"Self-taught" is another word for uneducated
Autodidacts have more credibility with lay-people than professors do, and we often abuse that trust
I’ve been feeling inadequate while writing my Great Books book. My friends are like, “Girl, that’s just imposter syndrome.”
But I never had imposter syndrome while writing novels. I always knew my work was better than most of the stuff out there. And novel-writing doesn’t require an education. There’s no training program, no professional course, in novel writing.
Writing a Great Books apologetic, on the other hand, usually requires an Ivy League (or at the very least University of Chicago) professorship. The most famous apology was written by Allan Bloom, a Chicago professor. Two more recent ones were written by Jacques Barzun and Roosevelt Montas, both Columbia professors. And I’ve recently enjoyed a lot of writing on liberal education by William Deresewicz, a former professor at Yale.
The concept of the Great Books, or even the much looser notion of the "classic", is inextricably intertwined with expert opinion. If lay opinion was called upon to anoint classics, all the classics would be by Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard (as this Modern Library reader poll memorably showed).1
Instead of trusting to lay opinion, we trust experts not only to select classics, but to define what it 'means' to be a classic, through a sort of push-and-pull, a continual process of interrogation about the merits of various works and authors. As J.M. Coetzee put it in "What Is A Classic?" (writing about Bach's The Well-Tempered Klavier):
“The criterion of testing and survival is not just a minimal, pragmatic, Horatian standard (Horace says, in effect, that if a work is still around a hundred years after it was written, it must be a classic). It is a criterion that expresses a certain confidence in the tradition of testing, and a confidence that professionals will not devote labor and attention, generation after generation, to sustaining pieces of music whose life functions have terminated.”
The concept of the classics is inherently aristocratic. The classics are selected by experts, and they can only be appreciated by people with expert taste.
I think this is why the Great Books program has, from the beginning, rubbed so many critics the wrong way (witness Leavis and MacDonald's reproaches, both on distinctly aristocratic lines). Allan Bloom, himself no democrat, only begrudgingly allowed for the worth of the Great Books program:
"I am perfectly well aware of, and actually agree with, the objections to the Great Books cult. It is amateurish; it encourages an autodidact’s self-assurance without competence; one cannot read all of the Great Books carefully; if one only reads Great Books, one can never know what a great, as opposed to an ordinary, book is; there is no way of determining who is to decide what a Great Book or what the canon is; books are made the ends and not the means; the whole movement has a certain coarse evangelistic tone that is the opposite of good taste; it engenders a spurious intimacy with greatness; and so on.2
I don’t totally believe that Mortimer and Hutchins, who originated the Great Books program, thought anyone would actually read the books they sold. For one thing, about a fifth of the books were dreary scientific treatises by Kepler, Euclid, Galileo, and the like. For another, the books had tiny type, dated translations, and no footnotes. For them, the adult education component of the Great Books program always seemed secondary to the college curriculum they’d built up.
Regardless of their intentions, today the concept of educating yourself in the Great Books has all but died out. I don't think I've read a recent polemic that seriously advocated reading these books on your own. The fad has instead been for single-author encomia, like Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch or Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life or my friend Jillian's Sex and Shakespeare.3
Then, of course, there's the self-improvement books, focused on drawing timeless wisdom from the Great Authors. The Stoics are popular, mainly due to Ryan Holliday's Stoic Virtues series. And I think an Aristotle themed self-help book came out recently too.
There’s also a slice of the conservative world that seems enamored of certain philosophers, mainly Plato, Aristotle and St. Augustine. This has some relationship to Leo Strauss, also a Chicago professor who used innovative readings of the Great Books to explicate his philosophies, but I know absolutely nothing about him and can't speak to that. (I am profoundly suspicious of though of their readings of St. Augustine, whose teachings, as interpreted by the First Things and Compact crowd, always seem to support Catholic theocracy.)
