Education Underlying True Life: Blacks, Women, and the Great Books in America
Saints and philosophers search for what is human.
The social philosopher, historian, and black activist W.E.B. Du Bois returned repeatedly in his writings to the issue of education and what would be required for blacks to flourish in America. It was a “higher education which must underlie true life” as he argued in his essay, The Talented Tenth. Today, this sounds practically mystical. One could never speak of education’s aim as “true life.” Objective knowledge of what is good, even best, has been completely rejected in the humanities and social sciences. And it seems the hard sciences too are now racist.
The trend among elite and self-styled “progressive” colleges in America and abroad is therefore to gut the traditional liberal arts curriculum or “Great Books” due to allegations this tradition is rooted in that new catch-all for bad things: “white supremacy.” Comprised largely though not exclusively of white, male authors, what one learns from reading these books is necessarily racist, sexist, homophobic, and generally oppressive to any group that is not white and male. It is most certainly not “woke” – the supposed insight that all societies previous to and including our own are irredeemably stained by sin. All artistic works of the past as products of these societies are thus merely apologias for cultural and governmental oppression. History itself is a history of oppressors, and their justifiers wield philosophy and art in their defense.
Yet this leaves us wondering why two of the key minority groups in America, blacks and women, have both repeatedly appealed to this same tradition. Even though they themselves are allegedly excluded from the Great Books, in truth some of the fundamental issues arising from study of these texts, those related to justice and equality, have been lauded and appealed to by both.
Liberty for Blacks
Written while protesting a racist South in the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is a reflection on the injustice of racism and the deeper question of what we mean by injustice. King appeals to the inherently flawed human origin of laws: Laws that are man-made are susceptible to being unjust since “any law that degrades human personality is unjust” and therefore “all segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.” What is striking is that King introduces this discussion by explicitly citing Saint Augustine. Justice for King has a status outside of merely conventional, man-made laws, however enacted – appealing to Christian natural law, and we might add, to a notion of human excellence unattainable for blacks under discriminatory statutes, reveals King’s philosophic affinity to grounding principle of the Great Books tradition.
Any particular time and place will necessarily be narrow in its view of justice. All politics, as Plato presents it, is like a cave. But there is always a higher standard waiting to be discovered and appealed to. It is the standard of natural law; it is the standard of equality under God; it is the standard, not of the political, but of the human.
We could return to another preeminent black thinker: W.E.B. Du Bois. He too appeals in his writings to the enlightenment of the traditional liberal arts, upholding both Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi as human exemplars in response to the restrictive education available to blacks during his lifetime. Policies in early 20th century America had created “a new slavery” according to Du Bois, and promise of advancement was being stifled, given blacks only had access to vocational training. Despite living in a post-slavery America, Du Bois was engaged in a dispute with Booker T. Washington on the most beneficial education and means to success for black Americans. For Du Bois, black advancement was not simply political though; it was a human advancement for those that could use the promise of America, its social mobility, to attain greatness for themselves, something Du Bois, as the first black Ph.D. from Harvard, himself achieved.
Washington had endorsed limited educational advancement and aims, famously critiqued by Du Bois as nothing more than a “gospel of Work and Money.” But Du Bois endorses something more:
A university is a human invention for the transmission of knowledge and culture from generation to generation, through the training of quick minds and pure hearts, and for this work no other human invention will suffice, not even trade and industrial schools.
Du Bois of course implies what has been, until very recently, universally recognized: There is a proper cultivation of the human being. This is culture. Sure, cultures differ and Du Bois himself admits this in The Talented Tenth. Education for various groups may differ in some ways. But knowledge and morality are education’s proper aims. Knowledge for scientific progress: mathematics, engineering, biology and chemistry. And morality for peaceable living together. Science is beyond race. Morality is beyond race. Saints and philosophers search for what is human.
King and Du Bois both appeal to higher standards, to Nature and to God, in locating the basis of human morality and thus customs and laws for human beings to live by. What customs and laws? Du Bois ends another of his essays by calling for black Americans to strive “for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwavering to those great words which the sons of our Fathers would fain to forget.” And what were those words? Du Bois quotes the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. What matters its author?
