I cannot imagine a situation in which, for me, it would be a good act. But I’m willing to let someone persuade me that it might be at times worthwhile. I’m not a relativist; I just think that I don’t know everything there is to know.
I think you have the situation reversed on cultivation in that cultivation occurs naturally in any given environment. This class of individuals will become fluid their their adoption of the tropes and mannerisms and see the connections between the myriad of the ways in which they function. this is similar to, but not exactly the same as, the ability to be fluent in a language, because any language when taught to children becomes a native language even if it was artificial before. Thus, whether it is purchasable is orthogonal to whether or not it is actually important: you can make money selling cultivation and many people do, however one can be extremely poor but extremely cultivated at the same time. There are a myriad of characters in novels which use this schtick.
In the same sentence what is cultivated changes radically over time, for example in the Tang Dynasty there was a collection of writings and poetry which made the core of cultivation and the ability to produce simulations thereof was considered essential for the proof of cultivation. I cannot think that either of us could be called cultivated in the Tang Dynasty.
To take one of your side notes: I do not know if there is any situation where a child should be spanked. I must assume that there is some circumstance which a very tiny fraction might be, because there are a small number of children which have deficiencies in their brain. However, I have never spanked my child. My significant other has never spanked her child. And we do not let anyone else spank the child in our absence. and I have never met a child who might benefit from being spanked. In the spanking equation, it is the parent which feels better not be child in all of the cases which I have observed.