If every white person died tomorrow, PoC Americans would lose all our hang-ups about the Great Books

Before the invention of race¹ it was not at all uncommon for invading peoples to incorporate ancient monuments into their religious observance. Stonehenge is a perfect example. It wasn't constructed by just one people. Various features date to various times, and it was built over the course of a thousand years (3000 to 2000 BC). Stonehenge was begun by a people who'd migrated to Britain from the Mediterranean, and then was taken up by a people whose DNA was from the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Then it was used off and on for the next several thousand years by various religions.

For a more contemporary example, take the Hagia Sophia. Constructed by Justinian as a Christian temple, it was converted to a mosque by the Ottomons. The Turks have a long history in fact of taking up Ancient Roman iconography and buildings. The original Seljuk Turk kingdom in Anatolia was called the Sultanate of Rum, and the Ottoman Empire at times described itself as the continuation of the Roman empire.

Nowadays it's impossible to imagine us doing this. North America is filled with extremely old monuments, but the colonial nations didn't appropriate them, they either destroyed them or fossilized them in museums. Right here in the Bay Area, we have our Emeryville IKEA, which is built on Shellmound Way. This commemorates the ancient shell mounds of the Ohlone people. In a pagan society, we would've associated one of our own gods with the gods of the Ohlone people (which is how you end up with the temples to, say, Zeus-Ammon and Jupiter-Ammon that dotted Libya). Even in a pre-racial Christian society, they might've been converted into sites for veneration of saints, as reputedly happened to pagan holy sites in Britain.

Before race, when a new people moved into a new country, the move might be extremely violent and might involve the cultural extinction of the existing people, but eventually the invaders would kick the tires and make themselves at home, and there would be a synthesis of old and new cultures as well. Look at Britain. The Anglo-Saxons were the most cultivated and literate Germanic people in Europe, and the only Germanic people to have a vernacular literature, but Anglo-Saxon high culture was virtually extinguished by the arrival of the Norman nobility, not because the Normans had no use for it (which they didn't), but simply because all the places at court and in the churches were soon filled with French-speaking Normans. But over the course of three centuries of war with France and intermarriage with Anglo-Saxon people, an English-language identity bubbled up again.

Of course that didn't always happen! The Ptolemaic dynasty seemed to keep Ancient Egyptian culture at a distance. They assumed the title and the iconography of the Pharaoh, but their capital was always Alexandria, far from the traditional sites, higher up on the Nile, where Pharaohs had ruled, and Cleopatra was supposedly the first and only Ptolemaic Pharaoh to know how to speak the Greek language.

But by and large some kind of synthesis usually occurred between new peoples and old ones.

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I think often of this rich mixing of culture when I think about the Great Books. The GBs are a set of texts that were hailed as being the shit, the bee's knees, the source of all Western culture, and the best basis for a university education, by a small group of early-to-mid 20th century educators (most notably Mortimer Adler). For a while GB programs were popular at American colleges, but eventually they died out, due to calls for more ethnic diversity and subject diversity in curricula. Nowadays the GBs are making a resurgence at conservative Protestant and Christian colleges. They're the unofficial curricula of the Christian Nationalist movement, the unholy union between Christianity and right-wight nationalism that seems to animate much of Ron DeSantis's policy agenda. Sometimes I joke that the Great Books are "the curriculum of my own extermination."

There's an impression by people on the right that the Great Books are subject to some extreme amount of controversy in left-wing circles. That they've been dethroned, somehow, and indicted as unbearably racist and sexist.

That's not true. There was controversy in the 80s (the so-called "canon wars") over whether the concept of canonicity was meaningful, or even if it was inherently tainted by hierarchical assumptions, but the opponents of the canon faced a major problem: if there's no canon, why would anyone study English? You can say they study English to learn some techniques of interpretation, but what makes something worthy of being studied by those techniques? That's like teaching prayer without specifying to which God. Ultimately professors need something to study; students need something to be taught. And the objects that are more worthy of study tend to form the canon.

The outcome of the canon wars wasn't an erasure of the idea of a canon, but it did shift the canon in a more contemporary direction. The need for more racial and gender diversity meant (for obvious reasons) privileging 19th and 20th century works over those from antiquity.² But people to this day get assigned Plato's Republic in class. Nobody disputes that Plato is an important writer.

