Self-betterment through better reading: another case for literary enlightenment. From the editorial:

[Louis] Menand doesn’t dismiss the value of studying these texts, and notes that he teaches many of them…. Menand wraps this all up by arguing something that caused me the same alarm that has called [Roosevelt] Montás to the academy’s battlements: that humanists such as Montás “need to connect with disciplines outside the humanities, to get out of their silos” and that “the idea that students develop a greater capacity for empathy by reading books in literature classes about people who never existed than they can by taking classes in fields that study actual human behavior does not make a lot of sense.”…

For several years I taught the Core Curriculum course “Contemporary Civilization,” and I do think it made a better person out of me, as well as the dozens of students I ushered through it.

That course is a two-semester marathon requiring every sophomore to read dense texts week after week and come prepared to discuss and write about them. It starts with Plato’s “The Republic” and continues with (this is but a partial list) Aristotle, the Hebrew Bible, St. Augustine, the New Testament, Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke, Adam Smith, Hegel, Kant, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Du Bois, Fanon and many others. And as much of a climb as this can be for students (and their teacher), it does make one a better person.

Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” for example, is initially a forbidding piece of work, seeming to meander through assorted definitions of vague- and perhaps quaint-sounding concepts such as happiness and virtue. However, to guide students through what Aristotle is getting across is to reveal invaluable insights about the human endeavor — one of my favorites of which is that what Aristotle means by virtue is excellence, as in excelling. His “Ethics” offers a light to shine through the difficulty in figuring out what the point of existence is — of finding something we do well and doing our best in it as a prime justification for existence. One day, it’s over for each of us, but you tried, and did, your best with what you were given….

Rousseau is perhaps best known for his concept of humans beginning as “noble savages.”… The key thing is that Rousseau did not see this “noble savage,” a clueless brute, as noble at all. His notion of semi-paradise was small, basically egalitarian societies, with the idea that everything went to pieces when humans conglomerated into hierarchical civilizations. The problem as Rousseau saw it was masses of people condemned to wrest “iron and wheat” from the earth — while a fortunate few reaped the benefits thereof….

To simply know that the kinds of questions Rousseau stimulates are, indeed, questions makes you a better person in the sheer sense of understanding the complexity of the real world, something that escapes ideologues of all kinds….

Scholars of Montás’s perspective are empirically correct, not old-fashioned, in treating the books on the grand old “Five-Foot Shelf” as vehicles of self-improvement, of the kind to which the sciences generally lend only more obliquely. Books like “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” teach us much. Aristotle, Rousseau and Kant teach fundamental lessons.

h/t Brenda Deen Schildgen