The Great Books are the easiest route, for the lay intellectual, into the life of the mind

Also, Sinclair Lewis is underrated

I've written before about how I'm not overly concerned with the education of the average person. If you're talking about which five to ten books will a college student read before passing out of college and taking up their career, then that's a sociological question. You're not asking "How can I best help this person to achieve their own goals?" Instead you're asking, "How can I mold them by imparting some specific set of principles and knowledge to them?" Conservatives aren't wrong that curricula are about indoctrination. The fact is, there are many lists of ten-great-books that you could teach. And each list would impart different implicit and explicit lessons, and at that point it all becomes a social engineering problem.

Very few people will graduate college and continue on to do serious reading. Most of those who do will go to graduate school, where their reading will be limited to their subject area. For most students, the purpose of general education requirements is to give students a story about the world that they can hold onto--a story about the consensus achieved by the world's greatest thinkers.

Personally, I see no issue with late 20th-century liberalism, of the gender equality, you-do-you, the-rich-have-responsibilities-to-the-poor, every-culture-is-unique-and-wonderful variety, so if I was making a list, it would probably be, I dunno, Invisible Man, My Experiments in Truth, Pillow Book, Pride and Prejudice, The Social Contract*, the Books of Genesis and Samuel and Ecclesiastes, the Trial of Socrates, The Iliad, and, like, the Oedipus trilogy. In other words, half traditional classics, half 'diverse' books, half works of philosophy, and a few pandering inclusions for the sake of white people very invested in the Bible and the Greek classics. Very safe inclusions--very "we have a lot to be proud of and so does everyone else".

I think the ideas of semi-educated people tend to come, however, from the aether. That's why even though the humanities are in lockstep resisting white supremacy, lots of people still somehow think Greek statues prove modernity is shit and non-white people are inferior. It is not and has never been possible to control what people think. You got these Catholics writing in First Things about how in the Middle Ages the Church guided the people, steering them toward goodness, but...in the Albigensian Crusade we saw in Southern France there would be entire villages of Cathars and nobody had a clue! In fact, through most of Europe (England being a notable exception), there were no parish priests. To call the ordinary people Christian was a pretty big stretch, when oftentimes they were continuing to venerate the same pagan Gods in the same holy groves on the same holy days (except they were calling them saints instead). Or look at the Soviet Union--they had total control over every aspect of society for 80 years, and by the time the end came, not even the Politburo itself believed in communism anymore!

This is not to say you shouldn't try to teach the people something. It just feels like education policy is something set by sovereigns, for their own purposes. Intellectuals strive instead to teach the truth, and the truth isn't going to hew neatly to an ideology, nor will it ever neatly serve the sovereign's purpose.

Which is to say, the purpose of this blog is not to say "People should read such and such books." It is, instead, a blog with a pretty small audience: potential thinkers and intellectuals. And it's a blog that's meant to push back against the presentism I see across the intellectual sphere, but particularly amongst center-left thinkers. We are not at the apex of history. We are not essentially different from the people who came before us. Our thinkers are no wiser. Our lives are not more meaningful or lived-in.

I go on this long tangent because I am halfway through three serious books right now: the Gothic classic The Mysteries of Udolpho (which I don't hate!), the E.P. Thompson work of Marxist historiography Making of the English Working Class, and a 1970s-era textbook about 19th century England called The Age of Reform: 1815-1870. All the books seem interrelated somehow, to the point where when I start one, I immediately think I need to finish the others.

Making of the English Working Class was great, but fabulously dense, and full of throwaway mentions of so many actors and actions that I felt as if I wasn't understanding most of it. Mysteries of Udolpho is a very readable novel, but important in the history of the English language primarily for the wave of Gothic and sensation novels it would inspire throughout the 19th century, and every time I read the book I think, what's the point of reading this book until I know more about the world it created. And the textbook is the densest and most rewarding, but it's so very much a textbook, without a central plot or thesis, and my going is so slow (after two weeks I'm on p150 of 600) that I keep thinking "My substack will die unless I read something I can actually write about."

I really want to write about the Age of Reform, and about 19th-century British politics--for instance, the British government that passed the Great Reform Bill that gave the vote to the middle class was also almost exclusively dominated by lords and the sons of lords. And, in general, the association between the great land-owning magnates and the cause of reform strikes me as extremely bizarre. Marxists have turned this association into a general rule--the conflict between the great and petit bourgeoisie--but it seems rather unique to 19th-century England, but for starters the Whigs were at least initially dominated by the great land-owning families, not the industrial magnates, and they were arrayed against the King, who opposed reform. Moreover, in France the great land-owners were certainly in opposition to ay sort of reform, while the King was at least somewhat in support of it, so the way the classes arrayed themselves was not at all set in stone.

This is all great info, but who's it for? Who's interested in it? Can I genuinely recommend that people spend several months of their life reading about the conditions in 19th-century England? I think these are important things to know, if you're a writer or thinker, but most people aren't writers or thinkers, and they don't aspire to be.

The general reader seems, to me, a bit of a scarecrow that we use to evade comments from editors about whether there's really a market for our work. I've no doubt there is a large, silent mass of people who are interested in ideas for their own sake, but I don't see any point in convincing people to be interested in ideas for their own, merely out of idle curiosity. I cannot imagine ideas coming alive in someone and not driving them to do something--to read, to think, to tweet, to write. I think there is a world of ideas that it's difficult to participate in passively, and if you wade into it, you end up contributing to it yourself. I'm thinking for instance of Catherine, in Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, who goes to college but knows instinctively she's not really fit for great work, so she marries a small-town doctor, and goes to this little community and is like, I am going to educate and uplift them. Obviously they hate her for her smugness and condescension, and perhaps rightfully so. But...they are also small-minded and ill-educated! In the end she leaves her husband and goes to DC and starts working in the civil service before, as I recall, he finally coaxes her back. That, to me, is the ideal reader of my blog.

