73: Prof. Simon Haines - What constitutes a great books education

Join James as he sits down with Prof. Simon Haines, founding CEO of the Ramsay Centre, to discuss a great books education, its history and importance.

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Music: 'Inspiring Dreams' by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon
Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

So for the for the podcast today, I thought it would be helpful given that you have helped the Ramsey Center courses in these different universities, that you would have some valuable insight as to what really makes a great books education, why it's valuable. Um because when people are thinking about it, you know, uh particularly listeners to our podcast are um focused on the prep to year 12 area in general. Um and look, the great books comes down into that realm as well. Uh but I think there's maybe a bit of a a question as to the real value of going deeper on these these texts. Um and you know, not necessarily doesn't always have to be at university, but it does you do want it to be lifelong, you know. These are the great conversation is a a lifelong pursuit um and something to be involved with in. So I think just I'd really like to be able to talk about that kind of stuff and maybe get a bit of your biography before that so people can understand who you are and what the what the perspective you're bringing is. How does that sound?

SPEAKER_01 1:13

That sounds all right. Well, um there are so many directions we could we could take this in. So I I'll I'll let myself be a little bit guided by you. So if I say something and you just want to develop that further rather than let me just keep rabbiting on, don't don't hesitate to interrupt. Um uh but before we actually start the I mean what I'm gonna be talking about, I think mainly is you know, we talk about a great book's education. Um what is an education? What is a book? What is what is read why why does reading matter? What is reading? Anyway, anyway, so you asked me to talk a little bit about myself. Um uh various career backgrounds. I after um my graduate work, I actually went into banking for a while in London and decided, maybe not completely surprisingly, that that wasn't for me, but at that point I had to make an income. So it was as good a way of doing that as anything. Uh, and then switched into diplomacy. And I had um best part of 10 years in the foreign affairs department, either in Canberra or on postings, uh, and then was an intelligence analyst for a little while in what used to be called ONA. I think it's called something else now. Um, and then after that, I was actually headhunted back into academia, or at least invited to apply, back at the ANU, where I'd done my first degree, which I want to talk about in a minute, actually, James, if you can remind me, because in some ways the first degree that I did and others were able to do back in the day, so we're talking 70s and 80s now, was very similar to what we now refer to as a great books program or a classical liberal education. It was just what you did in an arts degree, and somehow we've moved away from that. And hopefully the wheel might might, the circle might turn, we might get back to it. Anyway, so I did um I had best part of 15 years altogether at the ANU, away for again for a posting, my wife has posted, and then uh was ended up as head of the School of Humanities there. So this is back in the sort of 20 years ago, uh, and then accepted a job as professor of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and had nine absolutely, nearly 10 absolutely fabulous years in Hong Kong, which is just a wonderful city, a terrific university, uh, a really, really good English department, and just a privilege to be able to teach very bright young Chinese kids, shouldn't say kids, young people, um, uh about the Western classics, particularly Shakespeare, which is what I did most of my teaching in while I was in Hong Kong. And then again, headhunted back to um Australia. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to leave Hong Kong, but in the end, I thought, well, I should give something back to my own country. And uh that was the job that you've mentioned as the founding CEO, director, if you like, of the Ramsey Center for Western Civilization, where the principal remit, our main mission, I mean, there were various things that the centre did and does, I should say, on, you know, it it sails on. I've left, but it's it's still going well. Um, the main mission was to create undergraduate partnerships with universities. We were we had the funding for three of them, uh, which we in in due course did, though there was a bit of controversy early on, as you probably know. Uh, and in the end, we were very pleased to land essentially. I mean, you know, you can there are variations in the way that this is actually done, but essentially we landed three great books, kind of liberal arts courses, at three very successful existing established Australian universities. One, as they say, group of eight, um, University of Queensland, which forges on with a fantastic degree. Um I might talk about it again in a minute. Uh, and then two other wonderful degrees as well. The first one we actually got was at the University of Wollongong, a very successful regional university just outside the group of eight, but you know, moving onwards and upwards, uh, has done very well. And it was a different model, different kind of institution. And we wanted to try different contexts for this degree to see whether, you know, they work better or worse, whether the demand was greater or less in different contexts. So that was, you know, in the Ilawarra, going very well, also, very successful degree. Uh, and then the third one was with um a nationwide multi-campus university called the Australian Catholic University, which I'm sure you know all about, ACU. Uh, at that time, the the the um VC was Greg Craven, who was very keen on the um on the project, as his successor is as well. Uh, and so that was the third degree. Um, and they all vary a little bit in focus and emphasis. One is a bit more philosophical, one's a bit more literary, one is a bit more classics oriented. That's a shorthand way of putting it. But all of them uh are what you and I would recognize, uh James, as kind of, I mean, classical liberal is a phrase that everybody uses, but they are sort of great, they are great books degrees. Uh, all three of them start with, basically start with Homer and work their way forward in different packaging, different ways of breaking up the courses, but all of them, you know, cover the territory from Homer, Thucydides, Antigone, and Plato, let's say, through Roman um literature and civilization. Most of them have some Virgil, some Ovid, for example. Um, and then on into the medieval period, you'd you'd find Dante, Aquinas in different mixes, um, um, you know, Margaret Cavendish, uh late medieval philosophy, um, and then on into the Renaissance, all of them, Shakespeare, I think Queensland has a whole course on Shakespeare, uh, a whole semester course, um, and other classics of the Renaissance as well, Machiavelli, uh, you know, political writing, Hobbes, Locke, uh, and then on into the Enlightenment, modern period, uh, 20th century. So they all follow broadly that that uh trajectory. So that's um that's where I'm from. And I had nearly eight years, seven years at the Ramsey Center setting all of those things up. I'm very proud of them. We've now had uh hundreds of students either currently doing those three courses or have done them, have graduated. They all seem to be flourishing, as far as I can tell, although, as I say, I'm not I'm not part of the project anymore. Um and we also hired 30 staff, 10 in each of the institutions. So one of the great benefits of this program was that it injected kind of an unprecedented level of private funding into the humanities. And we're always hearing, oh, whoa, the humanities is in crisis, etc. This was a very concrete way of helping by actually putting terrific young teachers, emphasis on teaching very much in these courses, but they're good researchers as well. Uh, and it was it was um, I think the largest single bequest into the humanities in Australian history. And even if you look at it in the context of you know those huge foundations in the United States or or even in the UK, I think we're still up there with one of the biggest um humanities foundations ever, anywhere. So that's a that's a big deal. And at the heart of it was this notion to circle back to your um your theme in this in this podcast series and and for today, at the heart of it was some notion that there is, you know, kind of broadly not being too prescriptive, not being too coercive, obviously, there is a there is a curriculum of core texts, key texts, great books, that it is of huge benefit to young people to read, to be exposed to. Doesn't have to be an exclusivist conception. I think, like, you know, the Mahabharata and the Quran find their due place in one or other of these courses. Doesn't have to be only Western, although obviously the great majority are. Um, it doesn't have to be only written. I mean, we talk about a text, I think Queensland has a wonderful history of art uh um semester course as part of their program and history of music, Western music as well. Uh and certainly if you if you look back at um the kind of how how will I put it, the kind of um prime mover, the granddaddy of all of these great books courses, uh we're talking about St. John's College in Annapolis in the US. Have you heard of that one, James?

