This essay on reading The Great Books, or joining the Great Conversation, may be addressed to an audience other than the one typical of BwB, but Professor Peter Lawler makes many good points. He argues primarily against those who believe we, the people of the 21st century, are far superior to the people who came before us on many levels.

From my postmodern view, maybe the chief purpose of higher education, is then to counter the dominant view of who we are-–which is partly true and partly degrading prejudice—of our time. Our tendency is to view human beings as free and productive—as autonomous individuals with interests. This means that we don’t regard anyone as less than a being with interests—or as existing merely to serve others. We all have a right to look out for our own interests, and so to be treated as individuals and not merely as part of some larger whole. That means that it’s not really news to any of us that racism, sexism, classism, and so forth are wrong, and we usually think that it’s an affront to our dignity to be thought of as merely parents or citizens or creatures. We tend to be all about autonomy and self-definition.

But we’re weak—often very weak—in thinking of people as more than productive or self-interested beings. We tend to think that human distinctions that can’t be measured quantitatively aren’t real, just as we tend to think that a true meritocracy is based on productivity. We tend to think that because the great authors of the great books of the past must have been racists, sexists, and classists and, of couse, not as technologically advanced or as productive as we are, they have nothing real to say to us. So our prejudice is to study them critically—or condescendingly—as remnants of discredited prejudices.