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But when it comes to the deeper, cultural level, I think it would be fair to say that there's a certain distaste for the Great Books amongst left-liberals. If you open any conservative journal, it's all Plato this and Plato that. It's filled with references to Aristotle and St. Augustine and Shakespeare and Dante and Euripides. That's just not the case even with, say, center-left outlets like The Atlantic or The New Yorker.

I also think there is a certain lay understanding, amongst educated left-liberal people, that the reputation of the Great Books is culturally constructed. The list of GBs was part of a racial project to conceive of white people as the best and most educated and productive and modern people. And as part of that understanding, there's a sense that, you know, if African people were to construct a Great Books list, it'd look a lot different (of course I honestly have no idea what they teach at African universities, so don't quote me on that).

And there's a sense in which that's obvious. The Great Books are a uniquely American project. Countries with a long literary history of their own don't throw together a hodge-podge of the world's greatest classics, from across the globe, and call it an education. Other countries have much smaller reading lists that are drawn from sources closer at hand. This is at the root of FR Leavis's famous critique of the Great Books. It's absurd to suggest that to be educated you need to read all of the world's most famous thinkers: what you need is to read the ones that are unique to your own time and place.

So in its weak form, the idea that this reading list is culturally constructed is obviously correct. And yet, America has not, thus far, produced a great alternative to the Great Books. Nor is it possible to imagine someone who's widely-read in the Anglo-American tradition without at least attempting to read many of the books on a typical Great Books list. So when it comes to talking about our literary antecedents, the Great Books do, in my view, have a role to play in America.

And I do not think that many left-liberals seriously believe in the strong form of the idea "The reputation of the Great Books is culturally constructed." Under the strong form, their reputation is entirely a result of hegemonic power. They are good because authority tells us certain things are good, and the Great Books embody those things.

But that idea doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. For one thing, it's a rather dark idea. If we only like things because we are programmed to like them, then why bother reading at all? If a book cannot change us, cannot convince us of its own value, then what's the point? (I dissected this idea in an essay of mine recently for Tablet)

Additionally, many of the Great Books have come back from the dead! And often in cultures fairly different from the ones where they were originally written.

For instance, after a few hundred years when secular philosophy was more or less extinct in the west, Aristotle burst back into life in the Islamic world. Medieval Arabic philosophy was created out of an explicit attempt to reconcile the teaching of the Koran with the teachings of Aristotle. The Abbasid Caliph Al-Mansur paid people to translate Greek writings into Arabic, and when Arab philosophers read them, they were struck by how logical they were, and they just felt a burning desire to make everything fit!

They could've just as easily said, "Fuck these Greeks, we don't care if they disagree with the Koran, we're right and they're wrong." And that is how a certain subset of Arab and Persian intellectuals felt. But the pull of these classics was too strong. At times it was dangerous to advance the ideas in some of these books! Al-Kindi, the first of the Islamic peripatetics was literally flogged because he wouldn't abandon these ideas.³ But he stuck with it. And Aristotle became the foundation of Islamic philosophy. When people talked about "The Master" they literally meant Aristotle!

In the pre-racial era, Aristotle was controversial not because he wasn't Arab, but because he wasn't Muslim. It was the idea of finding wisdom outside of the Koran that was controversial. But once that barrier was crossed, there was no additional racial hurdle. Loving Aristotle didn't lower or demean you as a person.

(For reasons that still aren't totally clear, Plato was almost unknown both in the medieval Islamic world and in Western Christiandom, though he remained commonly known in the Byzantine world).

Here’s a picture of Stonehenge just for fun. Used under the CC License, because I belatedly realized that if I was going to charge money for Substacks I should probably not violate photographers’ copyrights.

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Right now, the approach to the Great Books is profoundly inflected by race. Do we think Ron-fucking-DeSantis promotes the Great Books because he cares about ancient learning? Fuck no. It's because, given the way race has been conceptualized, the Greatness of the Great Books somehow proves something good about white people.

Similarly, the disdain that many left-liberal people have for the Great Books is because it's felt that to say Aristotle or Plato is great in himself means you're saying white people are superior to all other people.

The chain of reasoning here is very abstract, and it requires the idea of race in order to function. I think the idea that we either like or don't like is that races differ in their abilities, and if one race produces lots of artistic masterpieces then it’s more likely they’re the master race.

