I just got back from a week at the ISI Honors Program in Annapolis. The real reason I had the lame post on Hilton Head was to make that trip tax deductible. The reason I’m saying a few things about the ISI week is to dispel the impression that I’m against liberal education and all that.
It really is true that what makes the ISI program a “whole” is devotion to such education as a way (not, in most cases, the way) to find out who we are and what we’re supposed to do. That’s not to say there was all that much agreement on what liberal education is.
There was a student from Thomas Aquinas in California who really knew her Thomas and was a very tough and pious Catholic. She was all about chastity and charity, in addition to truth, beauty, the rule of reason over desire, and the good. She described her future in terms of having a baby under one arm and the SUMMA under another.
There was another from Claremont-McKenna who was all about the self-evident natural rights of the Declaration as perfectly articulated by Lincoln as the true foundation of the American life and somehow the secret to the purpose of human life itself. This young man, although an insomniac and a bit of a hypochondriac, really was in love, as was the TA woman, with the books that gave weight and or deep orientation to his life. He was, probably, overly suspicious of my heretical tendencies, but he knew how to talk thoughtfully (and with very definite opinions) about every issue under the sun. He was as un-Christian (Christianity had had its chance to rule and screwed up) as the young lady (and, of course, many of the students) was deeply Christian. (There were also three orthodox Jewish students, and one of the most charming and erudite professors was modern orthodox.)
Although the most strange and wonderful thing about Annapolis is St. Johns College, there was nobody from St. Johns among the 50 students present (and there were a good number from the Ivies, Notre Dame, Northwestern, Stanford etc.). There was a professor who had graduated from St. Johns, but that college was clearly one of many formative experiences in his life. Visiting the bookstore at St. Johns is, as the young people said a long time ago, a trip. Maybe the most impressive thing is the effort in various translations of Plato and Aristotle to uproot the English equivalent of Greek words from any sendimentation or distortion from Christian/Latin culture or experience. Those translations are very hard to read, and they can only be appreciated by those, such as St. Johns students (eventually), who know Greek.
Now the students at ISI connect the “Great Books” to a living culture or religious community—Jewish, Catholic, Protestant (of various kinds), or America understood civic religiously. The approach of St. Johns is more radical or detached from any form of contemporary culture, and St. Johns itself becomes its own apolitical and a-religious community of a kind.
There were also a few ISI students with definite libertarian tendencies, who were more about personal responsibility than cultural immersion. They weren’t the silly, entrepreneur-as-god, pseudo-Nietzschean, Randian kind of libertarian. Nor were they the nihilistic, shamelessly materialistic kind. The stories of their admirable lives reminded me of the limits of anti-techno/modern cultural conservatism. These are the best times ever to be an ambitious and self-reliant African-American woman, blind person, or person with type-one diabetes.
This conference was not at all conservative in a political sense. President Obama was rarely mentioned, and what the professors shared in common wasn’t some project for political reform or restoration we can believe in. Dr. Pat Deneen and I didn’t discuss peak oil or the outlawing of air conditioning or even totally organic family farming. This conference was, in fact, a vacation from politics in the ordinary sense.
I got more to say, and I will soon enough.
