Reading to the Rescue: Roosevelt Montás’s “Rescuing Socrates”

Roosevelt Montás, Rescuing Socrates.  How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.  Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2021.

I am tempted to say that we live in a golden age—if not of liberal education, then of books about liberal education.  I have had the honor and pleasure of reviewing a couple of these books and turn now to a third, Roosevelt Montás’ quite engaging Rescuing Socrates, whose subtitle—How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation—cries out to those of us who have been attempting, in C.S. Lewis’s telling phrase, to “irrigate the deserts” in undergraduate liberal arts classrooms over the past few decades.

Montás, whose entire life in higher education has been spent in and around Columbia University’s relatively traditional and “Great Books”-oriented core curriculum, offers us a winsome account of how that experience has helped make him who he is.  The story is compelling and the result—Roosevelt Montás, the man and educator, who I have encountered in a number of professional settings—is impressive.

I’m sure I’m not the only professor who almost swoons when I hear that a book I like to assign has changed a student’s life.  And I’m not the only one on the lookout for arguments that the books we assign “matter for a new generation.”  There is, I think, a ready audience for Montás’ argument, but if it’s only among aging professors like me, then it might seem to be more of a lament than an inspirational rallying cry.

The core (pardon the expression) of the book consists of four chapters, each devoted to a single author—St. Augustine, Plato, Freud, and Gandhi.  Montás tells us that he “weave[s] together three strands: a discussion of the work of each author, a meditation on how each has helped me to make sense of my own life, and a critique of the practice of liberal education in the contemporary university.”  Rather than discuss how he proceeds in each chapter, I’ll focus on his treatment of Augustine, which also offers us the story of his first encounter with university life as a young, poor recent immigrant from the Dominican Republic.

Indeed, this chapter foregrounds many of the issues that are central to current debates about the place of liberal education and so-called “great books” in American higher education.  We are frequently told, on the one hand, that liberal education is a luxury for the few, and hence out of place in a democracy, which should be all about offering opportunity—i.e., training for access to the contemporary workplace—for the many.  We are also told, on the other hand, that traditional liberal arts curricula—of which Columbia University’s is an outstanding example—have little or nothing to say to contemporary students.  If they can’t see themselves in what they’re reading, if it isn’t “relatable,” they’re unmoved, indeed alienated from the very enterprise into which we’re trying to induct them.  Liberal education is under pressure from “neo-liberal” proponents of the marketplace and from those for whom identity matters above all else.

Montás is “tempt[ed] to frame” his early experience in a summer bridge program for low income, at-risk students “in terms of racism, elitism, and historical exclusion.”  “But,” he continues, “it’s not that straightforward.”  The leaders of the program were people like him and his fellow students, and were “our strongest advocates and supporters.”  They sought to prepare their students for Columbia, rather than seeking to adjust the university to accommodate them.  The program “gave me the tools I sorely needed, but it also drove home my outsider status.”  If this doesn’t capture the challenge facing anyone who seeks to reach and teach a cohort of first generation college students, especially students of color, I don’t know what does.

Here’s how Montás defends the enterprise to which he has devoted his professional life:

We do minority students an unconscionable disservice when we steer them away from the traditional liberal arts curriculum….  We condescend to them when we assume that only works in which they find their ethnic or cultural identities affirmed can really illuminate their human experience.  Contemporary life… is no less saturated with the concepts, traditions, institutions, and norms whose historical development is charted in the Core Curriculum than it was in the early 1990s, or in the early 1900s.  Today, too, and for all students, a Core education serves a leveling function, sharpening their historical awareness of how the world has come to be what it is, giving them a shared vocabulary with which to describe and act upon it, and equipping them to communicate with others who bring different backgrounds and perspectives to the conversation.

The effect of this education, he says elsewhere, is to make students like himself “indistinguishable from the rest of the student body in academic sophistication.”  He clearly regards this as largely a good thing, as do I, but I can imagine many others who would prefer to emphasize and celebrate difference, or critically to deconstruct, rather than to cultivate a common ground, especially if that ground is “western” and “male,” to choose just a couple of the adjectives often deployed in criticism.