Sometimes we read 'race' as 'culture', but culture in such a broad sense that "Western culture" becomes synonymous with "the white race." One problem is there is simply no way to exclude Islam and the Middle East from Western Culture. Most of the sources of classical culture, from Istanbul to Alexandria to Persia to the Ionian coast, are quite literally within the Islamic world at the moment. Islamic philosophy also takes Aristotle as a springing-off point, just as the Koran takes the Old and New Testament as a springing-off point. The Islamic and Christian worlds are just inextricably and rather messily interlinked in a way that, say, Western and Chinese cultures are not.

In fact most attempts to cut the Islamic world out of "Western civilization" require a kind of teleological argument: the natural end-point of Classical Greek civilization was the Enlightenment and liberal democracy and industrialization. Hence the West is the real heir to Greek civilization, and Islam is not. But with that, you've already assumed ex ante that the West is superior, and since that's exactly what you were trying to prove in the first place, why bring the Greeks into it in the first place?

So, going back to race, it's always baffled me: why would the people of Athens 2500 years ago writing good things mean that the people of Europe, and those descended from Europe, were racially superior to other people? It seems to me that in 2023, we know two things: Western Europe and the British settler states are richer than the rest of the world, and they exert an outsized influence, relative to their population, on the world. To try and prove (or disprove!) that that's due to some natural racial or cultural superiority seems very...shortsighted? I mean in 1240 the Mongols could've easily written tracts about why they were the world's most superior people. The same could've been said for the Turks in 1077. Or the Arabs in 700? At any given time, someone's on top and someone's not. Nobody can seriously believe that America and Europe will be on top for the rest of history. And yet for the rest of history Plato and Aristotle will be read and appreciated. So any link you draw between people today and the Greeks is bound to be false. The West has not always been the dominant power in the world, and it will not always be the dominant power. White people have not always been the dominant race, and they won't always be the dominant race. So clearly there is no inherent superiority there. The dominance is just a matter of circumstance.

My point of view is that it's silly to talk about one people owning a particular set of books. Nothing that's written in a book belongs to anyone. I mean, there are certain practices that you cannot learn; you need to be born into them. That's true for many dances, styles of speech, religious traditions. But that doesn't apply to things written down in books. Everyone reading a book has the same relationship to it. The words in books are dead and disembodied, stripped of context. All written literature belongs to the person who can read it.

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Of course it is precisely these universalist sentiments that held in America throughout much of the 20th century, and which have been rejected by many leftists and left-liberals. And again the reason is race. It is race that gave the lie to this universalizing impulse. It's because of race that Gandhi, for instance, would, despite his learning, get thrown out of a train in South Africa, and begin to turn against Western culture. Because of race, it becomes untrue, at least in a racialized society, that the Classics can belong to everyone. In a racialized society, they will always belong more to certain people. Which is to say, certain people will be able to use them more easily.

Where America stands on the continuum of racialized societies is debatable. The secret of race in America is that antiblackness is a lot more severe than other forms of racial prejudice. I've gotten pretty far using my knowledge of the Classics (and I'm not even an expert), but I know a lot of Black professionals who feel they've never been accorded the respect due them for mastering (and being highly credentialed in) equivalent forms of knowledge in other fields. I'm talking, for instance, about the Black doctors who get 4x the complaints the white doctors get or the Black authors who get half the advances of white authors with the same sales record.

In such a society, while your personal experience of the Classics can be the same as a white person's, the way you deploy that knowledge won't be the same: it won't serve the same function in your life that it would in theirs.

This is why leftists and left-liberals are so leery of whole-heartedly embracing the Great Books. Non-white people have said, you know, the assumption that this stuff is universal rings false to us.

But I do think there is a difference here between the sociological meaning of the Classics and their value as good books to read. Sociologically speaking, maybe forcing non-white people to read the Classics is bad, because it forces them to spend lots of time learning things that they can never fully "get credit" for. But I have seen no evidence that the wisdom and beauty in the Classics isn't as applicable to non-white people as to white people.

And I think that to assume the Classics have less to offer non-white people is itself racist, because, like, how could that possibly be the case? If you're English, you're the descendent of several waves of Neolithic people who migrated to the island (the same folks who built and used Stonehenge), with a small leavening of Anglo-Saxon genes. When Socrates drank the hemlock, there was no literature on the island, and the first description of the island in the extant literature, by Strabo, was 500 years away. In contrast, the Carthaginians were in Tunisia trading away with Athens--the Greek alphabet is itself derived from alphabet of the Phoenicians, who were the people who founded Carthage. There's no racial grounds on which the Greeks could be more meaningful to the British than to the North African person.