Liberty for Women
And let’s also remember the ladies. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” is also modeled on that other Declaration. And it too appeals to a higher standard: Human beings by nature have fundamental rights that governments and society must not infringe upon. Stanton draws on the “law of Nature” which “binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times; no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this.” Or as Susan B. Anthony argued regarding the Preamble to the Constitution:
It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.
What applies to the Founding applies to the Great Books that inspired it: They offer universal promise and open new possibilities for human betterment. All of these great (not white or not male) thinkers recognized in the grounding principles of Western thought a richly edifying philosophic and religious tradition, with teachings of political significance. Certainly there was, and is, fruitful disagreement across this vast expanse of philosophers and scientists. Considering this disagreement is precisely the activity required for a true education. But for us in America, the Enlightenment principles leading up to the Founding are of enduring and undeniable significance whatever their potential flaws.
It was the 17th century English philosopher John Locke’s opening to his Second Treatise that undercut slavery itself and advanced liberty: Human beings are born free and equal; no man has more natural authority than any other. Like that, the basis for political slavery disappears. And when searching for a natural basis for property ownership, Locke extends this repudiation of slavery. The first piece of property being one’s own body, one’s labor belongs by nature to no one but oneself. Human beings, with the gift of reason, are capable of guiding themselves, both for self-preservation and in setting up governmental authority when necessary to guard against the predations of others.
Rooted in this account of human liberty and equality, the Declaration of Independence becomes the philosophic ground for future liberation. Women and blacks (and we should add, millions across the world who seek to escape totalitarian governments today) have borrowed from its tradition. As Jefferson himself recognized on the 50th anniversary of July 4th:
May [the Declaration] be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition has persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessing and security of self-government…All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.
That a particular government or culture did not always apply the teachings of this tradition, natural justice and the rule of law, the best regime, the beauty of human nature, to its time and place was not the fault of these thinkers, but of those elites at the helm. Recognizing humanity in Western principles, individual thinkers put forth challenges to their own time and place, undercutting the given circumstances of how all things political were organized.
Politics versus Free Inquiry
Let’s not forget that Socrates was put to death for challenging his fellow Athenian citizens on their notion of civic virtue, lax as it had become. That John Locke published his greatest works anonymously and had a foreign home in Holland, a refuge for controversial and persecuted philosophers and scientists in his day. That virtually every philosopher, saint, and scientist was persecuted, prosecuted, tortured, or ostracized is today entirely ignored by those with sanguine notions of the relationship between politics and science. As Friedrich Nietzsche argued, philosophers are always the “bad conscience” of their times; they are stepsons searching for a higher humanity beyond the narrow-mindedness of their day, not apologists for dictators and tyrants.
The philosophers, statesmen, and theologians of the West offer a variety of arguments for what the best human life entails, both individually and collectively, placing on us the burden of careful study and reflection. Providing arguments for and against different forms of government, the role of piety in politics and one’s private life, and what we might mean when speaking of the good life and happiness, their inquiries are human ones. This burden, it seems to me, is a good problem to have.
It is ironic that students at many elite liberal arts colleges today would want to eliminate such great authors and that the administrators of these colleges would readily agree. For the views underlying this attack are not only ignorant because historically illiterate and incoherent, especially in light of the fact that many do teach King, Du Bois, Stanton, and Anthony among many, many others; these views are also at odds with the very means to achieving what many “progressives” today wish to achieve. Besides, “Western Civ” or the Great Books tradition advances and new works are added. Tradition is not stagnation. If students paused to read, ponder, and make careful study their burden, before protesting, they would discover this tradition has endured precisely because it confronts fundamental human questions and problems – not white questions or male questions.
We must seek to keep these questions and problems before our own eyes when we’re tempted to forget them among the peculiar, loudly proclaimed, but less pressing issues of our own day. If today’s students and administrators had received a truly liberal education, they would understand the myopia of their own views and the dire need, more today than at any other time in America’s history, for this tradition to be resurrected and reinvigorated, not ostracized and “canceled.”