Roosevelt Montás’s education in the ‘Great Books’ has enabled him to write a valuable and persuasive book.
His education in the ‘Great Books’ and in the purpose of the humanities has enabled him to write a valuable and persuasive book.
Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, by Roosevelt Montás (Princeton University Press, 248 pages, $24.95)
R oosevelt Montás was born very poor in a remote rural village in the Dominican Republic in 1973 and managed to immigrate with family members to the United States in 1985, living in impoverished circumstances and broken homes in New York City. He has now written a poignant and edifying book about how he emerged from such circumstances and ended up getting bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in English and comparative literature from Columbia University and becoming a key instructor and administrator in the famous Columbia undergraduate liberal-arts program generally known as the Core Curriculum, now a century in operation. Rescuing Socrates is a valuable and thoughtful book both sociologically and educationally, making a contribution to the ongoing debate over the past, present, and future of liberal-arts education in the United States.
It is temptingly easy to see Montás’s success story in assimilating to Anglophone, elite Western intellectual culture as in fact the rare exception that proves the general rule that for poor, immigrant, racial- and ethnic-minority students the very structure of Western high culture and institutions is essentially irrelevant, useless, exclusive, humiliating, and destructive. What about the other 95 percent of such students who did not happen to encounter a passionately committed high-school teacher who encouraged a bookish young man’s accidental discovery of a discarded copy of some of Plato’s dialogues?
Yet Montás’s book is sufficiently complex and deep in its treatment of large-scale cultural and curricular issues to warrant wide and careful reading about our current educational condition. Though he has indeed become a vigorous spokesman for “Great Books” education, his own upward path is not unduly idealistic or unrealistic about ethnic, linguistic, and class dynamics: Only on the surface is it a story of “making it.”
Living in socially anarchic urban circumstances, Montás went to a nonselective, multiethnic high school in the New York City borough of Queens, and a dedicated teacher mentored him and suggested he enroll in an intensive summer program, at Columbia University, sponsored by New York State for able lower-income and socially disadvantaged students, HEOP: the Higher Education Opportunity Program. The social and emotional costs of this program were wounding but were ultimately outweighed by the benefits of induction into the middle-class Anglophone educational milieu that enabled him subsequently to get admitted on scholarship to Columbia.
It is no secret that liberal-arts education at the college level is in a bad way in the United States today, with enormous declines over the past 25 years in the number of students majoring in “humanities” fields such as literature, history, and both classical and foreign languages. Two prominent academic humanists have written in detail about these issues — Andrew Delbanco, a mentor of Montás at Columbia, and Harvard’s Louis Menand, who reviewed Montás’s book with some asperity and annoyance recently in The New Yorker (“What’s So Great about Great-Books Courses?,” December 20, 2021). It is surely right to grant that “liberal-arts” education has often been oversold and that the liberal-humanist educational program of Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) was an unstable, probably temporary halfway house that the scorching history of the world since 1914 has rendered increasingly unreal to many people: “Sweetness and light” and genteel culture are now antiques in a market that is not much frequented. The reputation and recognizability of Arnold’s heir and biographer, the Columbia teacher and literary critic Lionel Trilling (1905–1975), have weakened, justifying his own fears about “the uncertain future of humanistic education,” the title of one of his last essays.
Louis Menand, too, “went to graduate school at Trilling’s university,” as he called Columbia, where he earned his master’s degree and doctorate. Although Menand himself is now a teacher of literature at Harvard, he waspishly and rather unfairly criticizes Montás’s book for promoting “Great Books” of fiction as opposed to other academic disciplines: “The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight. . . . I teach a great-books course now,” he writes; “I like my job. . . . But I don’t think I am a better person” for reading, rereading, and teaching such great books. But Montás’s book is not so simple or negligible as to warrant this dismissal: In fact he concentrates his narrative and exposition on four “great writers” — Plato, Saint Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi — none of whom (except Freud, covertly) wrote fiction at all. What irks Menand even more is Montás’s attack on the “destructive” Nietzsche: Menand is a member of that recurrent academic species, the “gentle Nietzschean,” who implies some elaborate, benign view of the ferocious, hammer-and-dynamite-wielding German nihilist.