And if we say that the grounds are cultural--if we say that the Greeks are now an integral part of British culture--then when did that happen? At some point, the first British person read a Greek writer, and loved it, and said we ought to make this a bigger part of our culture, and they did it--and that happened because someone had a genuine response to a writer from an extremely alien culture.

Similarly, even if we argue that the non-white American is more culturally removed from the Greeks (an extremely dubious proposition, giving the relative cultural homogeny that's the inevitable result of a childhood subjected to American mass media), then why shouldn't they be introduced to it? To argue that something is good for white people but not non-white people is, again, to create a racial divide by assuming that one already exists. If the answer is simply that the Greeks _aren't_ good for anyone, even for white people, then that's just false, and anyone who's read them knows it to be false.

That's the thing, either they are good for everyone, bad for everyone, or only good for white people. And we know that they aren't bad for everyone, so then what options are left? They're good. They're good things for everyone to read. But in a racialized society, admitting that is like drinking poison, because the white racist inevitably hears "My people are better." It feels *so* tempting to not give them that, to just continue to dismiss this body of knowledge, or even to subtly undermine it, by pointing out that Aristotle supports slavery and that the Persians were really the larger, more advanced civilization, etc.

Then of course this all gets caught up in the question of ethnolinguistic and national identity. The Great Books is a uniquely American concept: it's the product of a people who don't really have a long literary history of our own. Of course a Great Books list in China would have a lot more Confucius than Plato. And a Great Books list in India would have the Upanishads and not Gilgamesh.

But amongst our community, the community of white and non-white Americans, we cannot will a separate ethnolinguistic identity into being. Like it or not, I read and speak English. I live in America. I don't read Sanskrit. And to me Plato is a lot more resonant than Confucius. The modern conception of the Great Books is much more cross-cultural, of course, and it includes Confucius along with Plato, but it's still tilted towards the West and towards works in English.

Ironically, the biggest barrier to universal acclaim for the Greeks is itself the existence of white people. If every white American died tomorrow, and all the non-white people of America were called upon to write up a Great Books list, there is no question in my mind that, just like the Turks moving into the Hagia Sophia, we'd put Plato and Aristotle onto that list.

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Paid Subscriptions

I’ve added a paid component to this substack. It costs $5 a month to subscribe and $30 a month. I get about 80 percent of that, so if you do an annual subscription (which you should all do and then forget you did it), I get about $24, or the equivalent of what I’d get from selling twelve hardback books.

More seriously, I realized my blog would look more serious and valuable if I charged money. I never did on wordpress, but that’s just not the culture of Wordpress. On Substack it’s the culture, and you look like a newb or a tyro if you don’t. I will have paid posts: likely those will be the ones I dish about books I don’t like. I’m thinking of writing the first post about Ocean Vuong’s On Earth You’re Briefly Gorgeous. Terrible novel. If you want to know why, subscribe. Maybe one paid post a week? Who knows.

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1. I used to bristle at the idea that race was invented, and that it didn’t always exist. Like, didn’t the Greeks consider the Persians to be a very different people? The Greeks are always talking about other peoples, and how they’re barbaric. But the idea of a people sharing some bond by blood, rather than culture, is a bit of a newly-invented idea. Then of course there’s the idea of the nation-state, when a race becomes identified with a state, and it’s just a totally different ball-game from something like the Athenian Empire and the Spartan League. So yes people do overstate the extent to which race is a new concept, and things like race, or that functioned like race, did exist in the pre-modern era, but they were slightly different and much more permeable. Unlike racial barriers, other barriers dissolved after a while (with the sole exception of religious minorities, but then, religious minorities were a racial group created by a belief. Every Parsi who converted to Hinduism, for instance, became just another Hindu).

2. It's unbearably dreary to harp on this point, but only a single literary work by a woman survives from the Greco-Roman period in its complete form (so far as I know). To study literature before 1700 means to study the work of men. A few female writers exist, but not enough to provide even a laughable stab at gender diversity.

3. The Peripatetic school was the one founded by Aristotle