Dear Max:

It is always nice to get back to old friends. Your publication of Hutchins writings is a wonderful contribution to all of us interested in the study of the great ideas and liberal education. I have also received with joy the forthcoming publication of Dr. Adler's How to Think about The Great Ideas. I am interested in one of the copies, when it is published.

Max, I am also interested to have a copy of the great books discussion seminar guidelines, If you have them in print or electronically, could you send them to me? I am going to start a great book discussion group with a group of college students, and they will be very useful.

Best regards,

Gonzalo Rodriguez, Venezuela

Max,

Here are some more testimonials from my Boulder [Colorado] Great Ideas discussion group.

Brian Hansen

I am glad that our facilitator asked me to describe the personal benefits that the Great Ideas discussion provides me. Ever since I acquired a mental handicap at age 19, I have striven to improve my deficit. The Great Ideas discussion group provides me a chance to develop my critical thinking and communication skills. Furthermore, it gives me insight into human nature and society, insight which I feel is most necessary for me.

Damian Cucirell

In the late 1950's I had the privilege of attending a lecture by Mortimer Adler at the University of Detroit, Detroit, Mich. His topic was, "The Forthcoming Computer Revolution." He discussed the idea of the well studied Greek and Roman civilizations, then pointed out the fact that only about 10% of these populations contributed to the cultures, the rest being slaves. Shifting to the forthcoming computer revolution, he hypothesized what the world might be and what kind of culture we could have if the computer could do 50% of the menial work people are required to do, and if people could use their new leisure time toward enhancing the culture. What an inspiring notion.

I've joined the discussion group because of these memorable ideas. I've thoroughly enjoyed the readings and discussions. I look forward to becoming a member of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas.

Cordially yours,

Paul K. Hagen

UNDER THE ELMS
by Alexander Meiklejohn (1872-1964)

Brown [University] men of 1953: you are very kind to summon an old grad, out of the distant past, to talk with you, Under the Elms. Speaking for myself and for my classmates of 1893, I thank you for the courtesy of young men to old.

What shall we talk about, you and I? Sixty years of living separate your youth and mine. Have we, then, anything in common to talk about? I am strongly tempted to evade that issue, to tell you stories of the glories of the past, to boast of Bennie Andrews and our other heroes. But that temptation I resist. I shall be speaking, not of our sixty years, which are gone, but of your sixty years, which are yet to come. I invite you to think, not about us, but about you. What are you going to do and see and be in the sixty years which stretch between now and 2013?

Of one thing I am certain, men of '53. I envy you. I wish that I were twenty-one instead of eighty-one. I wish that I could be a member of your class and live the life that you will live. I hate to miss the game that you will play. There is a chance, which we have never had, a fighting chance, that, at the hands of you and your contemporaries, mankind may turn a corner, may clear away the rubble of a social order which has fallen to pieces, may start to build another to take its place. And you, winning or losing, will play that game. I do not promise you a quick or easy victory. Who wants to play a game that he is sure to win? But I do envy your chance.

Why must men turn a corner? What is the rubble which you must clear away? What must you build to take its place? You will not expect me to answer those questions in these few moments of a summer afternoon. I only offer, for your criticism as college men, a loose and sweeping generalization about the present desperate crisis in human thinking.

Our colleges, it seems to me, are cultivating two very different kinds of thinking. They teach their pupils skills in doing things. They also try to teach them wisdom in choosing what things to do. The search for skill has, as its intended products, inventions, devices, tools, and gadgets, by which, whether in thought or action, men get things done. The search for wisdom has a different aim. Its hoped-for products are judgments of value, decisions about what should be done, and why; about what should not be done, and why.

And these two kinds of thinking have different intellectual sources. The inventions of skill grow out of the sciences. The search for valuation is guided by philosophical or humanistic studies. These two, as so defined, cover the total range of human thinking. Science discovers and invents. Philosophy interprets, for human welfare, the meaning of those discoveries and inventions. If we could see those two in right relations, we would know, not only what colleges are doing, but thereby, what human living is and ought to be.

To you who are now facing the planning and making of a coming world, I offer three observations about inventions and about their meaning.

First, inventions destroy a social order as well as share in its creation. The inquiring, discovering mind has given to men the use of earth and water, fire and air. It has fashioned the plow, the wheel, the road, the boat, the clock, money, the bank and credit, the multifarious uses of power, and, most powerful of all, new methods of mind by which still other inventions may be made. But each of these devices, in turn, displaces older devices, and thus shatters and renders obsolete some earlier mode of life, the customs and beliefs, the habits and values, which the earlier devices had kept alive.

Second, as inventions thus lead the way, the forces of wisdom tag along behind. Theirs is the task of reconstruction. They must, by reasoned, creative, imaginative thinking, bring into being new beliefs and plans, make out of chaos a new order of individual and social action. The inventions have widened out the range of human choice. And now, a new philosophy, informed by knowledge, but not directed by it, must make a plan of life to fit the novel situation.

