Why I Was Never Invited to Great Books Camp

I was chuffed to read Molly Worthen's article in the New York Times about how she wants to start a great books camp for liberals. I sympathize acutely, having watched most of my grad school colleagues journey off to retreats to discuss great books with fellow young conservative/straussian/hayekian intellectuals. (They came back with such great gossip!) And I too wondered, why don't the non-conservatives throw their own book party? (And invite me!) Then eventually it dawned on me: they can't.

All great books camps are conservative (no matter what Yuval Levin says) because they are funded by people who think old books are important, even more important than new ones. This is an essentially conservative argument--studying the great books is a way to conserve certain ideas because you think they are important and perennial. If you are a progressive, even a progressive who is studying the history of political thought, you must acknowledge that new ideas are just as important, if not more so, than old stodgy ones. If they aren't, then what's the point of progress??

Cue a whole chorus of undergrads yelling, "so WHY do we still have to read Plato?!," a question I got more times than I can count. While a progressive can agree we should read Plato, he would also argue we should read everything else important, from Confucius to Rawls to Sayyid Qutb to Ta-Nehesi Coates to....infinity. Worthen includes Obama and MLK on her reading list, but I'm certain those additions would not satisfy. (Remember the controversy over the Trump syllabus? Sigh.)

So while the reading list for progressives could easily grow into the thousands and still not keep everyone happy, conservatives agree that the canon is really just a relatively short list of stuff written by dead white men. No liberal is going to sponsor a reading camp for that, unless they want to be hounded into oblivion. And it's too bad, because dead white men have written a ton of amazing stuff. Including, you know, all the foundational texts of liberal western democracy.

So while I sympathize with Worthen and also dream of starting a great books camp, until either she or I earn enough to pay for it ourselves I think we're going to be disappointed.

Relatedly: what is a person who is neither conservative nor progressive? Is that just a confused person?

Sunday Afternoon

In one of the more bizarre episodes of my life, a guy with an assault rifle walked into my favorite local pizza joint yesterday. The pizza joint in question has been the focus of crazy online conspiracy theories linked to the election. The man with the assault rifle went in to "investigate" whether the conspiracy theories were true. He fired one round before the cops arrived, and, thankfully, no one was hurt.

Josh and I happened to be in the area at the time. We saw cop cars really booking it up Connecticut Ave for over an hour and actually guessed what had happened. We had just been to this pizza place the day before. We had pizza and salad and beers, and remarked on how much more crowded it was than usual, surmising that the neighborhood had come out to support the restaurant in light of the online insanity. And the next day, somebody walked in with an assault rifle and fired.

I can't quite wrap my mind around this. Regular street crime is not something I worry about, probably because I've lived relatively closely with it my whole life. I can't excuse it, but I do understand something about the logic of it and what it feels like. But this is an adult man who, by his own admission, drove up from North Carolina with multiple weapons in his car to investigate rumors of a child sex trafficking ring run by a presidential candidate and her advisors out of the back of a neighborhood pizza restaurant. He walked into a restaurant full of children with an assault rifle because he believed this lie was the truth. This is simply beyond my comprehension. My first instinct is to make a joke out of it, it's so ridiculous.

But it's not funny. Whatever this man's individual issues, this happened because of a depth of ignorance that is terrifying. I don't see how there can be any antidote to it.