SPEAKER_00 10:10

You probably does a scholarship there as well, is that right?

SPEAKER_01 10:14

So one of the I didn't mention this, another thing that the Ramsey program does in addition to its undergraduate programs is it has a terrific series of uh a terrific suite of postgraduate scholars, scholarships. It varies in number, and as I say, I'm not completely up to date. I've been I've been gone a year and a half, two years now, nearly two years. Um but 25, 30 postgrad scholarships a year, of which a small number, maybe a couple, two, three, four, are set aside for St. John's College. Um, do you want me to talk about St. John's a little bit? I can do that if you can.

SPEAKER_00 10:51

Yeah, I'd love to, yeah, because they're um it's such a it's such a a good model for people to base off. And um I think listeners who have listened back through the through the years will recall the conversation that Diff and I had about uh Zaynna hits, and she's one of the one of the lecturers there.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

So I thought that's helpful.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

Yeah, well, that's fantastic. Um, so I uh I went over a couple of times to St. John's just to kind of observe and see how how it's done. Um, and one of my colleagues did the same thing. So we in a sense, more than anything else, when we were trying to dream up the Ramsey curriculum so that we could present it to the universities and kind of go, well, what do you think of this? Could you put something like this on? It was the St. John's model that we had in mind. It's a four-year program, it's very intense, it's a small institution, like a lot of those American liberal arts colleges. And the Americans are lucky. I mean, their population is 10 times as big as ours, but the the number of tertiary institutions that they have is a hundred times as big as ours. So, in a sense, per head, they have 10 times as much choice when it comes to what you do for your tertiary uh qualification as we do. So it's um that's something people don't always realize. And lots and lots of the choice is of small, kind of local, residential liberal arts colleges where you where you reside on campus with your colleagues, with your friends. And so the whole experience is quite immersive. Uh, and so you often you talk about what you're doing in your studies, you know, over dinner uh or a drink or whatever, over the weekend, as much as you would, or not as much, but as well as in in the courses. So that's one thing. St. John's has been around a long time. Um, and another thing we forget with the US is that its institutions are older than ours, quite significantly older. Harvard dates back, I'm doing this from memory, James. Harvard dates back to the 16, I'm gonna say 1690s, 1680s, 1690s, it's a 17th century creation, and so is St. John's. So William and Mary College, Harvard, and St. John's were all creatures of the 1690s. Um, and so it's been there a long time, but for a lot, but for a fair amount of that time, it was more like um the kind of Oxbridgey classics model. Uh, but what happened was so this was an interesting moment in American cultural history that's not, you know, not without um not without interest for Australians as well. So we're talking late 19th, early 20th century. America was experiencing an enormous influx of immigrants, as you know. That's what the it, in a sense, the Statue of Liberty is all about, bring me your poor, etc. Huge number of immigrants, so many languages, many cultures, many backgrounds. And a group of people in initially at Chicago, which has always also had a very significant great books program. I don't know whether you knew that, but it's um it's almost the origin of the great books programs was at uh was at Chicago. And there was a group of teachers and academics, including, I'm trying to remember the names, Stringfellow, Barr, Mortimer Adler, who was the Chicago guy, Robert Hutchins, um, Scott Buchanan, set up this, had this idea that you needed a common cultural foundation or conversation so that all these people from different backgrounds could have a shared cultural inheritance. And the idea was to design a degree that would offer that no matter where you were from, if you were Polish or Lithuanian or Greek or wherever you were, or Irish, or wherever you were coming into America from, this would be a common course that would give everyone a similar kind of uh cultural and intellectual and civilizational foundation. And so they the Great Brooks program was created at uh Chicago. There was another one at Columbia, which still runs, called the Core Course. And I think every Columbia undergrad, no matter what other subjects they're studying, they all have to do the core course, which is again like what I've been outlining, kind of you know, from Homer, looking at Old Testament, New Testament books, looking at Greek, Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and modern, um, uh in something of a scramble at Columbia. But St. John's, back in the early 1900s, so we're talking, I think it was actually created about almost exactly a hundred years ago, 1920s, they redesigned the St. John's curriculum to be uh a great books program in the model that had been invented at Chicago. And ever since then, they've had this four-year thing, and I actually printed it out. So um the the seminars are very intensive. Uh, and the great thing about them is that you are not expected to do any secondary reading. The entire focus of every class is completely on