Those familiar with the early history of the movement at Columbia identified with John Erskine’s Honors Course and the “Classics of the Western World,” known later in Chicago and St. John’s as the “Great Books Program,” will recall how its early advocates, including, among others, Mark Van Doren and Stringfellow Barr, referred to the dialogue among the great writers and thinkers as the “Great Conversation.” They thought of it as the great minds speaking to one another over the centuries about the perennial issues of human life and society. Contrary to those who misperceived the process as one of handing down fixed, eternal truths, for them it was a vital process of reengaging with questions that had continued human relevance, age after age. One could not afford to ignore what had been said about those issues earlier because civilization depended on building upon the lessons of the past. Thus tradition, like civilization, continued to grow. It was cumulating and cumulative, not fixed.
Not all of the issues engaged in this conversation had to do with civilization and society—some religious issues might go beyond that—but sustaining the conversation itself required a civilized life, a willingness to show a decent respect for what others have learned or thought for themselves, what others have valued or held dear—indeed, it was an appreciation for human life as it has been lived.
In the earlier phases of this movement, the conversation was largely within the Western tradition and was closely tied to the question of how classics, originally expressed in the classical languages of the West, especially Latin and Greek—could still survive in the modern vernacular as part of a classical education. But it was easily assumed that translation into the vernacular was possible because of a continuity of both language and culture into the later period. Such continuity in cultural values overrode historical change. As we shall see, this was largely (but not entirely) true of the major Asian traditions as well. They too had longstanding traditions of a Great Conversation, as later writers spoke to and reappropriated their own classics and thus engaged with the great minds of the past.
It was not, however, a matter simply of conserving received tradition. It was, as the word “conversation” suggests, the present speaking to the past in its own voice, actively repossessing and renewing the classics in modern terms that spoke to contemporary concerns as well. In other words, these traditions had within themselves the capacity for reexamination and self-renewal.
In modern times, this meant reflecting on the classics in a way that responded to the new cultural situation in which modern writers found themselves. As homegrown classics but also recognizably human, they became world classics. By the eighteenth century, at least, Western writers recognized that Asian traditions had classic thinkers who spoke to the same issues and concerns, though perhaps in somewhat different terms. Thus Enlightenment thinkers began to speak to the thinkers of classical China as well as to Western classics, and the New England Transcendentalists spoke also to philosophers of ancient India. Benjamin Franklin, at the founding of the American Philosophical Society, dedicated it to the study of Chinese philosophy as well as Western. All this had an effect on early twentieth-century writers such as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and others too numerous to mention. But as of the twentieth century, though the most creative minds were already extending the Great Conversation to Asia, it had as yet little effect on Western education at the base level. Asian classics did not become part of the Great Books program. They were not among Mortimer Adler’s “Hundred Great Books,” nor did his “Hundred Great Ideas” include any Asian concepts.
Another limitation on the inclusion of Asian classics in the Great Conversation as conducted in the modern West was the tendency to focus the conversation on the classic writers of the Asian traditions, but not as part of a continuing conversation over time that matured well beyond ancient times. Thus Ezra Pound thought he could directly engage with the Confucian classics and even translate them himself with minimal sinological expertise. Sometimes he succeeded brilliantly in intuiting and appropriating them for his own poetic purposes, but this fell short of explaining what the Analects or Great Learning had meant to later Chinese, Japanese, and Korean civilizations. In other words, it was more of an extension of Pound’s own culture, his own exploratory venture into a past idealizing Confucianism, than it was a substantial engagement with Chinese culture or civilization in its mature forms.
The time has come, however, for us to extend the conversation to twenty-first-century education in ways that do justice to Asian classics not just as museum pieces but also as part of the historical process to be factored into an emerging world civilization. Given the domination of education today by economic and technological forces—the same forces that drive world business—the preservation of any humanities education at all is problematic now anywhere in the world. Chapter 4 speaks to the crisis in East Asian education: as in the West, modern Asian universities have found it difficult to sustain the reading of even their own classics in the undergraduate curriculum. But the reasons for it are the same as those that militate against any classical education at all, even in the West. For the most part, Chinese or Japanese classics are read only by a few East Asian students majoring in classics departments. Meanwhile, most students want to concentrate on economics, science, and technology, and for these English is the relevant language. Thus the problem for Asian education is little different from that in the West: how to sustain any place at all for the humanities in the curriculum. It is a global problem and raises the question everywhere whether traditional humanistic learning can be sustained as part of a new global culture that would otherwise be dominated simply by the market and technology.
