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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   33698 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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At the end of the day I think lists like these are counter-productive. Rather than encouraging independent thinking, I think they just create another shibboleth on the right to stand opposed to the shibboleth on left: post-modernism and marxism are evil and wrong, the answers to all our problems can be found in the past, and the Western, Modern, Liberal worldview is probably correct. Rather I would suggest reading widely, and with things you disagree with. As Haruki Murakami once said, if you only read what everyone is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. This is just as true for this MENSA list as it might be for the slop that we've normalized.

More and better quality shared shibboleths are exactly what the right needs. Shibboleths provide a sense of community and belonging and act as shortcuts - if someone uses a shibboleth they signal familiarity with the concepts related, allowing you to bypass covering them. I completely agree you should read books others don't, but I think there is also a lot of value in a shared knowledge base, and the St John's curriculum not only provides a lot of instruction in independent thinking (which is necessary, independent thinking is stifled at every turn by the modern world), it also includes a lot of historical works, which provide a connection to our history that inspires pride in the Western intellectual tradition. Beyond that though, I think historical works do a much better job of inspiring interest in history than actual histories, although that might be typical minding.

Also yeah the curriculum should be used as a base, a springboard into the pool of knowledge as opposed to an outline of its breadth.

a lot of historical works

Well yes and no, picking the 'Junior' list at random, it includes only two works of historiography (Gibbon and Spengler) and lots of original sources. Nothing wrong with Gibbon or Spengler as things to read, though it's a strange choice as literally works of history for a full year. It's even stranger to read the Federalist papers etc. without accompanying it with a single historiographical work. Obviously it's important to read the documents themselves but doing so without attempting or seeing any kind of interpretative framework is meaningless - it would be much more instructive to read a work or two from each of the major historiographical schools of early American history, and realistically I think the course-setters know this, otherwise they would have set primary sources on Rome too, and it's hard to shake the feeling that setting the Federalist papers is a purely aesthetic decision.

In fact just had a look at the Sophmore list and it does set Livy, Tacitus etc. Points for consistency then but this is just silly. The average student would get a thousand times more out of reading Syme or just the Oxford History of the Roman World than any primary sources.

I think this is probably what St. John's as an institution that you actually attend does this well, re:creating a shared knowledge-base that can be expanded on individually. I think what I am frustrated with, which maybe didn't come across here, is how this is presented by secondary sources (i.e. substack). Read these 100 books and become based, you HAVE to read these books in order to be a learned individual, etc. etc.

Re:histories vs. historical accounts. I think there is a place for both, but a good history book will a). introduce you to many other primary sources about the period and b). take a step back from some of the bias that is inherent in a primary source account (although you can't really get rid of bias completely). Of course pop history often fails to this, which is why I think trying to read more academic history (Battle Cry of Freedom is my favorite axe to grind here) is the way to go.

Re:histories vs. historical accounts. I think there is a place for both, but a good history book will a). introduce you to many other primary sources about the period and b). take a step back from some of the bias that is inherent in a primary source account (although you can't really get rid of bias completely). Of course pop history often fails to this, which is why I think trying to read more academic history (Battle Cry of Freedom is my favorite axe to grind here) is the way to go.

A lot of great books courses utilize outside scholarship to give context to works. I did multiple classes studying historiography from primary sources in late antiquity, and we read excerpts of modern "accurate" scholarly works, while reading the entirety of the primary sources assigned. You read all of Herodotus, then you read an excerpt covering the modern view of the Persian Empire, and an archeologist's journal article proposing a reinterpretation, etc.

Few modern histories are important to read cover to cover, from a syllabus perspective.

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