the primary text that you're doing that week. So I'm looking at the I'm looking at their first year program, the seminars begin with Homer's Iliad, Odyssey, Odyssey, Aeschylus, Plato, three dialogues, Aristophanes, two Sophocles plays, a Euripides, loads more Plato's dialogues, Aristotle. So it's Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, and the tragedians, and Homer. And each week you look in huge detail at one work. Sometimes it spreads over two weeks, but it's usually one. And I actually sat in on a couple of the classes. It wasn't the um the classical one, it was uh, what was it I sat in on? I think it was, I think it was a Machiavelli class, so it was a later year. And essentially what happens is that the teacher almost takes a back seat. It's utterly student-led. The expectation is that every student has read that text really carefully, you know, twice, and really has some active thinking and questioning about the text going on in their minds. And so the teacher gives a kind of key question at the beginning. You know, what do you think about the, I don't know, James, you know, what do you think about the the metaphor of the cave and the republic? Does this actually speak to you or something? And then just sits back. And the the the two tutorials that I set in on the the the students then took over. The other one was on Keats's um um Nightingale, the the ode on a nightingale. And uh they didn't even get to the end of the poem at the end of the two hours. It took them so long to go through the thing line by line. And the Plato similarly, very intense, very focused. The only times the teacher intervened was if the discussion rambled off a bit into something that was beginning to sound like a bit of a tangent. He or she, it was a man in one case, woman in the other, brought it back. Um, and the other only other thing that the teachers did was to, if there was a lull in the conversation, or it seemed that we kind of got to the end of that question, they'd inject the next one. But that's it. It was not in any sense a lecture. Uh, it wasn't really a thing where the teacher delivered their wisdom and then the students kind of went, Oh, and then the teacher said, What do you think of what I've just said? It was really student-driven. And they expect the students expect it, and because they expect it, they've read the texts really carefully. So first year was what I've told you. Uh, and then I think they all they also, it's not just um humanities, they read Euclid's elements in first year. So they read Euclid, they read Ptolemy, um, they read uh um Lavoisier, they read Harvey on the motion of heart and blood in animals. So that's all in first year, and then second year, the the seminars, it's Old Testament and New Testament, a number of books from each, Virgil, um, medieval stuff, some Aquinas readings, some Augustine's Confessions, uh, then Dante, Chaucer, and then they get into Shakespeare. But they also read Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes' Geometry, that's second year. And then on into third year, they're looking at um uh at the Enlightenment. Now there's Cervantes, Descartes, Pascal, Hume, Locke, some Jane Austen, lots of Rousseau, uh, Molière. They listen to Mozart's Don Giovanni, Kant and Swift, um, Adam Smith, um, Newton's Principia, etc. And so it's very much a great books program, but they are absolutely expected the students to immerse themselves in each text on a week by week basis. And that is the program. I mean, so there's no thematic uh, you know, this semester we're going to be looking at great classics about such and such. There's no theme. You just read the books and that's it. Um, and you do assignments, you have to write essays about some of them too, but most of the focus is on speaking in the class. So that has been in existence for over a hundred years, and its reputation is very high. Um something I should say about this, which mattered to us at Ramsey, is that we did not want to be uh in any way politically kind of aligned in the way that we devised the program or presented the program. This wasn't, you know, a conservative adventure of some sort, uh, a right-wing curriculum. St. John's is completely non-political. I would say from the conversations I've had that most of the students are like most young people everywhere. They tend to be on the left in their ways of thinking, but it doesn't matter. Most um and most St. John's graduates go off into jobs all across the sector. I mean, some of them end up in Wall Street. They're very much in demand informally in the US. You know, the the the resumes that that kids send in for their first jobs. Obviously, people take Harvard and Yale and Princeton very seriously, yada yada. Um, but or maybe not as seriously as as they used to in some ways. Huh. Another topic for another time. What's gone wrong with some of these universities? But the the the St. John's ones are always treated as this is a serious person. If they've done that degree, they can think. So that's it's a long, it's a long rant by me on one program, but that's what we based our our curriculum, the the Ramsey curriculum on, because we thought it was so comprehensive. Oh, as I mentioned to you, they do look at some non Western texts, it's not all Western, and they look at music, art, and mathematics as well as humanities. So it's very comprehensive, but we really wanted something that had that breadth and that intensity. So that's my kind of point. If you want me to, do you want shall I shut up? Did you want to?