Montás can be said to offer two sorts of responses to this all too common line of criticism.  One can be found in his measured celebration of his life in America:

I count the chance of becoming an American as among the greatest fortunes of my life.  I doubt that there is any place on earth my mother could have taken me where I could construct a life as rich and broad as I have here….  I cannot take lightly the opportunity Mom created for me of taking part in the collective self-governance of the most powerful nation in the world….  Never mind the failures of that nation to live up to [its] high ideals….  The idea of America calls upon me to hold the nation accountable to those founding ideals, to denounce its failings to achieve then, and to struggle with all my might for their realization.

Two things are noteworthy here.  First, appreciating American ideals does not require or imply uncritically celebrating them.  And finding that the U.S. falls short of its ideals does not require or imply a thoroughgoing rejection of the country or its principles.  Hard as it may seem to some, one can study racism in U.S. history without (depending on your side of the debate) either rejecting or being disloyal to the country and its principles.  Second, what America’s imperfect attempt to instantiate its ideals makes possible is the “construction” of a “rich and broad” life, understood not just in material terms but also in the flourishing of our individuality.

This line of argument is connected to another that Montás makes, with respect to reading St. Augustine and others like him:

Reading Augustine and other ancients…is a sort of archaeological exercise.  Much of what seems strange and remote has…a genealogical relationship to how we understand the world today.  Spending time with these ideas and perspectives deepens our understanding of the contemporary world by revealing how what we think today emerges from and is shaped by discarded foundations.  Ancient articles of faith, for instance…, may strike us as simplistic and misguided, at odds with our own perceptions and certainties.  Yet they often contain deep human truths, even if clothed in language we no longer understand or grounded on metaphysical assumptions we no longer share.  But like the archaeologist…, we can recover some of the ancient understandings and use them to enrich and add texture to contemporary knowledge.  Such an exercise has the salutary effect of sowing a little doubt in our own certainties, reminding us that we, too, are historically circumscribed.

I am inclined to take this argument—in its most basic form, an appeal to cultural literacy—a couple of steps further.  This kind of archaeology is not just a matter of establishing either progress, as the past is aufgehoben in our present, or mere difference, in the recognition of varying historical circumscriptions.  It can also consist, as Montás’ later quotation of a famous passage from Leo Strauss suggests, in a conversation across the ages, a dialogue that we construct out of monologues.  The truths and possibilities evident in the different positions are potentially always true and always possible.  The archaeology of which Montás speaks is not merely antiquarian, and it serves self-knowledge not just by showing us our roots, which are practically inaccessible or unrecoverable, but by uncovering forgotten or half-forgotten alternatives, which can be realized in new ways in our time.  Approaching the “great books” this way opens up the prospect of self-criticism, not just a form of ancestor worship.

Montás’ form of liberal education thus provides access not only to our contemporary conversation, as he rightly insists, but also to a collection of permanent human possibilities.  It is democratic not just because it empowers everyone to take a seat at our contemporary table, but because it offers everyone the opportunity to ask and answer questions for themselves.

In plumbing the depths of his own psyche, Augustine gave me a language with which to approach my own interiority; he gave me a model and a set of questions with which to explore the emotional wilderness, full of doubt and confusion, that was my own coming-to-adulthood, in America, in New York City, at Columbia.

Everyone has a self, or, if you please, a soul.  Understanding one’s self is not, or should not be, a luxury, available only to the privileged few, but is rather the sine qua non of our humanity.  We are not merely participants in a post-industrial division of labor, identified only by the roles we have been trained to play in it, and deriving our meaning only from our work.  That much the proponents of identity have right.  But they wrongly assume that we are only, or are limited by, the visible markers whose intersections they choose to emphasize.  Indeed, Montás explicitly and (sad to have to say) courageously rejects this view:

When I arrived at Columbia, I didn’t know that I registered to those around me as a member of an oppressed minority who was socially disadvantaged….  I had all these aspects of identity foisted on me before I knew what they were….

I quickly came to resent expectations about who I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to like, what political views I was supposed to hold, what student groups I was supposed to join, what classes and topics I was supposed to be interested in, what Identity I was supposed to need affirmed.  It was at Columbia, coming subtly from faculty and administrators and overtly from my peers of color, that I first became aware of being treated on the basis of other people’s idea of what my skin color and my ethnicity meant.

What Montás poses against the contemporary categories of identity politics is not mere subjectivity or self-definition, though he is not averse to terms like integrity and authenticity, but also the inquiry into the good, as articulated by Plato’s Socrates.  That one begins this inquiry from a particular standpoint, i.e., from one’s own circumstances, does not make it irreducibly and ineluctably individual, unique to oneself and thus idiosyncratic.  This particular point of departure is also not limiting in another respect: where we go is not determined by where we start.  What Montás opposes to the contemporary categories of identity is not individual particularity, but a common enterprise that transcends the typical categories of identity politics.