These reading plans are small and well-targeted. You can read the texts in a year. Whereas the broad-ranging Great Books reading plan set people up to fail: it’s too long and too hard, with too many texts that’re of doubtful use. The Great Books program promises some kind of completion or mastery, and yet its very breadth militates against that mastery. Whereas the single-author approach (take a summer, read Middlemarch) doesn’t make grand promises. At the end, you won’t be an expert in literature: you’ll just be a person who’s read Middlemarch. And yet there’s a reason I was drawn to the Great Books. I wanted that mastery! I wanted to know everything! To appreciate everything! And I wanted it, not for self-improvement, but so I could ultimately make additions that storehouse of knowledge. (Incidentally, I’ve uploaded the complete list of Great Books, exactly as I copied it out of The New Lifetime Reading Plan when I was twenty-four, along with tick-marks to indicate which ones I’ve read).
In my own field, fiction writing, it's a bit astonishing how little attention is paid to the classic novels. Most writers of literary fiction, in my experience, majored in English in college, and they generally seem happy with whatever 18th and 19th century literature they were taught for their degree. In their spare time, if they're not reading contemporary fiction, they tend to read the mostly highly-acclaimed writers of the last fifty years: Delillo, McCarthy, Atwood, Ishiguro, Morrison, etc. Millennials read these writers the same way Gen-X writers might've read Hemingway or Heller (dismissively, but with interest). For the modern literary writer, it's rare to read a novel written before World War II.
Multiculturalism is often held up as the enemy here, but I wasn't alive fifty years ago, so I have no idea if the writers of the 80s were more interested in Melville than we are in Edith Wharton. I suspect not.
I assume there is some fraction of the literary world where this isn't true, because otherwise there's no way to explain Blake Smith's takedown of the NYRB Classics project. Personally, I would love if all my friends and colleagues waited anxiously to read the latest NYRB Classics. I'm actually a member of the NYRB Classics Book Club, and one of their recent selections, Aleksandar Ticsma's Kapo, was brilliant and unbearably bleak and got me back into reading Holocaust novels.
But for those of us who aren't in academia and don't live in the metropole, we're glad even to find someone who's read David Foster Wallace--we don't dare hope they might like Edith Wharton. And Samuel Johnson? Henry Fielding? Samuel Richardson? Milton? Forget about it.
It's easy to say that the autodidact ought to stay in their lane, and that their knowledge is for their self-improvement only, and not something they ought to opine about, but that's a bit unrealistic. For one thing, it's simply a fact that faith in experts has waned. The autodidact is in the strange position of having rather more credibility, with the lay person, than the university professor!
One would assume that the autodidact feels some measure of pride over their achievements, and I think this is true for many autodidacts who aren't themselves in the arts or humanities, but I mostly feel inadequate. I cannot overstate the degree to which I thought, when I began this course of reading, that this was simply the done thing. I thought once I was truly in the literary world, I'd be discussing Proust and James Joyce and Natsume Soeseki over tea every morning.
That's one reason I love Substack so much! It's my dream of a literary life, and I hope that I never wake up.4
In writing my book on the GBs, I've been careful to define my project so it encompasses what I am capable of doing. I am not, as that famous autodidact Count Tolstoy did in the bravura opening to What is Art?, capable of summarizing the last two hundred years of aesthetic theory. I cannot tell you what makes a great book great, or if there are any commonalities between them. I cannot even tell you what every other writer has said about greatness.
Moreover, I am incapable of summarizing the various schools of thought on the question and the various approaches. Someone who's been properly educated (i.e. in graduate school) has absorbed a number of different "discourses", ways of talking about a subject. They know precisely where you can get with each discourse, and which approaches will be more productive of new knowledge.
In general, the autodidact is unable to add new knowledge to our collective storehouse. The autodidact, especially when they're attempting to draw connections on their own, often says things that are banal or easily disproven. Even when the autodidact may be on more certain ground, they won't be taken seriously by the systems that produce knowledge. For instance, I feel dead certain that Taming of the Shrew is about mistreating your wife until her spirit breaks, but Jillian told me the scholarly consensus is that when Petruchio deprives Katherine of water and food, it's merely a playful act, and that Katherine understands it as not involving serious risks. Who knew?!
