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Two prominent book lists seem to be making the rounds on my vaguely conservative substack feed. The MENSA reading list for high school students, and St. John's Great Books curriculum. While these two lists are pretty different from each other, and I generally find the St. John's list to be more broad, I find both to be vaguely unsatisfying and narrow in a way that I can't really put my finger on.
I'm reminded of Sam Kriss's critique of a similar kind of list on the /lit channel on 4chan. There's a certain kind of anglo-centrism to this list, an anglo-centrism that is focused on a specific type of worldview. I can't quite put the feeling I have into words here, but if I were to try, I would describe this list as emphasizing a modern (in reference to the modern era of history), Western, progressive (as in history as progress, not woke), Liberal, and individualist perspective of the world. A few big gaps I see below
-No Eastern Bloc/communist authors. Communism might be bad, but it is an ideology that determined the course of the 20th century. Why not add some Soviet Science fiction, or one of the works of Stanislaw Lem.
-No East Asian literature. Journey to the West is something that sticks out, but if you wanted to be more "edgy" you could add some Yukio Mishima, who certainly is quite different from the general theme of this list.
-No post-modernism. Yea, yea insert comment about degenerates, drugs, and nihilism, but this should be something that the youth should decide for themselves. Camus is on here which is borderline, but I would recommend some DFW (Infinite Jest is the best), Italo Calvino, Michel Houellebecq, or David Mitchell.
-No Latin American literature (on the MENSA list, St. John's seems to have Borges and Gabo) The fact that Gabo isn't on here is a crime. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a great, short one that could easily be added to this list, but Ficciones (Borges), The Invention of Morel (Bioy Casares), or The House of the Spirits (Allende).
-No environmentalist literature. Lord of the Rings sort of counts, but I would add Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, or some Wendell Berry.
-Very little history. One of the big problems I see on both the left and the right is a complete ignorance of who we are and how we got here. The Oxford History of the US (although incomplete) would be great to ad to this list, but I'm not sure what else to add that would give more than a basic survey of history which I don't think is useful.
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.
Now that being said, if you want to build a university degree/program of study, you need to have some kind of reading list. In that sense St. John's list isn't too bad. But to really develop as an independent humanistic thinker, reading the books on their list is not enough. You need to cultivate independent seeking out of literature beyond the "lists" and beyond the slop that is peddled to us by popular culture. You also need to kill the anglocentrism, preferably by learning to read in one or more languages outside of English. If I were in charge of St. John's curriculum, I would cut back these reading lists by about 50%, add in a language requirement, and some kind of independent reading requirement. We had something like the later in my Global Voices (world literature) class in high school, where you had to pick a non-Anglo author and write an essay/give a presentation on its plot/themes/character.
Man I should have gone into the humanities instead of into the sciences. I am so much more passionate about this stuff than STEM.
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.
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.
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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