SPEAKER_00 22:02

I've been loving listening. I've been loving hearing because it's it's ringing true. And you know, the whole time you've been talking, I've been thinking back to my own university days. Um, because I I studied at an institution that that did a very similar style, and I was just thinking back to those three hour-long seminars, and you'd you'd get quite heated around the table, I remember, even because there'd be maybe disagreement about the interpretation of the real meaning or the weight of something, and there'd be and you'd you'd almost be fiery at each other, and then there'd be a 10-minute recess for people to go, you know, get water water, and you're out and it's instantly lovely and communal, and it's and it's beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 22:38

I couldn't agree more. You you've summed up the vibe at St. John's, exactly. That's exactly what they achieved. And then I I watched because the the tutorial seminar finished, and everybody kind of well, some people stayed behind to continue their intense disagreement in the room, others walked out of the room, still talking about what they've been talking about. And when I left and went for a coffee, they were still talking about it out in the quadrangle outside. So it's it's wonderful, really. It's a it's it's a terrifically uh exciting, immersive way to learn and to be educated. And you mentioned your own experience as an undergrad. I was going to mention that. I was at ANU, I won't even tell you how many years ago, um, but I was I was able, and I wasn't the only one. Anybody could do this if they wanted to. I put together a degree which had elements of classics. I did a bit of Greek um in translation and and and learning some Greek as well. Uh, and then I did a major in English and a major in philosophy. And if you put those three things along, so that was three years, and then there was an honours year, which is we have in Australia the Scottish four-year model with a capstone fourth year, which is a Scottish thing, not an English thing. That's where we got it from. The Americans don't do it either. We're quite unique in that way. Um, you might not know that. Um, that thing where you go into more depth in one subject in your honours year is not something that's done in either the US or the UK. We we're um we're unusual. Anyway, those three years, when I look back on it now and I look at what we read, I basically did a great books program, pretty much. I mean, my in the in the Greek course I read Thucydides, Antigone, Plato, Aristotle, blah, blah, blah, Homer, uh, and then the English major in those days. You there was compulsory courses, and essentially we read everything from Chaucer to it was like ordin, you know, middle to late 20th century. Um, not late, um, middle. Uh, and and uh that was English. And then philosophy, if I think back now, we we did Locke, Barclay, Hume, Wittgenstein, Kant, Hegel. It was a list of the great philosophers and and Plato. So I did a great books program without even realizing that's what I was doing. That is what it was. And I don't think you can do it anymore. I don't know of any Australian universities where it's even possible to construct something like that unless you do one of the Ramsey programs. Or I should say, James, um uh um declaration of interest here. I I have a uh a post, I'm privileged to have a part-time post at Campion College in, I don't know if you've heard of them. It's a small liberal arts college in Western Sydney, which is Australia's only liberal arts college. It's the only one that we have in the St. John's kind of model that I've been telling you about. And so I've recently been lucky to sit in on some of those classes and give give one, uh, and I'll be giving some more. And it's the same thing, same experience is is the goal, uh, same kind of curriculum. It's very similar to what I've just uh just outlined at these other places. It's been there uh decades rather than centuries, but it's it's still there, doing very well, flourishing, hope, hopefully growing. And my thought about that is that if we've got one, why don't we have a bunch more? Why don't we, why doesn't this become a thing? You know, you'd need to find a few people who are prepared to back the thing to get off the ground, uh, or else, or else persuade governments at the state level that this is a good model, as I fervently believe it really is, and kind of go, okay, this is uh this is a different kind of model that really works. Uh let's let's fund that. Let's make that an option, or at least make that a degree kind of model option within existing universities. That's another way you could go. So that's um so that's a bit about that. And I was gonna, that's it. I was gonna tell you about why, why it's good to read. Okay, because this is um people might say, well, what's so great about this? Why is it a good thing for me to do? It's it's fundamentally a reading program. So I was when I was thinking about Ramsey, I was kind of motivated a bit by a book by an anthropologist at Harvard, I think he is. So his name is Joe Henrick. And he wrote a book called Weird, the Weirdest People in the World. And WeIRD stands for so it's an acronym, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. So the title of the book is something like, Again, my memory is fallible, but why the West is Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. So it's kind of a book about why the West kind of worked, right? And the first chapter is on reading. And it's an interesting chapter because he he goes back to the origins of mass literacy, which begins with the Gutenberg press and the arrival of print. Uh and then the the next sort of big step was Luther and the Bible and making the Bible available through print to an entire population. And this actually kicked off a boom in literacy like you wouldn't believe. So the West, by you know, middle to late 19th century, had levels of mass literacy that no other society in history has ever been able to even dream of. And we're still as a group of societies more literate than historically human beings ever have. And Henrik links the boom of mass literacy actually to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It was mass literacy that made a lot of the inventiveness and the dissemination of inventions possible. So he actually argues, interestingly, that reading is the foundation of prosperity and kind of mass intelligence. So intelligence kind of went up as a result of mass reading. So that's Henrik. Um, and it just made me think what is it about reading that does this? I mean, you might, I don't know what you think about the books that you've read when you were a child or as an adult, what they've done for your brain. But there's quite a lot of cognitive science stuff out there that actually, and I'm not just I'm just making this up, reading actually enlarges certain parts of your brain. They've actually shown that this