Older and more privileged, prominent, secure, and learned than the lower-class, Hispanic-immigrant Montás, Menand resents his critique, which has, however, a long and noble pedigree: that Nietzsche’s histrionic nihilism and its vast cultural influence have indeed been lethal to Western and world moral culture, to political and social order, and to the very ideal of a true civilization. Montás makes anew an argument, rooted in the “logocentrism” of Plato and Saint Augustine, that 150 years of critics of Nietzsche have made repeatedly and often with great poignancy and pertinence, and that Montás makes with commendable courage, pluck, and insight. As E. A. Burtt put it a century ago, the only way to avoid metaphysics is to say nothing: because human consciousness, cognition, valuation, purposive behavior, and language are themselves metaphysical phenomena. To deny, ignore, or spurn this “logocentrism” is the ruin of civilization itself and involves endless self-contradiction. On this point Montás is indeed, and rightly, a dog with a bone — better, a good man with a good cause: “Nietzsche saw no possibility of truths that exist independent of particular interests — that is, truths that exist as objective entities graspable by pure intellect. He rejected the notion of ‘objectivity’ to begin with.” To do so is, as C. S. Lewis put it, to “abolish” the human person.
Among Montás’s four exemplary great writers, he makes claims for Freud that I think are no longer sustainable in light of what we know about Freud’s dishonesty, arrogance, and nonscientific fetishes; but his attempt to promote Gandhi as an ecumenical saint seems to me noble and moving. Yet it is Montás’s struggle with Socrates, Plato, and Saint Augustine that shows him as a wrestler with the angels of our tradition. He makes no claims for particular or unique scholarly insight into these writers — nor should most of their readers: Why should specialist, nominalist scholarship be the goal of most students and readers? Nominalism and positivism have deluged the world with vast quantities of little-read scholarship whose underlying rationale is often the confutation of the very possibility of the larger-scale intelligibility of the world. We end up with Swift’s Grand Academy of Lagado and the cloud-land of Laputa, where learnéd foolishness is epidemic. Montás, like Swift, is concerned with the epistemological and ethical res publica that makes up a civilization and how to keep it alive and transmit it. Hyperspecialized, tenure-seeking scholarship and Nietzschean dynamite can both be destructive of this mental and moral order. This order Montás has come to understand and appreciate, from Plato, Saint Augustine, and Christianity more generally, to the American Declaration of Independence, Hamilton, Madison, and Lincoln, down to Gandhi and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) in our own recent past. He sees that the educators who crafted the Columbia and University of Chicago core curricula — John Erskine, Mark Van Doren, Mortimer Adler, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and Daniel Bell — were involved in a profoundly democratic and civilized project.
The Columbia and Chicago undergraduate core curricula, uniquely among the great secular research universities, enable and require all students, of many backgrounds, to have common cultural-linguistic factors in the first two years of university study, and the courses are not mainly “belletristic” but philosophical. Montás sees and says that, from Plato and Saint Augustine to Noam Chomsky, the unique potency of language has been understood as the distinguishing mark of humanity: His insight and insistence are no mean feat in the environment of the current reductive, nihilistic culture of late modernity. Though he nowhere quotes T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, or F. R. Leavis, their “logocentrism” has become his heart’s desire, and his personal and professional salvation. “For he that thinks reasonably,” Samuel Johnson put it, “must think morally” (Preface to Shakespeare, 1765). Montás quotes the Apology of Socrates, from the passage just before his execution: “It is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day.”
Montás credits Edward W. Tayler’s required Columbia freshman Logic and Rhetoric course — “notoriously demanding (and now extinct)” — with teaching him how to write in English, and it is in fact the literacy issue that reveals the greatest, most damaging weakness of the whole American education system. He writes in a note early in his book: “Perhaps the obvious also needs to be said here: that pre-K–12 education is a far more important and critical tool [than the undergraduate college] for addressing social stratification. As a society we should be ashamed of the failing of our public school system to live up to the values of equal opportunity and fairness that we claim to stand for.” This is a comment of great importance.