But, third, in this our present "time of troubles," disaster has come upon our planning because inventions are being devised so fast that wisdom cannot keep the pace. Philosophy, the tortoise, is far out-distanced by Science, the hare. And for that reason, our civilization is now becoming more externalized, more mechanized in mind, more fascinated by gadgets and techniques, more avid for power, more barren of clearness of purpose, than any other which the world has seen. The madness of that external preoccupation invades even our colleges. In them the acquiring of skills now claims an equal status with the search for wisdom and may be substituted for it. The passion for knowledge dulls the zest for insight. Techniques of scholarship are cutting away the roots of liberal learning. And, to cap the climax, philosophy itself seems eager to be a science, to follow the current fashion of the mind.

Men of '53, have you any philosophy in you? I have suggested, in these hurried words, that discoveries and inventions do not, as such, accomplish human welfare. But they do bring it more fully within our reach. During your sixty years, if you and your friends can, by rigorous thinking, understand and master the process of invention, there can be established a human community in which no woman or man or child will lack for proper food, or proper housing, or proper care of health, or proper education to fit him for friendship and mutual understanding with his fellow-men. That can be done, as basis for further advance, only if you will bet your lives and minds, not on the hare, but on the tortoise. It takes an act of reckless faith to lay that bet just now. But, sooner or later-so the fable goes-the tortoise wins.

As these words come to their end, I am thinking of that member of 1953-not yet selected, I assume-who, if this custom is continued, will, sixty years from now, stand here, "Under the Elms," and talk to 2013.

I'd like to shake his hand and smile with him in friendly greeting. Meanwhile, the Class of '93 salutes the Class of '53; salutes, with high respect and admiration, our president and faculty; salutes the grand old college to whose "altar" we Brown men, whether of '93 or '53 or 2013, bring once again our "offering of praise."

More on Meiklejohn as president and professor at Amherst:

"Perhaps most important for the liveliness of the campus, Meiklejohn himself continued to teach. In the classroom he was without rival. Here is one account of the Amherst years:

""No one who took his sophomore course in logic can forget its thrills. A hundred or more of us sat on benches in the dingy chemistry lecture hall where the periodic table of the elements on the chart before us was soon forgotten (along with the smells from the laboratory) as we watched and listened while Prexy held forth. He would begin with a selection from the 'Euthyphro' or perhaps the 'Phaedrus'. Then, eyes flashing, and voice trembling from excitement, he would carry the battle to us, testing our comprehension of what had been said, summoning us to debate, challenging us to criticize his thought and our own. There was nothing namby-pamby about his use of the discussion method-no easy going "What do you think, Mr. Smith?" or "How do you feel, Mr. Jones?" Instead it was: "How should you think? What ought you to feel? What conclusion have you reached and why?" The effect of their swordplay was both devastating and stimulating in the extreme.

Meiklejohn had that asset possessed only by the great teacher of a sense for the dramatic unity of the teaching hour. On occasions, before the closing bell, a kind of incandescence would descend on us, and the embers of the argument, so to speak, would burst into blazing flame, Afterward we would realize that the experience had touched us where we lived.""

In 1923 Roscoe Pound, the dean of the Harvard Law School, told a friend that "Amherst has sent us regularly, for the past five or six years, a little group of men who have stood absolutely at the head of the Law School. Their prominence has been out of all proportion to their numbers. How the miracle has been wrought I don't know," Pound said, "but they are sending us men that know how to think," testifying to the effectiveness of Meiklejohn and his faculty as teachers."

Submitted by Jack Walsh

CULTURAL AMNESIA: America's Future and the Crisis of Memory
by Stephen Bertman

Stephen Bertman's Cultural Amnesia is an important book. It should make everyone think seriously about how we transmit the ideas, the history, and the civic values that allow us to function as a nation and a community and about the consequences of failing to do so.
--Diane Ravitch
Research Professor in Education
New York University

Sixty percent of adult Americans don't know the name of the president who ordered the dropping of the first atomic bomb, 42% of college seniors can't place the Civil War in the right half-century, and 24% think Columbus discovered America in the 1500s. Meanwhile, more American teenagers can name the Three Stooges than the three branches of the federal government.

Applying the metaphor of Alzheimer's disease to our national state of mind, Bertman offers a chilling prognosis for our country's future unless radical steps for recovery are taken. He offers psychological insights into the nature of memory with perspectives on the meaning and future of democracy. With compelling evidence, the book demonstrates that cultural amnesia, like Alzheimer's disease, is an insidiously progressive and debilitating illness that is eating away at America's soul. Rather than superficially blaming memory loss on a failed educational system, Bertman looks beyond the classroom to the larger social forces that conspire to alienate Americans from their past: a materialistic creed that celebrates transience and disposability, and an electronic faith that worships the present to the exclusion of all other dimensions of time.

STEPHEN BERTMAN is Professor of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Canada's University of Windsor, and a member of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas. He is the author of Hyperculture: The Human Cost of Speed (Praeger, 1998).

Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
Price $35.00 -- ISBN 0-275-96230-X
192 pages -- Publication Date: 02/28/00

The Great Ideas Online is published free of charge to its members by the Center.

As always, we welcome your comments. We reserve the right to edit all submissions for relevancy and concision and to publish them at our discretion.