happens. Um, the parts of the brain, particularly that have to do with empathy and um uh uh awareness of other points of view, but also the parts of your brain that have to do with assembling and disassembling complex amounts of information. And it made me think so if you read Plato's Republic or Thucydides' History or War and Tolstoy's War and Peace or whatever complex text it is that you're reading, what are you actually doing? And the important thing is, and I realize this from listening to these these classes, that reading is not passive, or when it's done properly, it's not a passive activity. You are actually exercising your brain, your mind when you're reading. Because what you're handling there in the book, you you can almost physically see it, you know. I mean, you know, kind of I often hold this up to um year 11 and year 12 classes, and I kind of go, What's this? And they go, Do you know what this is? Have you ever seen one of these before? And they kind of go, Oh, it's a book. Yeah, it's a book. Why does it matter? What's so important about the way that it's laid out? What's so important about what happens when you pick it up and try and read it? And and what I've what I like to say is with something like those complex texts that I mentioned, reading the the reason it's not passive is you're not just running your eyes over the words and collecting a story or whatever it might be, collecting an argument, you're actually disassembling a very complex structure of words and thoughts and feelings in your mind and then putting it back together again. If you've really understood that text to the point where you can actively engage with your peers and a teacher in a classroom, you need to have read it actively, which means taking it apart and reassembling, being able to do that. And that activity of disassembling and reassembling of, I mean, geez, these are complex artifacts. Uh um, the brothers Karamazov, or you know, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, or Wittgenstein's investigations, or um Joyce's Ulysses, these are the these are pieces of human craftsmanship and intellectual creativeness on a scale like a Gaudi cathedral. You know, that they're they really are complex human artifacts that happen to be made of words, not out of bricks and stones, not out of musical notes. That's a separate topic. I mean, Beethoven's quartets are in the same category, but they're not made of language, uh, and that's important. Uh, a great painting, a very complex piece of human um uh creativity in the same way. But books, staying with books, really complicated structures of language, and it is no small achievement to be able to take one apart and put it together again. But it's something we all start doing, hopefully, very young. So when you get to university and you're asked to do this with the Iliad, you're not coming to, hopefully, if you've had a decent school education or your parents read to you, it's not the first book you've ever read. You know how to read, you know, um, Harry Potter or whatever the childhood books are that you've been reading. So it's a growth thing as well as um uh a very complicated grown-up thing to be doing. So if you do that with each book, and then over the course of three years, or in St. John's case, four years, you've done that with several hundred extremely complex books. You've really done something with your mind. And if you can do that with your mind, you are certainly going to be able to go into, I don't know, a public policy role in the civil service or into a management executive role in in a big company, and and be able to assimilate masses of complex data. And I'm not talking about maths, that's a whole separate thing. But a lot of the data that that you assimilate in big companies or public service departments is kind of human, is arguments, you know, stories. If you can do all of this with war and peace, you can certainly do it with a with a speech for a minister, uh, or uh, or or you know, giving a talk as a as a as a senior executive or developing a creative program inside a company. So I'm not trying to say that that the main benefit of a great books education is that it will give you a career, because I think that would be a mistake to think about it that way. It's not a career training we're talking about, but it is an expansion and training and enriching of your mind. And that will make you, you know, good at is the wrong word, but that will make you competent, sympathetic, flexible, articulate in whatever you do in your in your family life, in you know, clubs or something, the your community life as well as in your career. So um, so all of those things are you know, there is much more to be said about why reading matters and what it does for your mind, but that's that's kind of a that's kind of a start, if if that's I mean there's more, yeah, there's more to say, but that's all if you think about this in terms of so why should we do a great books course? Well, I've given you kind of half the answer, which is what it does for your mind. But the other half of the answer, I'll stop in a second before I do that to give you a chance to ask anything about the first half, but the other half is really about what it's what it's introducing you to and what it's making you a part of, which is a whole other topic. So let's stop with the anything you want to say about that.

SPEAKER_00 35:51

No, but that's great. I think you've you've hit all of the you've tilled the soil well there to give some value to reading, and I think it's it's good because there's something you said earlier, and I think it's what you're gonna end up tying to. So I think we should just jump into it. And I think it's I I often get this question, you know, I'm I'm teaching senior students literature, um, and there always comes this point where they they want to talk about, you know, further education. Uh, and you know, well, what should I do? Why should I do that? What what what's the what's the purpose of it? And they get into all of these kind of bigger questions um that tend to have a utilitarian or functional perspective to them, you know, and and I do lay out the the functional purposes of of a great books education that you just kind of have there as well, you know, to be able to communicate well, to be able to think, well, these are integral, uh, these are so important. And a great books program isn't the only way to learn critical thinking, but it's a very tried and true way, and it gives you something more than that critical thinking and that that creative expression as well. I think you used the term earlier cultural inheritance, a shared cultural inheritance, and I think that's a very good way to frame it because we you know my wife and I both have done liberal arts degrees, and I'm a teacher now, and and she is currently raising our children. Um, and she's in the other room right now reading them a story of kids that congratulations to her.

