We can locate the origins of this tradition in some fragments of Cicero, who remarked that the purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present…
It is in the spirit of this tradition – that is, education as a defense against culture – that I wish to speak.
-Neil Postman, Conscientious Objections, p. 22
This isn’t much different from what C.S. Lewis said. I’ve written about that HERE. In short,
Lewis argues that a familiarity with the literature of the past provides readers with a standpoint which gives them critical distance from their own era. Thus, it allows them to see ‘the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective.’ The reading of old books enables us to avoid becoming passive captives of the Spirit of the Age by keeping ‘the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds’ (Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis – A Life, p. 187).
Another point I’ve made in the past has to do with McLuhan’s ‘rear-view mirror’ analogy. It is pertinent. Some look at things like old books, or old methods of education, and say such things are like looking and living in the rear view mirror. We’ve left those things behind, why look back? But this is not what looking in a rear-view mirror actually shows us.
Looking into a rear-view mirror doesn’t show us the past – it shows us the present and the future. It shows us what is behind us now and what is coming at us in the future. It gives us perspective on where we are, what is nipping at our heels, and what is preparing to overtake us and pass us by.
This is the defense against culture that education should provide; and it starts with reading old books. Someone says, ‘they’re not relevant; you’re living in the past.’ Not quite. We’re actually going to old perspectives so that we can get a new one, or at least a foreign one. We’re being oh so totally pluralistic and democratic – letting dead people speak to us (they are, after all, the most maligned group these days).
Our culture will not defend us from itself. Future cultures cannot defend us from the present one. The past is the only place, so to speak, of finding such a defense – a defense against the tyranny of the present.
Have people actually said that?
What idiots. The reason we should reach for old books is the same reason we should reach for foreign books. Our individual experience is limited. We need to expand it by hearing what other people have to say, whether it’s from 500 years ago or 5000000 miles away.
How I love Neil Postman.
In Technopoly, Postman made the point that our culture can’t really sustain any reasonable purpose for reading old books. The old scientific ones, our culture says, are not true. And the old fiction ones…well…what good is fiction? We don’t use fiction to portray the world now. We use the social sciences. The only thing that is really saving old books at all these days is that people like to be entertained, and some of those books remain entertaining.
And I totally agree with your point about needing to expand ourselves by seeing other viewpoints, or seeing through the eyes of others in the stories we read.