Because the autodidact is shut out of the traditional uses of their knowledge (scholarship), there's a tendency to try and introduce it into other fields, where their cultural knowledge is less common. I face a constant temptation to start engaging in amateur sociology, using my knowledge of the classics as a stand-in for knowledge of how people actually behaved in past eras. But the truth is, my knowledge is very shallow.5 For instance, when I said that Gen X'ers read Heller the way we read McCarthy, that's not really based on anything. It's just an induction, because he seems to have a Gen-X vibe going on (especially in Something Happened). But I don't know what writers in the 80s liked to read. I don't even know how to find out!
It's easy to say that the autodidact ought to stay in their lane, and that their knowledge is for their self-improvement only, and not something they ought to opine about, but that's a bit unrealistic. For one thing, faith in experts has waned. The autodidact is in the strange position of having rather more credibility, with the lay person, than the university professor! After all, the autodidact's income doesn't depend on their knowledge, and they haven't been acculturated into the academy either. If the autodidact is able to genuinely second the opinions of the experts, then for the average person, that counts for more than an infinite amount of argument by authority.
But the autodidact often finds it easier to destroy than to preserve. By reiterating the conventional wisdom, the autodidact has only a small marginal effect. But when they go against the conventional wisdom, their opinion can be outsized. For instance, Shakespeare is not my favorite writer on a line-level. My deepest, darkest most secret opinion is that what people find remarkable in his work is simply a representation of the standard, rather ornate, Petrarch-inspired style of the time. I much prefer the pre-Renaissance, much more unadorned style of, say, a Chaucer or the Pearl Poet. People are impressed by Shakespeare's elaborate metaphors, but that's simply what writers did in Elizabethan times. Other Elizabethan dramatists wrote in a very similar style.
If I was to try and sell a book called The Shakespeare-Industrial Complex about how Shakespeare was foisted on us in a racist-colonial project by Imperial England I'd probably set the tone for much of the public debate on Shakespeare, even if scholars scoffed at me. Arguably, this is what Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins themselves did in creating the Great Books--any discussion of the classics and of liberal education must include mention of their program, even if most scholars find it a bit ridiculous.
Incidentally, this effect is even stronger if, like Adler and Hutchins, you are yourself well-credentialed. The expert in one field who becomes a self-appointed expert in another field is a notorious figure. Economists are particularly prone to this (witness Emily Oster during the pandemic), because their field provides tools that, they think, can model any sort of human behavior (except for, you know, the stock market, because if they could model that, they wouldn't be professors, they'd be billionaire investors).
One example I've been seeing lately is Nigel Biggar's Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. An Oxford philosophy professor attempts to defend the British Empire, but does so without reckoning with the past fifty years of post-colonial studies. The result is they produce exactly the same kinds of apologia for colonialism that were common in the 50s and 60s, and which led to....post-colonial studies. (I read the book and was predictably unimpressed.)
So is the autodidact required, then, to uphold the conventional wisdom? Well, that's certainly what most traditional scholars would like them to do! They want handmaidens and boosters for academia, they don't want to hear the autodidact's thoughts!
The autodidact ought to be content with applying their knowledge within the scope of their own field. The manager can channel the skepticism of Hume or Montaigne. The writer can be influenced by Samuel Johnson's long, lush sentences (he's one of my favorite writers). The parent can rely on stoic virtue when their kid is being a brat. Autodidacts ought to read to improve themselves in their core functions, not to butt into intellectual life.
Personally, I am skeptical of the idea of the yeoman farmer, the factory fore-person, the real estate agent, who reads Chaucer privately, merely for their own education. I think once you've read enough books, you naturally long to become part of the nation's intellectual life.
Indeed, one of the main justifications for the liberal education (at least in some phase of American history) was to prepare people for roles as citizens. In a prior era, I am told, various small advisory bodies proliferated: school boards and neighborhood commissions, etc, and it was not uncommon for the leading citizens in a town to take on some civic role. When I've visited small towns, it's still like this--the wife of the town's richest farmer will be the librarian; their brother will be the school principal; their son is the mayor, etc. It's oligarchy (or perhaps aristocracy, if you've read lots of Aristotle and are trying to ennoble the idea of rule by the wealthiest).