SPEAKER_01 37:22

Well done.

SPEAKER_00 37:23

It's she does a great job. Um, but there's a shared we have because we've both gone through this degree together in that very similar communal way of you know, half the time the person I was disagreeing with was her in the class about whether which was which was the true Milton being shown and things like that. And yes, um uh but what I was trying to say with that was that we have now this foundation, this this inheritance, this cultural inheritance that we uh has formed us and has almost oriented us. So there's this degree to like, yes, you can spend three years doing any range of difficult things and it will develop you into being functional in some capacity. Uh the great books is a very good way to do that. In fact, it might be one of the most tried true versions of that, but it gives you something more additional to that because this inheritance, this as you this great conversation that you're now a part of, um is something that propels you forward through life and and we'll find I won't talk to my wife about an issue at all for you know something that's been raised in the in society or something that's come up in our lives, and then we'll get a chance three weeks post the news happening, you know, um say some some policy decision or something, uh, and and we'll both have thought the same thing without having to have had the thoughts together because we've got this shared cultural inheritance that we know what values are values, and and and particularly I think one of the one of the terms that comes from this notion of the great books that you don't get if you go uh to another just you know random way of developing critical thinking, any other number of avenues. But this notion of virtue that seems to be so prevalent through the great books, and you know, and not not uh it's not a unanimously agreed upon thing, it's a contested issue, but there's still this notion of virtue and and a good uh that we as people align to, and there's a you know, you can use different language to to talk about this thing, you can use Kantian duty or whatever, but there's this forming of a standard beyond yourself. And I think the cultural inheritance has a part to do with that because it kind of helps you recognize it. So I just I'm sure you've got some things you'd like to jump in on to with that.

SPEAKER_01 39:55

Gladly, gladly, James. And and again, there's almost too much there to talk. You've raised so many things that we could be uh we could spend all day with this, and hopefully we will one day. Um so if you think about education, that's the word, it's got this double etymology um from educare and educare, as you probably know. So part of it is a leading forth from out of from out of the person of something that's kind of innate within them, bringing out of the person what's there to be brought out, which is a lovely thought. But the other part of it is a kind of a training or um or um um feeding notion, which is more to do with making the person aware of what they're being brought out into, of the world that's out there, kind of waiting for them to come forth and play their part in it. So that education means both of those things, what's in you and leading you out into the world that you can then be a part of. Um, and it in inducing you, if you like, inducting, inducting you into a world. And I use inducting because it's got that ducare, that leading notion in there as well. But so has so has tradition um got the same notion that tradition is transdicere, which is handing on speech, passing on the language. That's what a tradition is. I came across a comment which really resonated with me the other day by a fellow, very um, I think a very significant, very interesting um uh um British uh intellectual called Ian McGilchrist. I don't know if you've heard of this guy, uh famous book called The Master and His Emissary. Um McGilchrist is both a neurologist and a humanities um scholar. Yes, yes. So he's got both sides. And his books are fascinating in the way that he thinks about the brain uh and and in the way that he thinks about the educational tradition. But he's just been appointed um chancellor of a new, relatively new liberal arts college in the US. And in his kind of opening remarks, he laments the fact that universities used to be what he called cultural anchors. They used to be culture which handed on um but formed a whole human being by handing on a tradition of thought and civilization and culture. And of course, his worry is that universities are no longer doing that job very well. So we need new liberal arts colleges to fill in the gaps that I'm not sure universities are unredeemable, but that's just his way of putting it. And I think he's right. I mean, this thing about helping the young person feel that they're far from being alone and far from being just part of a contemporary group, that they're actually not even the end of a chain, but they're a link in a chain, a transmissive, that they're in a way that your duty and your responsibility and your life meaning is to hand on as much as to receive. And uh and a book that um I often cite in this context is by a terrific French philosopher whose name is Remy Brague, B-R-A-G-U-E, Remy Brague. Um, he's at the Sorbonne, and he wrote a fabulous book. This is way back in the 90s. Uh, I've actually interviewed him for the Ramsey program, and I just uh I just think he's just as good as it gets. And he's wrote this book called Eccentric Cultures, um, a theory of western civilization. And what Bragg says is that the key link in the chain is Rome. It's actually Rome. Why is that? Because Rome inherited the two traditions, which between them are the DNA, if you like, the double helix metaphor of that. This is those are sorry, I'm imposing that. He doesn't say. that that's me uh but but that's what he's basically saying that that namely the judeo christian strand and the um and the Greek the Roman Greek intellectual strand or Greek particularly Rome inherited both it inherited Christianity and became the focus of Christianity but it also inherited the Greek intellectual tradition and then transmitted them so those two separate traditions that had been separate were joined in Rome and then transmitted into the future as a linked DNA double helix and he says Western civilization is essentially transmissive it's not foundationalist it thinks of itself as not an origin but a kind of responsibility to hand on a transmissive civilization you receive it you pass it on and I I love that because it's not saying we're the origin the be all and the end all we it's just that our duty is to pass on to our inheritors to future generations what we're lucky enough to have inherited from the one before and I think universities have that responsibility or they they should have and that is what all of us as you know you talked about your undergrad experience that is what that is such an important message for us to get that that as human beings we are handing on a culture an understanding and a tradition I'll quote you something James um I love this and I've quoted it before but it you know it can't be said often enough. This is that remember the movie called the History Boys? Did you ever see that? If not go and see it. It's based on a play by Alan Bennett and it's set in um in a 1980s north of England somewhat underprivileged grammar school the kids are from not very well off backgrounds but they're desperate to learn and they all end up going off to Oxford and Cambridge and whatever they do very well. But the history teacher who inspires them to learn um played by Richard Griffiths in the movie he says this to them in a northern accent which I can't do he says pass the parcel that's sometimes all you can do take it feel it and pass it on not for me it's not for you but for someone somewhere one day pass it on boys that's the game I want you to learn and pass it on and that's that's the quote and I just that just I just think that's that's it in a nutshell that's so wonderful that he put it that way that the hit this history teacher with bright but um somewhat disadvantaged kids of 15 16 17 teaching them that their role is to pick up this great conversation this great tradition that we're all lucky enough to be part of and not let it die but keep passing it on. Your role is a transmitter not necessarily an originator. So it's quite a humble doctrine really you're not you're not a great you're not necessarily a great creator as we all need to feel if we're reading Plato or Wittgenstein or something geez I'm not him I couldn't do that but I can understand it I can make it part of me and then I can hand it on and that's um that's not bad if you can do that.