And the key thing about that person is they're not going to leave the thinking to the experts. Maybe they should, but they're just not going to. They're going to read these books, and they're going to have *notions.* And they'll do their own researches. And they'll get into weird subcultures. And they’ll produce tweets and papers, and, honestly, a lot of it will be cringe-inducing. But that is also the lifeblood of the culture.

Reading The Making of the English Working Class, you realize that the working class had its own traditions, its own rituals, its own notions, and its own ideas of right and wrong, which they acted fiercely to defend. Similarly, I think the middle class has a sense of its own prerogatives, and one of those prerogatives is that they are not going to just leave the thinking to the experts!¹

And it's in the context of people determined to do their own thinking, for better or worse, that I think the Great Books have a lot to offer--these are relatively-accessible primary texts, which allow of infinite interpretations, and which are, most importantly, rather under-read. Yes, the experts have read them, but they've read much more *about* the books than they have of the books themselves. The average professor can tell you that Caliban has been read as a post-colonial subject, but not that he wishes he'd succeeded in raping Miranda: ("would't had been done! / ...I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans"). There is a lot within these texts that various experts have thrown out in order to create their theories, and by returning to the text, the lay reader is often able to subvert what they've been taught _about_ the text.

I think the number of people who want to play a role in the world of letters and the world of ideas is not a small number, and, from my vantage point, "Great Books connoisseur" is probably only of the only entrypoints that isn't already clogged with other aspirants.

Also it's just fun. Like...it's a lot of fun to play this game at a high level. There is so much power in it. That's what the Straussians have realized: nobody in the mainstream is reading the Great Books. If you crack them open, you basically have them to yourself. It's kind of intoxicating, honestly, and there's a very dangerous sense of power that comes with it. Like if I wanted to say Main Street was an attack on some proto-woke white-lady improver, it would be such an easy case to make. It's not like any of y'all have read it. In fact, the book comes closer to being the opposite (it's an attack on small-town closemindedness).² But what makes the book great is that Carol, the main character, really IS a bit insufferable, just like Caliban might be unfairly dispossessed, but he really IS a rapist.

Of course, now I risk minimizing the worth of the Great Books--I am not claiming they will give you unfailing wisdom or bring you happiness--I'm reduced to claiming that, in this specific time and place, familiarizing themselves with them is a good way to play a role in the intellectual life of the nation. But the wisdom and happiness, although real, are things you can get in a lot of different ways--whereas playing a role in the intellectual life of the nation is something that's pretty fucking hard to do and is getting harder and harder every day.

1. It’s funny because I’d say most of the literary critics on Substack (at least those who are writing criticism, rather than book reviews) have PhDs, so they’re not exactly lay readers or lay intellectuals. They’ve gone through a professional training program in criticism. However, most of them are also, not to put too fine a point on it, failures. They washed out. The academy rejected them. Usually unfairly! But now if they insist on the value of their own specialized education, they are also deifying the power that damned them, and ensuring that they will always be losers in their own minds. Whereas to do the opposite and to run down their own training might mentally free them from the negative judgements of the academy, but it also reduces the distance between them and the barbarians. This is the typical conundrum of shabby-genteel people the world over! I personally say the best thing to do if you’re a baronet’s third son is to eschew the clergy and instead marry the daughter of a rich farmer and enjoy one generation as a local celebrity and then let your bloodline sink into obscurity. In other words, don’t write literary criticism, write fantasy novels instead, and everyone will love you for slumming with them—but of course this is something most of the shabby-genteel would rather die than undertake.

Of course someone might easily say the same thing to me, “Naomi, you’re at about 70 percent of a Thomas Chatterton Williams right now. If you went 100 percent TCW, you could be in The Atlantic or The New Yorker tomorrow.” It’s true, and maybe if I needed the money, that’s what I’d do, but thank God I do not. I would literally rather be unpublished than be the tranny who spends her days putting swords in the hands of transphobes.

2. As an aside, Sinclair Lewis is underrated. He’s regarded as a bad Nobel Prize winner, but he got the prize during the era when only writers of big social novels got it. To put it another way, Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Borges—none of them got the prize. It was only after WWII that stylists and aethetes started to get it. But, honestly, I don’t see what’s so wrong with writing big social novels, so long as they’re good. Lewis had a phenomenon run of five novels in the middle of his career: Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Arrowsmith, and Dodsworth. These, along with his late-career It Could Happen Here, constitute a fine oeuvre—they’re well-observed, complex, forceful, and entertaining. On a prose level, he’s better than most of the naturalists and realists—certainly better than Dreiser or Upton Sinclair (who are both underrated as well!), to whom he’s often compared. He also had a vivid, fertile imagination and a lot of ambition. Nobody else, in the hundred years since, has done a better job writing the life of a hero scientist the way he did in Arrowsmith.

Sinclair Lewis has a bad rap because he was the most famous and acclaimed novelist of his generation, and the first to win the Nobel, and everyone thought he was overrated and said so, and then the next generation never circled around to check where he should be rated. Compare this to Somerset Maugham, who wrote a very similar sort of thing, but was never overpraised in his time and never threatened his colleagues and as such has maintained a steady popularity since (Maugham famously said he stood in “the very first row of the second-raters”, which is honestly a pretty fair assessment).