Multipolarity and the Great Books

The canon that erased Christendom

Momcilo Nevesky on why the modern Great Books™ canon flattens Western civilization, and why a multipolar age demands its reconstruction.

Ideas about the world determine how we see the world and thus affect how we interact with the world. Alexander Wendt and the Constructivist school of international relations have understood this well for a long time with their famous catchphrase that “[a]narchy is what states make of it.” In the realm of multipolarity, we can alter this saying to be “multipolarity is what civilizations make of it.” If the Western world views itself as an anti-civilization that is a bulwark for the deracinated freedom of men across the globe, then it is quite easy to translate that into foreign policy.

There are several reasons that the West views itself as such, but in this article I’m going to take aim at the contemporary classical education movement and one of its chief pedagogues, Mortimer Adler (1902-2001), who emphasized the importance of great books. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with classical education and a great books-centered education. In fact, this is the ideal form of education, a true liberal education. The issue is the way that a great books education has been transformed into a highly ideological Great Books™ education.

While a great books education is perhaps as old as books (or scrolls and codices) themselves, in the first decade of the 20th century the idea received widespread attention and democratization with “Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf of Books,” a fifty-volume set compiled and edited by Charles Eliot (1832-1926), the longtime president of Harvard. With a mass-marketing campaign, an option to pay in installments, and the clout of Harvard, the publishers were able to sell over 350,000 sets—1.75 million volumes. Anyone, the advertisers promised, was now able to obtain a liberal education with just fifteen minutes of reading a day. Various universities, including Yale, Chicago, Harvard, and St. John’s, would soon after begin to develop their own great books courses where Adler played a key role either as inspiration or directly consulting universities and teaching classes.

Adler, in his crusade to democratize education, partnered with Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1952 to publish a 54-volume set called Great Books of the Western World, which was republished in a 60-volume set in 1991. Over a million copies have been sold, and Adler, along with his other writings, became a cornerstone of contemporary classical education, with his influence permeating beyond higher education into secondary education. This idea of a Western canon or great books canon was a hot culture war topic in the latter half of the 20th century, which saw literary critics, such as the Straussian Allan Bloom (1930-1992) and the Freudian Harold Bloom (1930-2019, no relation), defend the notion of a Western canon, especially against the criticism from “the school of resentment,” or what we could call in modern parlance “grievance” or “critical” studies.

I agree in broad strokes that it is ridiculous to include or exclude books based on, say, the race of the author, but each side of this 20th-century dialectic, the school of resentment versus the grouchy Great Books™ professors, shares several liberal assumptions—fundamentally the debate is between left and right liberals. While the two sides are debating about whether or not the great books are Eurocentric/racist/sexist/transphobic, etc., the true illiberal critiques are crowded out in the culture war.

The real issue with the canon has nothing to do with him being a cisgender male, but with a rather conspicuous gap in the Great Books™, specifically Adler’s and the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s version. After including several volumes from ancient Greek and Roman writers, we encounter St. Augustine (354-430), our first Christian writer. Then the next person, chronologically, is Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who comes 800 years after St. Augustine. To make matters worse, the entirety of the Middle Ages is a mere 3 out of 60 volumes, consisting of only Thomas, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), and Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400). Full disclosure: I might be biased here because I run a medieval literature podcast, but to jump 800 years and then gloss over a 1,000-year period from 500 to 1500 of Western history as simply three authors from the 13th and 14th centuries is inexcusable. Perhaps the issue is simply space. You can’t publish a 500-volume series of books, so necessarily some things must be cut. The editors, in their profundity, were able to find room to dedicate an entire volume to Sigmund Freud, and another to 18th- and 19th-century scientific texts, but we don’t get a single mention of King Arthur or the Holy Grail. Unsurprisingly, no room is found for Christian hagiography, any texts regarding the Great Schism, or of any of the Ecumenical Councils, but they found room to include the Articles of Confederation, a document that was in force for less than 10 years.

It’s clear that when the “West” is spoken about, it is not the West as rooted in Christendom, which sees Constantinople, Moscow, Mt. Athos, and Belgrade as much a part of its heritage as London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome. As the editors of the Great Books of the Western World clarify: “The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day … The goal toward which Western society moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue.” Instead of a multipolar dialogue of civilizations, the West is a civilization of dialogue—an amorphous and boisterous ever-present conversation that never comes to any firm conclusions. The antithesis between the Resurrection and Plato’s notion of reincarnation is not an opportunity to preach the Gospel, but simply an opportunity to deliver a seminar lecture where both ideas are treated as equally plausible and no firm conclusions are ever reached (for that would be dogmatism!). This is why there can’t be too much theology because it clearly delineates the chatty free-thinking heretics as just that, heretical, and it doesn’t fit neatly into the idea of the West as an endless conversation with no firm answers.

Again, I must say that I am completely in support of a classical education rooted in great books. The issue is Adler’s influence on great books and classical education programs in both classical education university programs and high schools that purport to be a bulwark against the insanity of the American education system. While they may shield students from left-liberal educators and their pet projects, which have little to do with providing quality education, the Great Books™ are just the right-hand path of the same tendency. Instead of teaching students that Plato and Aristotle were racist, classist, cisgender white men, students are just taught that Plato and Aristotle are part of the Western tradition, somehow supported classical liberalism, and that we are much closer to these Pagan ancient Greeks than any Christian medieval Greeks.

We don’t need to rehash the 20th-century culture war, or even continue the 21st-century variant. Instead we need to realize that without a multipolar consciousness, a multipolar world becomes much less attainable. Plenty of students who would otherwise view the West as unique civilization, and not a universal anti-civilization to be violently imported all over the world, are funneled into these Great Books™ programs under the guise of Western civilization, but are just being taught that the West is nothing more than an ongoing conversation that almost completely ignores the Christian medieval era, because then they might realize that there is an identity to the West that is beyond liberalism. We need to rework the canon of great books to represent the West as a unique Christian civilization that is rooted in something deeper than an ever-ongoing conversation.