SPEAKER_00 47:22

If your education does that for you well done to the teachers yes and I think you're right I love the point that it ties back to what you were saying earlier about these these great books they're they're on the scale of cathedrals when you consider the the just brilliance of the lank the use of language in the way they've constructed such fine stories or arguments or or what be it um but I think that's also a great thing to point out that you know not everyone gets the opportunities to you know go and see all the great places in the world. Not everyone has such such privilege but books are readily available to everyone and anyone that's fallen in love with a book understands when other people talk about it opening up worlds you know like it opens and it does this doesn't have to be like a you know a fantasy novel in order to for it to open up a world I mean you can just be delving into the arguments of you know even going back to the works of Plato it's it's those are powerful texts and they are they are what a privilege we have to have these texts.

SPEAKER_01 48:34

That's exactly right you you you've hit the nail on the head there. I mean we all want to go and see Machu Picchu or you know or the Coliseum or the Great Wall of China or whatever it is. We can't necessarily all do that. But these are uh experiential um objects on that scale that you can you can actually it's just in your own lounge room you can just sit and read them. And I and I think that's look there's something we should probably mention um I don't know whether you do a whole podcast on this at some point but it would be worth it because it's something we all have to face to face which is what AI is going to do to this kind of way of thinking that we're talking about because increasingly it's going to be hard for young people to resist the argument that I don't need to read War and Peace AI can you know I can just go to ChatGPT and it can summarize it for me. Like I don't need to go to Matthew Pichu I can see a documentary and and an AI summary of what what's great about what so kind of why have these experiences at all if there is uh um a complex language model or computer model that can kind of do it for me. And this is a very real I don't know whether you're coming across this much in your work but I think it's happening increasingly at universities that young people aren't reading the books. They're reading an AI summary of the books and then putting whatever it is the question that the teacher asked them to write their essay on into ChatGPT and that's churning out the answer. What are we going to do with that? What does that mean? Why does it matter? Why is it so important in this completely new context? We've got no human experience of what it's like for young people to handle this. For somebody my age it's kind of unimaginable what young people have to deal with. But this is a very serious thing you know James I mean it's why would they read The Republic? So you've got to we we have to start thinking of answers to this and and I'm only beginning to try to think of this myself but it seems to me that there is absolutely no substitute for having the experience of reading the book yourself. Yes you can have the AI have your experience for you but then you might as well say AIs can have my whole experience have my life for me why have a life why have a life if I'm not going to actually do the living and and um one thing that you've kind of hinted at with books is that you know lots of people say when you're reading a book you're not actually living life you're just lost in some book world a book is a life if you're reading a book by a really great writer you are in direct immediate electrical dynamic contact contact not just with the whole of Milton's life if you're reading Paradise Lost but the distilled kind of essence of everything he had to say that the the book itself is a hyperlife sort of you know it's almost in a different level of reality from an ordinary life but it's real it is a real life and by only by reading it yourself does your mind creatively in the ways that I've talked about grow in contact with that other mind. I mean you know however wonderful these contemporary scholars that I've been mentioning are they're not Milton you know they're not Wittgenstein not that many people around are there's a few but there's not that many very hard to go and talk to them but you can read books by people who are as great as anything that we've ever been able to think and you can read them yourself. And by doing that you are in a real world you you are in a higher level of reality not a lower level and I'm my worry about social media and you know all this stuff that young people are sucked into is that it's ephemeral. You know that word it's fleeting these are these are fleeting dreams whereas what we're talking about are as real as thought can possibly get which is what Plato's um you know myth of the cave was actually saying you've got to get out there into the light of the sun not just look at the flickering shadows on the wall of the cave and I think the shadows have become horribly addictive and and tempting for young people now as many of them themselves would would agree. I mean they they can see this and I think if you can get them out of that into this real sounds it sounds paradoxical but this real world of books is a kind of saving thing to to to get them to make their minds formed full you know as well as part of the tradition in in ways that I don't think I mean God knows what AI is going to be capable. I don't think even the people in Silicon Valley who are inventing ever new versions of of it know where it's going. I I don't think anybody knows.

