Max,

I saw the following book review in today's edition of the New York Times. It is a follow up to the article about teaching the great books to the poor and the homeless that you recently published.

Jack Lance

PHILOSOPHY ILLUMINATES MINDS DARKENED BY MISFORTUNE
By Edward Rothstein, New York Times - March 29, 1999

[Related Article For Homeless, Rebirth With Socrates and Plato NYT (3/7/99) and our issue #20]

During an unusual course in philosophy and literature that Earl Shorris was teaching specifically for the poor and homeless, a student who had a history of violent behavior telephoned Shorris. The student had become so angry at a colleague, he reported, that he wanted "to smack her up against the wall." Shorris feared the worst. Was this a call from jail? No, because instead of striking outward, the student had reflected inward and asked himself, "What would Socrates do?"

Not even a university provost, I imagine, would raise such a question in the heat of confrontation. But in his 1997 book on American poverty, "New American Blues" (W. W. Norton), Shorris also tells of prisoners in a maximum-security prison reading Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy," and of yet another prisoner who recommended that Shorris take his homeless students to museums and teach them Plato's "Allegory of the Cave."

It is startling to read about lives that have been ruined by criminal choices, crippling addictions, disturbed minds or accumulated misfortunes being so touched by Great Books and High Art. But Shorris has been proselytizing for their salvational potential for some years, and earlier this month The New York Times reported that his initial 1995 class, which was created after intensive screening of candidates, has now become a model for a five-year multistate program run by Bard College.

There are also courses being taught in New York City and New Brunswick, N.J., as well as in Seattle and Anchorage, Alaska, and Shorris is also taking his message to British Columbia, Mexico and France.

The irony is that all this is taking place in a period when so much energy has been expended in universities to undercut the authority of the very material Shorris is promoting to the imprisoned and the homeless: Plato and Aristotle, Euripides and Pericles, William Blake and symbolic logic.

As Shorris makes clear in his book, one of the inspirations for his enterprise was the educational philosophy of Robert Maynard Hutchins in the 1950's at the University of Chicago, where Shorris says he received "the best education in America." The undergraduate degree required 14 yearlong required courses and allowed only 2 electives.

But even the University of Chicago (where I did graduate work in a program that had similarly ambitious devotion to Great Books), has long since left behind such rigors and is now trying to shed its monastic reputation still further, increasing electives, decreasing requirements and marketing itself as a more fun place. Apparently Shorris is advocating a more serious approach for the poor than is often considered necessary or appropriate for college students.

But Shorris is also not the best advocate for such an enterprise. He seeks, as he explains, to use the humanities for political purposes. Thus he first awakens a sense of resentment among the students. "You've been cheated," he says.

"Rich people learn the humanities; you didn't." And the humanities have a use, he says. They help people become political, teaching them how to use power: "If you want real power, legitimate power, the kind that comes from the people and belongs to the people, you must understand politics; the humanities will help."

This does of course skew the ways Plato or Aristotle might be read or museums might be visited, and the poor have been learning the humanities for generations at public universities. Shorris's approach risks turning all readings into power lessons, tapping into students' horrific tales of evils done or evils suffered, turning philosophical texts into variations on Machiavelli for the disenfranchised.

And to put it mildly, Shorris does not always inspire the greatest of confidence with his own interpretations. He argues, for example, that the study of the humanities should, politically, "belong to the left" because the study of the humanities "is in itself a redistribution of wealth."

He engages in a series of egregious misreadings of recent texts, distorting, for example, the complicated views of the sociologist Nathan Glazer, who has studied the causes and culture of poverty. Shorris calls him "a man in whom any form of social justice produces an allergic reaction." He also quotes a passage from Allan Bloom's controversial book "The Closing of the American Mind" (Touchstone Books, 1988) that seems very clear. Bloom, who was attacking university culture, explained that his experience was with students who had the luxury of pursuing a liberal arts education, who were "raised in comfort and the expectation of ever-increasing comfort." Those very comforts, Bloom suggested, actually contributed to a cursory understanding of the world.

Yet Shorris states that Bloom believed that only the wealthy are "fit for a liberal education," that such an education should be withheld from the poor. One can argue with things Bloom said, but not with this, which Bloom did not say. Shorris's program of teaching the traditional humanities is as politically charged as the opposition to them.

It may also be that Shorris is such a good teacher that his motivations matter less than his ability to make the texts resonate with the students' experience. Plato's cave may really be the best analogy. Plato is too often portrayed as an ideologue, censoring poetry and music in his perfect state, creating rigid classes and philosopher kings. But this is a cave view of his more supple philosophy. Recall that cave: prisoners are underground in a large chamber watching shadows dancing on the walls. They create elaborate theories about their shadow universe. They construct crude notions of the world.