I have said enough, I think, to persuade my readers that Montás’ arguments are worth engaging, that the book deserves to be read and discussed widely.  I conclude with three questions or observations whose full treatment would make this already long review sprawl even further.

The first has to do with the complicated character of Montás’ conviction that liberal education is for everyone.  He seems to me to be a quite extraordinary human being, which makes me hesitate to extend his experience to the new generation of students we’re all facing in the classroom.  He tells us that he had a deep and thoughtful religious background that made St. Augustine accessible to him in a way that wasn’t available to many of his peers.  I find this true of some of my students, and more likely for my Black and Latino/a students than for others.  He also tells us that he encountered and came to love Plato in high school.  I have a very few students like that.  I suspect that a vanishingly small proportion of our students come to us with the background that set Montás’ heart and mind on fire.  We—or someone—can expand on programs like the one he describes in which high school students are offered the opportunity to encounter great books seriously.  But such programs are in so many ways countercultural that it is certainly possible to argue that the “democratic” promise central to his argument will be fulfilled only for a few.  In theory, Montás’ program is democratic; in practice, it is “aristocratic.”

Second, Montás describes liberal education is both individual and communal terms: it serves the purpose of self-discovery and of participation in self-government.  The tension between “human being” and “citizen” is central to classical political thought, “resolved” only in the paradox of the philosopher-king, who has to be forced to rule by those who have no interest in that kind of rule.  Montás tends to elide the difference between the two goals he depicts, emphasizing, for example, the “civic” dimension of Socrates’ rhetorical self-description in the Apology and not fully appreciating the dramatic context of his presentation of a social contract to his unphilosophic and conventional friend Crito in the Crito.  In the chapter devoted to Gandhi, this elision is almost complete, with no apparent distinction between the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of justice.  I do not deny that Montás’ position is plausible, but it certainly is worth considering the alternative.  In addition, I fear that emphasizing the “ethical” or justice-oriented aspect of liberal education runs the risk of short-circuiting the challenge to our students’ righteous and sometimes self-righteous convictions that they already know what justice is.  How to use the moral lens to offer access to the central issues in a liberal education is a question of some delicacy.  To my mind, it requires laying some stress on the difference between self-knowledge and conventional morality or civic-spiritedness.

My final observation takes as its point of departure Louis Menand’s ultimately rather dismissive review of Montás’ book in The New Yorker.  Among other things, Menand celebrates the role of disciplinary expertise and deprecates any moral dimension that might be integral to a liberal education, however complicated and nuanced that integration might have to be.  For Menand, “’liberal’ just means free and disinterested”; it has no connection with self-knowledge or self-government, with becoming a genuine or authentic self, self-consciously free from the external categories and constraints imposed upon one by time, place, culture, or ideology.  Menand’s liberality is the liberality of rationalist scientific expertise, an expertise purchased at the expense of any sort of synoptic or architectonic vision.  Experts should prevail in their area of expertise, and we can only hope—without, I might say, any rational basis—that the rule of experts will provide any sort of coherence, other than that provided by the commitments of those who happen to hold power.  That this is a profoundly undemocratic vision goes without saying: specialized knowledge rules without consent, and rules coherently only on the basis of the arbitrary will of those in power.  By contrast, as I’ve already noted, Montás offers a conception of an education that encourages synopsis and discerning the larger framework into which various sorts of specialized knowledge might fit.  While by default, Menand leaves us at the mercy either of the marketplace or the machinations of the mandarins and their patrons, Montás invites to enter into the hard work of becoming human beings and citizens, engaged in a common enterprise.

I began this review by saying that we live in a golden age, at least of books about liberal education.  The prospect of a hanging is said to concentrate the mind wonderfully.  The dominant voices of the age attack liberal education in the name of power and profit, on the one side, and power and identity on the other.  The latter frequently present themselves as the only possible response to the former.  And those who are frightened by the self-righteous moralistic indignation of the latter often seem to regard the former as the sole counterweight or antidote.  Montás quite rightly suggests that there is a third way that frees us to pursue self-understanding, against those who would define us either by our professional roles in a division of labor or by the ultimately reductive categories of race, class, gender identity, and sexual orientation.  That is more than enough reason to read his book.

Print