In cities, most leadership roles are carried out by professional managers, who have their own system of education that doesn't leave time for reading the Great Books. My sense is that in most of the country the Great Books, and autodidacticism more generally, is either the province of the retired person or the oddball, someone with more self-regard than status. A person like Richard Wright, for instance, who left school at 8th grade and worked as a night porter in a drug-store, checking out books from the segregated white library by pretending they were for his white coworker. Both the far left and the far right seem to have more than their fair share of autodidacts.
When I think of the audience for this blog, and for my book on the GBs, and for this program of reading in general, I don't imagine it in the aggregate. I am not trying to ennoble or uplift some particular class of people. I am thinking in individual terms. Due to the accident of my education, I had a respect for the Great Books that most people with my class status (solidly upper class) tend not to have.6 I want other ambitious people to be weird like me and to seriously think about these books as a source of both wisdom and power. And not for self-improvement or to gain happiness or any of that nonsense--if you want to be happy, go meditate--but because they want to contribute to our nation's intellectual life in off-beat, interesting ways.
Oh and also, also, also, I want more people to read St. Augustine's City of God, so they can call Sohrab Ahmabi and the rest of the integralists out on their bullshit! St. Augustine was not a theocrat! I feel sometimes like I am going crazy: isn't the entire book about how the city of god and the earthly city are different? And how God doesn't guarantee a strong and prosperous nation? Other people need to read this and report back.
That's the other thing about the Great Books. They're so under-read these days, in my opinion, that they've become anyone's toy, and it's possible now to make the most outrageous assertions about what's in them. That too is something I'd like to stop. Let's challenge those motherfuckers next time they try and pull out some St. Augustine on us. One problem with pseudo-intellectualism is real scholars often don’t bother to correct it, so other pseuds need to take up the sword ourselves!
Yes, followers of both cult-leaders obviously flooded the poll, but that’s just another way of saying these are the books that genuinely aroused the most passion and excitement.
Bloom continues: “But one thing is certain: wherever the Great Books make up a central part of the curriculum, the students are excited and satisfied, feel they are doing something that is independent and fulfilling, getting something from the university they cannot get elsewhere. The very fact of this special experience, which leads nowhere beyond itself, provides them with a new alternative and a respect for study itself. The advantage they get is an awareness of the classic—particularly important for our innocents; an acquaintance with what big questions were when there were still big questions; models, at the very least, of how to go about answering them; and, perhaps most important of all, a fund of shared experiences and thoughts on which to ground their friendships with one another."
This was my first time ever being thanked in a book’s acknowledgements!
Aside for, you know, the transphobia. That’s not and has never been in my dreams.
I was highly amused by John Pistelli’s recent observation (in a blog post that includes a mention of me) that even Borges had a very shallow understanding of many matters. A lot of his encyclopedic knowledge was literally from the encyclopedia. I guess my hours of Wikipedia browsing haven’t been wasted then!
Ironically, this veneration for the Great Books makes me come off, in literary circles, as very middle-class. To make it in the literary world, you need to appear as if you already know everything you need to know. This means if you haven’t read a book, it’s by choice. Whereas if you’re into the Great Books, then it’s hard to escape the fact that, clearly, you haven’t read all of them (because nobody has).
You really are one of the better writers on the subject of the "humanities" that I've encountered! To jump off this and your comments on Pistelli's substack, there isn't much of a lay American intellectual life - a trend which I think has less to do with abstruse academics and more to do with Star Wars and Michael Jackson (and, later, Netflix and social media). For 99% of people, mass culture is just too popular, and too easy, to the point where it's hard to imagine what an intellectual culture (beyond the semi-professionals of academia and magazines in New York) would look like. And critiques of mass culture have vanished even more than the culture war over the great books.
Like many Americans, I sometimes hope this is better in Europe, but even Kundera at the end of his life was complaining that the French elite watched TV instead of read novels. Maybe the growth of Korean and Latin American pop culture will compel Americans to invest more in their high culture since their mass culture will no longer be hegemonic, but that seems a bit far-fetched...
I can't speak for Kepler and what I've read of Euclid confirms your description, but Galileo is anything but dreary.
Wasn't there a Great Books program in the mid-20th century that included local book clubs and standardized editions? I am remembering this from the elementary school version in the 1960s.