Great Books and the Right
The Required Supplement to a Great Books Education
Montana Classical College wants you to read the best books that have ever been written. But, we also think that reading these books is not enough. That is why a rigorous morning exercise program will be built into the college’s way of life. And it is why we want to impart something I’m going to call situational awareness into our students. My concern stems from the realization that there are people who can read Plato and Nietzsche with some real care, and yet, agree wholeheartedly with most moral opinions expressed in the New York Times. We will discuss:
Self-knowledge or awareness of why psychic self-possession is so difficult (a permanent problem)
The proper supplement to a great books education
I. Self-Knowledge
We have to start with why it is so easy to fall prey to false opinions. Instead of speaking about this in the abstract, I’ll start with myself. We’ll concisely focus on a moment in my life that other great books admirers are likely to appreciate or understand; but, more importantly, we’ll see why this moment had limitations that MCC students will more easily overcome.
In high school, I didn’t respect the majority of my literature and history teachers so I did the bare minimum in their classes. As a consequence, I was not very well read going into college (except for the UFO and ghost books that I read instead). When I encountered great books courses my first year I was enthralled; I had never experienced anything like it. And the people who were also drawn to them were immediately more interesting than the people who weren’t. I grew very quickly to treasure the volumes I would walk around campus with, thinking how lucky I was to have books of world historical importance in my hands. My non-great books courses felt like lame high school classes; the classes on Homer, Plato, and Nietzsche felt like divine gifts—and I mean divine, because they felt otherworldly compared to everything that came before.
One of the most exciting moments was learning about the idea of esoteric writing for the first time; the idea that a philosopher can speak to two different audiences at the same time with the same sentence. “You mean that Descartes doesn’t really believe in the cogito ergo sum argument?! What?” I don’t know Descartes well enough to know if this interpretation stands up, but thinking this claim through in class was a revelation to me.
The most basic presupposition of esoteric writing is the difference between the few and the many. That there are few, who by nature, are capable of discovering and digesting certain truths, and that they greatly benefit by doing so. The many cannot discover such truths on their own, and they are likely not to live better lives for knowing the truth; for their lives are likely to be structured by a life giving or horizon building lie that gives them a mental map that allows them to make enough sense out of the world. To say the least, this is an elitist presupposition.
A claim that follows from the idea of esoteric writing is that philosophers in the highest and strictest sense are not simply products of their time. They have ascended out of the cave of their time and place; and even if they did not come face to face with the Idea of the Good, they saw that there are fundamental questions or problems that humans in each time and place attempt to solve. The conventions of a city, people, or culture are the manifold incoherent attempts to solve these problems. In this way, there is an intelligible structure to reality that we can grasp if we faithfully participate in the great conversation.
And yet, this elitist and fundamental problem account of the history of political philosophy was for me, only an abstraction that didn’t, on its own, do enough to transform my other moral opinions, even though I believed (and still believe) in this account wholeheartedly. And yet, my political and moral orientation underwent almost no change at all! I was unthinking and apathetic towards politics going into college. I was functionally a live and let live kind of guy, not really caring about what people said about contemporary events. I was an elitist in certain moments or conversations, but my soul was not transformed. It was as if great books and close reading became a kind of conceptual game to me (that felt like more than a game) that you could get really good at and receive honor for; like a sandbox to have fun adventures in before you went home. I felt at the time that I had transformed, but from my current vantage point, I realize that the re-orientation had not yet gone very far.
I have a distinct impression of the first teacher who made a conservative moral judgment and seemed to mean what he said. It was Halloween and we were at the tail end of a discussion of Plato and girls in slutty costumes walked by, and he said something to the effect of: “they don’t know how bad it is that they are doing that.” This isn’t even a “based” comment or very extreme at all; but I had never heard anyone I trusted really judge someone else’s moral outlook in this way before. I mean sure, I had heard plenty of people say that racism or intolerance, etc, is bad—but I had never heard someone speak with firm conviction from the Right about moral phenomena. I remember laughing uncomfortably and asking him to explain.
Political philosophy is supposed to be about the careful examination of moral opinions; and especially the examination of our own opinions! Self-knowledge! And yet, I felt like much of my time was spent trying to find the hardest to find detail in a text rather than really considering what was at stake for my own soul. I read the first part of Nietzsche’s Antichrist with this teacher. He asked me what Nietzsche’s argument was in the first several aphorisms. I responded by calling his attention to how the first several paragraphs ended with a period but that the seventh (or something like that) ended with an exclamation mark. My teacher looked at me with a bemused expression and then asked: what is Nietzsche’s argument?
I admire a cadre of my undergraduate professors because they increased my vision and bequeathed to me an abiding interest in the deepest and most beautiful texts. But I was mostly still a liberal/Liberal product of my regime when this teacher found me. I was not anywhere close to achieving genuine self-awareness.
We have to see clearly how our regime has shaped our soul’s architecture without our notice; and if we are really examining our opinions rigorously, it will have to hurt at some point, or we are probably not doing the job right. It hurts to move from thinking to the core of your being that you don’t have a right to judge others on one hand to then thinking: No. I have to oppose with my speeches and deeds all polymorphous forms of perversity.
II. The Proper Supplementation
Situational awareness means possessing a kind of outline of how bad things are going in the West. I think that students who go into a cocoon of liberal learning for 4 years and who then emerge on the other side without any contact with the outside world are liable to become unwitting allies of the same forces that hope to end liberal education. I was one of many such cases for a time.
After my undergrad, I joined an educational organization that purported to be politically neutral, but which was really a Leftist indoctrination chamber. I was briefly caught up in being a Progressive! Part of what broke me out of that frame of reference is that people there were saying that I shouldn’t read Plato. But then I thought: it felt like in 3 or 4 weeks I had learned how to speak like my Progressive friends but it took me about a year of re-reading one Platonic dialogue to feel like I had a real handle on it. The comparative depth helped me see that Plato was the way forward and the people telling me to not read him were not.
The process of breaking free was not immediate, but worked little by little. To make a long story short, meeting my friend Phocaean Dionysius was an important moment. I have never met another person with the spiritedness and courage to make incredibly regime impious arguments on behalf of the truth. He was willing to be seen as a villain, by an entire room; our unwillingness or inability to be seen as such a villain is a big part of what enslaves our mind to false opinions.
The rub, then, is that MCC wants to help readers of the great books liberate their minds from the regime more quickly than I was able to liberate my own. It is why we have a mission statement about nobility, nature, and nationalism.
We will have courses devoted to interpreting just one book like Thucydides’ history, but we will also have courses like Nationalism vs. Globalism which help lay out the stakes for what happens if we aren’t willing to fight.
There are people who don’t want you to read these books. There are others who will bend over backwards to make Aristotle a good liberal—to do this, to crush Aristotle’s text into what we want to see is to obscure the most potentially liberating elements of his thinking. At MCC we will make sure that you know this up front.
Students and friends of MCC will fight to keep their bodies and minds free.
Hell yes!