SPEAKER_00 53:54

But it's uh it is a threat it's a risk it can do wonderful things I'm not wanting to sound catastrophist uh and they remain to be seen too marvelous things no doubt but this does strike me as a risk that it's going to I mean there have been some studies that say that um the average intelligence of the demographic is dropping as a result of social media people like Jonathan Haidt working on this stuff you know the coddling of the American mind and those those books there does seem reason to be worried that that we need to push back against the kind of um impoverishment um um of of thought uh I think you're right there's yeah there's there's been I mean we're almost coming to the end of our time together and so it's a shame because I feel like there's so much that could be said. But there's this this idea of what you're saying is so true and it's that you know I think back to those students that asked me those functionary questions about the great books and and it's this idea of if you're looking just at the function or the utilitarian angle of this well you're missing it you're reducing it to the wrong to the wrong thing. It's that's that's only a part of the the benefit um and AI you know offers in in maybe short term goals this same benefit they're like oh well I I get these function functionary things done um and it's you know it's similar it brings us even further back in the conversation to the idea of the Ramsey center's funding and how that has come at a time when the government is pulling away from humanities funding you know they they're so focused on the on the utilitarian angle but there's this something at stake here this cultural inheritance there's something at stake that we can't let be lost yeah I agree because it's too valuable.

SPEAKER_01 55:46

Yeah I couldn't couldn't agree more that's a whole other topic on the whole question of not just university funding humanities funding but kind of university mission what it is that universities think they're doing uh as well as what governments think they should be doing uh and what communities um uh think they should be for um I'm in a I'm a co-director of a new not-for-profit called Humanities for Life and part of our mission is going to be to take exactly this kind of question that you're asking out there into particularly into regional communities and sit down with schools and colleges including in Toowumba of course coming up later this year um but across the regions and say what do you think about these questions? What are we losing here? What do we need to do to not lose them? And AI is important but government attitudes, funding attitudes, community attitudes are really important too. There's a lot here that we absolutely cannot risk losing um but we need to we need to talk about this and to give people the feeling that they have a say in what education is going to be like kind of going forward. I mean I could leave you with a I know we're almost out of time but um John Stuart Mill, the great liberal progressive philosopher of the 19th century, fascinating moment in his um in his own thinking when he said to himself, because he was a progress he wanted votes for women he wanted um uh votes for poorer you know people more disadvantaged classes he wanted to extend the franchise he had a lot of um what were then considered very progressive liberal ideas but he said to himself supposing I achieved them all everything I ever wanted was achieved you know people were prosperous people were healthy everybody was equal AI had given us let's take the argument into the present AI had given us everything we wanted we had everything he then said what would you do then what would you do with this wonderful comfortable equal social justice achieved perfect life what are you going to do what are you gonna do with all the time you've now got and his answer was well you're gonna read philosophy and read poetry because that is that is not just a pathway like we've been talking about but it's an end it's kind of what you get to when humans are really civilized is that they talk about the meaning of life what is the good what is justice what is truth that is something you aspire to have the freedom to do so I think that's a very interesting thing that Mill said it's it it it it makes you rethink why we have a liberal education it's not just because it's good to do it not just because it inducts you into a culture but because it gives you a glimpse of what human conversation can be like when everything else is solved. And I think that's that's a fascinating thing for some for a kind of beardy you know philosopher of ninety of the 1890s to have thought of that it's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 58:53

And it is the question that we need to ask so anyway final thought I love that thank you so much Simon for your time I'm sure the audience will have really appreciated these ideas um and just that that thinking about well what are the great books why should we care and and really I I love how you've diagnosed the pressing uh weight that is in this contemporary setting that we have find ourselves within um and needing to really wrestle these questions because they're they're it's a valuable thing and we can't let it be lost. Must not no it would it would be yes great damage.

SPEAKER_01 59:29

We're at a hinge point what some people like to call a civilizational moment though I've got I've begun to hate that phrase um but we are at a crucial juncture really I think in in so many in so many uh dimensions in so many different ways so you're right we must we must seize the moment well thank you very much Simon uh that'll be it for today's episode thank you for listening great pleasure see you next time you bet nice to nice to talk to you thank you very much Simon I think we'll be um I'll I'll see you in Fremantle next week I believe yeah I'll I'll be there next week definitely and and then and I think we you're at the Toowoomba College right yes so I think we're coming up John Lane and I are coming in August um okay to do um I think I'll be doing a couple of talks one at the college and one at some community centre it hasn't been all sorted out yet but um cool that's sometime in I think late August so yeah yeah so I think um we uh yeah because I run the our school does a well I've I've organized our school for the last this is our second year doing it symposium nights where the teachers will write papers and we it's one of those I think it's so I think you'll be jumping on that.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:43

Which would be lovely uh looking forward to that well that's great. Well I'll see you next week and we'll I'm sure we'll have another chat.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:48

Lovely nice nice to talk. Cheers James bye bye