Letters to a Young Conservative by Dinesh D'Souza Read Free Book Online Page B

had in mind the best of Western thought and culture. There is no reason in principle, however, that Arnold’s criterion cannot be applied to non-Western cultures as well.
    Personally, I would like to see liberal arts colleges devote the better part of the freshman year to grounding students in the classics of Western and non-Western civilization. Yes, I am talking about requirements. To heck with electives: Seventeen-year-olds don’t know enough
to figure out what they need to learn. Once students have been thoroughly grounded in the classics, they have three more years to choose their majors and experiment with courses in Bob Dylan and Maya Angelou. My hope, of course, is that after a year of Socrates and Confucius and Tolstoy and Tagore most students will have lost interest in Bob Dylan and Maya Angelou.

7
    What’s So Great About Great Books
    Dear Chris,
    I see that I have gotten ahead of myself. You are a premed student, and you profess to be confused by all this liberal arts talk. I take it that you understand the importance of politics—it provides the necessary infrastructure for us to live peaceful, prosperous, and good lives. But you are puzzled by my emphasis on the importance of books, especially books written a long time ago. I even detect a hint of sympathy for the liberal view that Sophocles, John Milton, and William Shakespeare are just a bunch of “dead white men.” Why should we read them instead of others? What do they have to say to us today? Your letter is full of questions, and they are good ones, so let me try to take them one by one. I have taken the liberty of reformulating them slightly so that they correspond to the questions that multiculturalists frequently ask.

    “What, really, is a classic and why should we read so-called classics?” Samuel Johnson provides the answer in his Preface to Shakespeare. A classic, he writes, is a work that has survived the provinciality of its own moment in space and in time. If Shakespeare, who wrote in Elizabethan times, continues to appeal to Victorian and modern readers, and to readers outside England, it must be because he addresses universal themes, and in an appealing and enduring way. The literary critic Northrop Frye put it a little differently: A classic is simply “a work that refuses to go away.”
    “Even so, why is it important for students to know about a bunch of great books?” It is less important for students to learn about the great books than it is for them to learn from the great books. The great books are about fundamental human questions; indeed, they are a kind of extended argument about these questions. The philosopher Leo Strauss writes, “Liberal education consists in listening to the conversation among the greatest minds. But here we are confronted with the overwhelming difficulty that this conversation does not take place without our help—that in fact we must bring about that conversation. The greatest minds utter monologs . . . and they contradict one another regarding the most important matters. . . . We must transform their monologs into dialogs.”
    As Strauss suggests, this is not an easy process, but it is one that can be learned through effort, and the effort is worth it because the result is wonderfully illuminating.

    Once again, the goal is not to give students a cocktail-party familiarity with a canon of great works. Indeed, Allan Bloom says it is better that students should be deeply excited, even have their lives changed, by one book. So if you want to embark on this journey, Chris, begin by choosing a writer who really speaks to you, such as Plato or Rousseau. That will get you started on what, I assure you, will be the most exhilarating and long-lasting adventure of your life.
    “What is the point of having a static curriculum? Shouldn’t the curriculum change?” Yes, and the curriculum has always changed. When Moby Dick was first published, the book was a failure. One reviewer complained that it was a