Last week I wrote about the standpoint, the place from which you look out on the world. I described my own standpoint, growing up in the American south, the outskirts of London and a New England boarding school (or, as I once described it to a group of students in a religious school in Pakistan, an Anglican madrassah). I compared that personal standpoint (που στω in Greek, pronounced ‘pooh stow’) to the view from Lycabettus in Athens from which in the time of Socrates you could look down and get a clear picture of how your world worked. A couple of days after the post was up, I was sitting with a group of former students who, between efforts to persuade me to help them drain a series of margarita pitchers that somehow kept appearing at our table, kept asking me to provide a reading list.
At the time I resisted; I don’t want to contribute to the idea that there are 20 or even 50 Great Books that you can read to unlock the secrets of the world. Building an understanding of the world is a lifetime project, and while it can never be completed, it involves reading hundreds and thousands of books, hundreds and thousands more hours of reflections, travel and encounters with people all over, and the experience that comes from decades of pitting your convictions and character against the ways of the world — to say nothing of the knowledge and wisdom that comes from a life lived among people you love and in the presence of God. This is not only a long and hard (though rich and rewarding) journey; it’s one without end or final resting place. It’s been said that all political careers end in failure; that is true as well of intellectual ones.
I fully expect to lay down my bow of burning gold, and my flaming arrows of desire with my work unfinished, my world picture incomplete, my mind still wrestling in the mists of uncertainty and doubt with half-perceived conjectures, still feeling that there are new and important truths just around the next bend in the road. I have come a long way on this road and seen many wonderful things, but there is much, much more to see and to do. There will always be more; the world changes as we learn it, and these days it changes faster than it can be known. The world will exhaust my capacity for wonder before I exhaust the wonders of the world.
Many of the students and young people with whom I speak seem to hope that their experience of being overwhelmed by the incomprehensible variety and riches of the world’s intellectual and cultural life is a consequence of youth and inexperience. Some hope that a reading list, diligently followed, will put an end to that sense of swimming through chaos. That is exactly what it will not do; if it creates the illusion that this world is easily navigated and understood, the reading list has done a disservice.
But as I thought about it more, I came to see the question from another angle. Last week’s post looked at the personal experiences that together shaped my που στω; what about the literary encounters that shaped me in similar ways? Cannot a reading list provide a kind of literary που στω; not an escape from the crowded chaos of the marketplace of ideas, but as a vantage point for better observing it? And it is certainly true that in my reading life there is the equivalent of the procession of experiences from South Carolina to London to Massachusetts that prepared me for encounters with many other places and cultures.
The cultural and political world that I learned to see from my own Lycabettus does have its own literary and cultural foundations. The Anglophone modernity that I know best is the combination of influences stemming in the first place from the three ancient Mediterranean cultures that produced (among other cultures) the Christian West, there is the Christian West itself as it developed from 500 to 1500 AD, and there are the influences of the renaissance and the reformation that both renewed and split that West. Next come the three Enlightenments (French, Anglo-American and German) that still compete to define the West today. Finally there is the literature of the two dominant features of recent times: the Great Acceleration and the Great Encounter.
The Great Acceleration is the dramatic increase in the rate of change in human society during the last 500 years. While the roots of this process go back before the dawn of recorded history, the acceleration of humanity’s economic and technological progress (if indeed that is the right word) is a driving force of our world today. It is the river in which we live, move and have our being; come of its consequences are obvious and plain while some are subtle, hard to trace but perhaps more important than the obvious ones.
The other story, the Great Encounter, is the story of the last five centuries of sometimes violent and abusive, sometimes enriching and profound encounters between the West (as shaped by these traditions) and the other cultures and visions rooted in other parts of the world. That story includes the rise of the English-speaking global systems of the last three hundred years as one of its principal features and is of course both a consequence and a causal factor in the Great Acceleration; altogether the Great Encounter is the most complex of all the processes at work, and ideally the reader of that literature could bring to it a profound grounding in the life and literature of all of the world’s great cultures and histories. It is the hardest of them all to understand; besides being stunningly complex, it is far from finished. Yet understanding it or preparing others to understand it must rank very high among the priorities who anyone with aspirations to play an important role in the intellectual life of our age. From the standpoint of power politics, cultural dynamics or humanity’s quest for self-understanding and self-realization, the Great Encounter in the light of the Great Acceleration is the topic that we most need to understand — and it is the topic the understanding of which is the most elusive, the most difficult, the most impossible of all.
Since nobody really comprehends the vast flow of world history, and especially not as the many histories of many peoples mingle together as the current accelerates so dramatically in these latest times, it’s not possible to provide a handy-dandy reading list that untangles the mysteries of our time. I certainly can’t provide a reading list that will give readers more than a flashlight whose narrow beam illuminates by turns different parts of the rushing torrent around us. In its customarily inscrutable and ironical way, Providence has chosen to place the best educated and best equipped generations in world history in the midst of the most complex and incomprehensible circumstances ever seen. In many ways we know much more about how both the natural and the human worlds work than our ancestors did, yet somehow we are no more the masters of our times and fates than they ever were.
As I look at the fragile raft on which humanity sits, rushing down a raging river on an accelerating course through a stormy night toward some end we cannot see and perhaps could not comprehend if we did, I don’t know of any books that provide a full and comprehensive guide to all the many dimensions of our situation. There are some, like the Bible, that in my view provide great spiritual clarity and indispensable guidance for the soul, while pointing to mysteries as complex as and related to the mysteries of the human condition in our time. There are others, like The Communist Manifesto, that while fallible as guides to our future must be understood and interrogated to analyze how we reached our present position. There are others, like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that may have been superseded from a scholarly point of view but that still serve as vital examples of how to think and write about the past. There are some, like Winston Churchill’s magisterial Life of Marlborough that show us the mind of one great historical actor learning and considering the lessons that flow from the career of a predecessor. And there are some like Lord Macaulay’s History of England that educate us even in the errors that they make. Some, like Thomas Carlyle’s glorious History of the French Revolution speak to us directly about both the spiritual and the historical roots of our current condition; some like Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago trace the outlines of the great malignant evils of the last century; others, like Simon Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, the Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, and Ian Kerstow’s life of Adolf Hitler show us the faces of some of the monsters who have risen to power among us.
Some of these books I’ve blogged about already. I will get to others. And I’ve decided that over time on this blog I will put together a reading list that I think can help others at least reach the same point of perplexity and confusion that I have floundered to so far. Some will be novels, some poems, some works of history. There will be philosophy, biography and theology on the list. I’ll try to add essays on the context that makes these books particularly worthwhile as well as suggestions on how to enjoy them.
But the goal of a reading list, like the goal of a teacher, is less to communicate information than to communicate excitement. If you try one of the the books I’ve suggested and it sends you off after others by the same author or on similar topics, so that you end up reading no more books on my list but develop one of your own, I would count that as a success. And I hope that readers will feel free to use the comment section to suggest other books, or to provide additional background and comments that give more color and perspective than I can.
The Mead tech crew is at work developing a special section that organizes the books by topic and period with links to the posts about them. Expect the reading list to grow slowly over time; I first read the Bible and William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich at a summer camp long ago and far away, and many fascinating books have come my way since. As I try to sort through the memories to think about which books have been the most successful at bringing me the sweetness and light that Jonathan Swift said are the reward of the best books (see The Battle of the Books for the reference), I’ll add to and revise the list.