Then one day their heads are turned. They see the source of the light in a cave fire and realize they have been contemplating mere illusions. The task of philosophy is to show eventually that even fire is just a distant image of a finer light. The philosopher leads the prisoners out of the cave into the light of the sun.

At each stage of the way, the prisoners understand their world according to the limits of their experience. The power of the greatest books is that, in effect, they know to whom they speak. They will first make a connection at the level of immediate experience, but in the hands of an expert teacher they will then begin to undercut such simple reactions. They will reveal the flickerings of the fire, leading the student into new understandings. But they do not provide a final answer; rather, they provide ways of thinking. They do not answer an ideological call; they undermine it.

Shorris's political appeal may just be the inadequate first step, taking place within the cave. Once hooked by such habits of thought, though, readers might be led by these books and their teachers to go further. Those with intimate experience of society's depths might also perceive something that more comfortable readers might have missed as well. Together, as in a Platonic dialogue, the netherworld participants are eventually granted glimpses of sunlight.

What a powerful idea it is: to engage those who are most wounded and most wounding in a project of moral, social and intellectual illumination! Certainly there is also something distinctly American about this project: democratic in spirit, elite in aspiration, salvational in texture. The puzzle is why this approach to Great Books, however skewed an inspiration, is now becoming established at the cave's darkest corners but is viewed with increasing skepticism by institutions supposedly thriving in the sunlit, open air.

HARRY A. BLACKMUN, R. I. P. *

Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, the author of "Roe v. Wade" died on March 4, 1999.

He began as a single-cell human zygote containing 46 chromosomes. He was, from conception, genetically unique and distinct from his parents. Although initially very tiny, and conceived in a condition of dependency, the Harry Blackmun who lived for more than 90 years was, from the very beginning, a separate human organism -- a human being -- who under the proper circumstances would direct his own continuous development from embryo to fetus to neonate to child to 23-year-old law student to 25-year old lawyer to 50-year-old appeals-court judge to Supreme Court justice, all the way to his death. Even in the zygotic and embryonic stages of his existence, Blackmun was no mere "undifferentiated mass of cells." Still less was he an "appendage" or "part of his mother's body." On the contrary, he was a new and whole member of the species Homo sapiens whose unity, distinctness, and identity would remain intact through the successive stages of his development. For someone to have cut short his life at any of these stages would have been to kill a human being -- and not in any merely abstract sense: It would have been to kill the particular, unitary, determinate being who was Harry Blackmun.

But; one may ask, was the prenatal Harry Blackmun a person? There is no plausible definition of personhood according to which a person is something other than a whole living member of the species Homo sapiens. To suppose that he came to being as a nonperson and then at some point (at, say, viability, birth, or some months after birth when he began to have self-awareness) became a person is to imagine that persons merely inhabit their bodies. That they are "ghosts in machines." But persons, whatever else they may be, are living human bodies; to destroy a living human body at any stage of its existence is to kill the person who, whatever else he or she may be, is that body.

In his zeal to create a national right to abortion, Harry Blackmun feigned a profound uncertainty about prenatal life. In "Roe", he cited a lack of consensus among "those trained in medicine, philosophy, and theology" as to "when life begins." He doubted whether it was possible "at this point in the development of man's knowledge to resolve [that] difficult question." None of this uncertainty, however, seemed to give him a moment's doubt about his own authority to sweep away the nation's abortion laws in defiance of the considered judgments of the people and their elected representatives. Nor did it stop him from declaring in "Roe" that the offspring of human beings prior to birth are mere "potential life." From that fundamental error followed all the pro-abortion dogmas that Blackmun secured his place in history by writing into our constitutional law.

The tragedy of Harry Blackmun, who had been appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon as a strict constructionist and a law-and-order judge, was that he sinned gravely against the very Constitution in whose name he purported to act. If the Constitution implies anything at all pertinent to abortion (and many distinguished jurists, including Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork, insist that it does not), the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment would seem to require states to extend legal protection to the unborn. Blackmun, however, relying on grossly inaccurate legal history and, even then, drawing from it the most dubious inferences, concluded that the due-process clause of that same amendment forbids states from providing any meaningful protection against deliberate feticide.

For his efforts in behalf of abortion, Blackmun was lionized by the moral-cultural Left. As one would have expected, he was soon finding all sorts of other previously undreamt-of implications in the Constitution -- for instance, that it prohibits the death penalty that it explicitly mentions. In place of the Constitution, he substituted his own conscience. Unfortunately, it wasn't up to the task.

*From member Wm. F. Buckley, Jr.'s NATIONAL REVIEW - 4/5/99

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