Why should we read old books?

Editor’s note: When the Calgary Classical Academy started recruiting faculty, we asked prospective teachers to write short essays answering questions like “Why should we read old books?” We received some impressive responses to this prompt, with invocations of Martin Luther King Jr., Boethius, Josef Pieper, T.S. Eliot, Confucius, C.S. Lewis, Aristotle, G.K. Chesterton, D. H. Lawrence, and others. But one of our favourite answers came from Andrew Casali, who took inspiration from some unexpected sources. Andrew will be joining the Calgary Classical Academy this summer as a teacher and learning strategist.

By Andrew Casali

During periods of prolonged drought, African elephants wander herculean distances over the Savannah in search of water. Tracking the herds to monitor which of these elephants are successful, scientists have discovered a reliable way of predicting which groups will survive the prolonged droughts and which will not. The key variable they isolated was surprisingly simple: the age of the oldest female in the herd. When you add to this discovery the fact that elephants are matriarchal, the solution to the puzzle becomes clear: the herds that survive do so because they are led by females with the longest memories, memories of times when they themselves had been led through drought by their own matriarchs, and of where and how to access distant and otherwise-forgotten watering holes. Kill the matriarch, and, at least in times of drought, in all likelihood you will kill the herd.

When the seemingly inexhaustible cod fisheries of the Canadian Atlantic collapsed, researchers noted that it was as if their populations had suddenly fallen off a precipice. They discovered, much in the vein of their colleagues in Africa, that the schools of cod tumbled over these population cliffs when - guess what - the schools lost all their elders. With the collective memories of their ancient migration routes consigned to the tombs of beer-battered TV dinners, the cod were literally lost.

And as it is with the animal kingdom, so it is with us. In Choruses from “The Rock,” T.S. Eliot laments, among other things, this very unmooring:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

Despite our best efforts - and they are legion - modern man has failed to produce the utopia he has so long promised himself. We invent new technologies, new fantasies, new ways to visit our imaginations upon the wide and bewitching world, and all the while we circle the heavens, as Eliot notes, retracing the same worn paths but believing our feet ply the clouds.

We are not so very much higher than our wandering ancestors. In fact, having attempted to uncouple ourselves from our “barbaric” past, we have too often sloughed off millennia of wisdom and learning in favour of our own blind leading.

How far back in the past do modern educators risk going? How many now dare dredge up Chaucer or Homer? What place is there in our “modern” world for The Iliad? For Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle, Machiavelli? If we returned to them, what might we gain and - more to the point - if we don’t, what do we stand to lose?

In The Well-Trained Mind, their treatise on the merits and implementation of classical at-home education, Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer offer their thoughts on the matter. “Great books,” they write, “provide historical perspective on the accepted truths of our own age.” Put another way, the old classics act in some ways as metaphorical matriarchs for us, as our own “cod elders,” serving as guides to help us navigate difficult times. Such texts offer wisdom vouchsafed for us against the rot and decay of the centuries. We read them to gain perspective on our lives; to evaluate the dilemmas and seductions of our own age; to be reminded of who we are, who we were, who we could yet be.

I’m currently reading The Odyssey. Homer, of course, offers countless commentaries on the human condition, of which his opening scene is but one example. In this scene, Penelope’s suitors swarm her halls, carving up the fat of Odysseus’s land in his absence and naively telling themselves that the king will never return. Never, they think, will they have to pay for their theft. Odysseus, of course, more than pays them back for their insouciance, and through them Homer reminds the modern reader of the timelessness of human foolishness. Moreover, through the nature of the prose itself, the lengthy monologues, and the artful repartee of the gods, an attentive twenty-first century reader will likely note just how much our own appetite for sustained and poetic discourse has shrunk. Without studying great writers like these, however, we could for all the world convince ourselves otherwise. Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, notes how the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas were comprised of full hours of uninterrupted discourse, each orator allowing the other to build his argument fully and thoughtfully before responding. Compare that to our modern spectacle of political “debates” in which our national leaders are given forty-five seconds to blurt out some farce of a well-reasoned position, and during which they are repeatedly interrupted and insulted by their opponents. On its own, this is sad enough. When compared to the great orations of the past, it is truly appalling.

As Charlotte Mason says, “Thought breeds thought; children familiar with great thoughts take as naturally to thinking for themselves as the well-nourished body takes to growing; and we must bear in mind that growth, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is the sole end of education.” The converse, of course, is also true: drivel breeds drivel; mediocrity breeds mediocrity. If we inundate our children with nothing more than distractions and trivialities, it is predictable what the “growth” of such children will be.

If, on the other hand, we crave understanding and wisdom; if we want to see farther and live fuller; if we aspire to raise ethical and moral children - if we want any of these things, then we must look to the great works to understand who we are and where we’ve come from. It is only by doing so that we or our children can get anywhere truly worth going.