For several decades the distinguished contemporary literary scholar E. D. Hirsch Jr., of the University of Virginia, has been the great figure in trying to diminish this primary, fundamental, shameful literary incompetence, with his books and the K–8 Core Knowledge curriculum that he and his associates have built. It is now used in many hundreds of American elementary schools and has influenced educators and statesmen all over the world (for instance, U.K.-government minister Michael Gove and Portugal’s former education minister Nuno Crato). It is not Montás’s business to know about this development, but he would not be surprised to learn that Hirsch’s long battle (he is now in his 90s) has been the better-known aspect of a coherent literary-linguistic endeavor whereby he has defended and refined the conception of objective interpretation in the classic “logocentric” tradition, in authoritative works such as Validity in Interpretation (1967), of which one reviewer said that he “has performed a monumental service . . . that of reinstating the credentials of objectivism.” Another reviewer remarked that “Professor Hirsch demonstrates convincingly that objectivity is attainable in humane studies, and that it is not identified with the subject but with the evidence.” Among Hirsch’s admirers and correspondents was C. S. Lewis.
Thus Montás’s case against ferocious Nietzschean irrationalism, its offspring in “postmodernism,” and their numerous, haughty, tenured contemporary successors puts him in good company and shows that he has understood the real grounds of our culture wars and their stakes, from elementary-school curricula and pedagogy to college curricula and the world of academic writing and publishing in the humanities and social sciences. He even has the temerity to defend the Victorian sage who shaped Anglo-American educational attitudes and practices for more than a century: “Matthew Arnold’s famous adage that liberal learning should consist in ‘getting to know the best which has been thought and said in the world’” has become “an object of derision among academic humanists. But Arnold was right about this, and every course offered by any professor represents some instantiation of his dictum, even if the object of the course is to refute the dictum. If we deny the capacity to make generalizable value judgments — albeit contestable and revisable ones — about what things from the past are most worth passing on to young people as they pursue ‘higher education,’ we lose the capacity to organize a liberal education curriculum. As indeed most institutions have.”
What the post-humanist, academically dominant “left” Nietzscheans fail to understand is that if their self-refuting epistemological, interpretive, and ethical projects succeed, they have no defense against the “right” Nietzscheans already so influential in the world outside the university and its publishing precincts. Intellectuals who discredit the residual momentum of traditional ideas of objectivity and ethics have no defense against an arrant trumpery whose “perspectival” will-to-power no longer has any motives or criteria for fearing or feeling shame or guilt. “Conscience is but a word that cowards use, / Devised at first to keep the strong in awe. / Our strong arms be our conscience; swords, our law” (Shakespeare, Richard III, 6.6). The Nietzschean “transvaluation” of values has always exercised a glamorous, aphrodisiac appeal to amoral, criminal, or depraved selves such as Machiavelli, Sade, Mussolini, and Hitler, and not only to the “fictional” figures whom Louis Menand depreciates. Preach often enough that capitalism is “only” a conspiracy of the arrogant, rich, ruthless, and unscrupulous and you make more likely a capitalism that is only arrogant, rich, ruthless, and unscrupulous. Montás himself quotes the Augustinian Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps the greatest of American thinkers, on “the children of darkness”: “moral cynics who know no law beyond their will and interest.”
Like Orwell in 1984, Montás has realized that, in his own words, the “unmooring of human reason from the possibility of ultimate truth in effect undermines all of Western metaphysics, including ethics and epistemology. All of these inquiries presume a bedrock reality that is available to the human intellect.” His wrestling with Plato and Saint Augustine has not been in vain; his study of “logic and rhetoric” helped teach him how to write and how to think. These educational experiences have enabled him to write a very valuable and persuasive book.