Let me now cite a case close to “home.” It comes from a publication entitled Inside Academe, which speaks for an organization dedicated to upholding academic standards and traditional values in American education. In its summer 2007 issue, Inside Academe had an article entitled “Where’s the Bard?” reporting on a new survey, headlined “The Vanishing Bard,” of more than seventy universities, which reported that only fifteen among them require their English majors to take a course on Shakespeare. Instead, it says, “English majors are being offered an astonishing array of courses on popular culture, children’s literature, sociology, and politics.”
The article goes on to cite a long list of American publications, from USA Today to The New Republic, which regarded these survey results as significant. I doubt that many of us familiar with college education in the United States will consider this news. But for those concerned with how traditional humanistic learning stands in today’s curriculum, the real significance of the report lies in its narrow focus on what is happening in English departments, to English majors—an academic vested interest—and how that is similar to what is happening to their counterpart departments in East Asia, i.e., the erosion in the study of their own classics, as upwardly mobile students choose to study the going language of English as the lingua franca of the twenty-first century. What adds to the irony in this case is that, before this, educated East Asians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had already come to admire Shakespeare as a world classic.
For traditionalists of almost any stripe, it would be a matter of concern that Shakespeare was being put on the shelf, unstudied, in any English department, but the reason for it is something antecedent to the state of the English major. If there is no place for the humanities in a globalized market for education, then even English majors will turn away from so great a figure as Shakespeare to whatever finds favor in the current media or marketplace.
My point is that mere conservatism—holding to an old line that has long since been overrun—will not avail today unless we can establish a place for local tradition in a global humanism that has something to say about what values might direct and control a runaway market economy and technology. Put in such global terms, the magnitude of the problem may seem overwhelming—how can one deal with the problem locally except in the larger context of global education? On the other hand, how can one get a handle on something so massive and complex as global education? If we have to think globally (as the saying goes), how can we act locally to work our way toward that goal? The answer, it seems to me, is that even if we have to deal within the limits of what is practicable in our local situation, we can begin the process of sharing our goals and experiences on a wider scale, so that the resources of the larger scholarly and educational community can be brought to bear upon beneficial, incremental change.
One way to get at this is to share our views on what has been considered “classic” in the major mature traditions of the civilized world and on how these can best be incorporated into our pooled educational resources—to put it simply, to make these resources available in a form that can be adapted to local systems. Thereby, one might hope to establish some kind of working consensus in the same way that the United Nations established a consensus on human rights in its Universal Declaration of 1948. The Universal Declaration did not effectively become “law,” but it did set an international standard few could disagree with and that almost all states formally “ratified,” however much or little they actually complied with it. Activists, always a minority, at least had a standard they could invoke in working toward its implementation. Fortunately, the English text of the declaration had the benefit of multicultural consultation and was less culture bound than would otherwise have been the case. Something like that should be done to establish “Classics for an Emerging World.”
Let us compare our situation to that in American education a century ago. No sooner had President Eliot of Harvard set up his Five-Foot Shelf of Classics than he went over to a system of free electives, which meant that students could wholly ignore the Five-Foot Shelf. Columbia responded by making its “Classics of the Western World” a required Humanities course (a core course for all undergraduates). The Chicago version of this was dubbed “general education,” with the idea of its being intended for students in general, young or old, elite or popular (as the Columbia program itself had been). But “generality” was its undoing when general education at Harvard succumbed to diverse academic interests and disciplines—to “ways of knowing” (among other methodologies) that could lead anywhere. The “core” of the classics earlier had been “ways of living,” i.e., what the “Good Life” could mean in human terms, but this was premised on what it meant to be human. “Ways of knowing” was one aspect of this, but only one. Without a core of central human concerns, Ways of Knowing could lead to a diffuse unboundedness out on the so-called cutting edge of knowledge.
The “elective” character of even general education at Harvard was congenial to the free market that has dominated almost all aspects of cultural life in the past century, and it has benefited from the affluence—the great range of choices—that free enterprise has afforded the better classes, based on the pervasive assumption of unlimited growth and expansion. Education in the twenty-first century, however, without the luxuries of a bubble prosperity, will find itself constrained to make choices within much stricter limits. Choices are still there to be made, but just as the economy will have to live with much less exploitation of natural and human resources, society will have to make harder choices—giving up some of the freedom our affluence has afforded in order to preserve other values judged more essential. Education will have to do the same—make judgments as to what is most essential. Without closing the door on intellectual growth, we will have to prepare people to make qualitative judgments as to what is most conducive in the longer run to “the good life” and as to what human goods are sustainable.
