by Mercy Otis Warren II
Like most Gen-X’ers who grew up in the lull between the massive “Boomer” baby boom generation (most who hadn’t yet settled down to have kids) and the “second baby boom” that we now call Millennials, we lived in a time when our Great Generation grandparents relayed first-hand witness accounts of living through World War II, with the occasional great-grandparent relaying tales of surviving the Great Depression. Remnants of the prosperity from the 1950’s and 1960’s still permeated popular culture and buffered the ill effects of drugged-out hippies, the Iranian hostage crisis, economic stagflation and OPEC-engineered gasoline shortages. History was still considered important, reruns of war movies filled the television, and family historical sagas dominated the best-seller lists (The Bastard-Kent Family Chronicles, North and South, Lonesome Dove, etc.). Christianity still permeated every aspect of life. Even if your family didn’t attend church, teachers still quoted the bible and, failing that, Charlton Heston brought ‘The Ten Commandments’ or ‘Ben Hur’ or ‘The Red Robe’ into your living room in glorious technocolor.
My most precious possession – which I still own today – was a complete set of Collier’s Junior Classics handed down from my grandmother. At a young age, I devoured simplified versions of Homer’s epics, along with myths, legends, and poetry about European history, from ancient Greece to American folk tales. There were only three channels of television back then (five if you include PBS and the fuzzy reception on one of the UHF channels), no internet, and nobody had the time or money to run around to the countless “activities” which seem to consume kid’s time today. If you didn’t want to die of boredom, most children read.
Perhaps that’s why it’s so distressing to watch “woke” professors and communist anarchists dismantle our Western heritage. How many have actually read Socrates or Plato? Sailed into a Homerian epic? Or contemplated the universe along with Galileo or Sir Isaac Newton? Have you ever wondered how we got here, or why we are the way we are, like Darwin did? Or perhaps you’ve contemplated independence along with Benjamin Franklin? How many people have laughed at comedies and farces written by Shakespeare, Aristophanes or Moliere? Or watched in horror at timeless warnings about human nature such as Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Shakespeare’s King Lear?
So before some “woke” college professor convinces you to erase all of Western culture as “racist,” shouldn’t you at least learn what the left wishes so to erase? Perhaps it’s time to read it all yourself? Make your own decision as to whether these classics are still relevant? Or whether, as they claim, logic, rhetoric and reason are now irrelevant, that only feelings matter, that math is a remnant of “privilege”, facts are racist, and the scientific method should give way to the woke?
Therefore, over the next year, I’ve set myself the goal of reading all 50 books in the Harvard Classics 5-foot shelf of books.
[*Update: it’s been taking me, on average, 2 weeks per book, so that will be “over the next two years”*]
Why this collection, and not another? First of all, its published by Collier Press, the same company which published my beloved Junior Classics. Second, the scholar who put the collection together, Charles W. Eliot, did so with the intention of enabling an ordinary person to give themselves the equivalent of a classical liberal education (i.e., a modern bachelor’s degree). Third, the books are out-of-copyright, so if you don’t wish to purchase physical copies, digital editions can be obtained at Project Gutenberg or Archive.org for free. Lastly, most of the books, poetry, drama and essays which make up these great books are available for free as audiobooks at LibriVox.org or through your local public library. Many of the plays have movies made out of them, or been acted out by amateur theater companies and posted to Youtube, so even if you’re too busy to read, you can watch them or listen in your car.
I therefore challenge you, my fellow aficionado of Western culture, to read along at your own pace, however long that shall take. I’ve set a goal of reading one book per week, over the next 52 weeks, and will post a summary of where I obtained free versions of the books, whether I was able to access free audio versions, and any other supplemental materials, such as videos, plays, movies, songs, lectures, or whatever other pretty shiny things I could find to bring our heritage back to life.
Will you read along with me? Will you take the challenge? Are you willing to educate yourself with ‘forbidden knowledge’ about the civilization which created astronomy, philosophy and space travel, before a raving mob tears it all down?
If you can’t juggle a book-a-week, don’t sweat it! Dr. Eliot urged his readers to commit to reading a minimum of 15-minutes per day. What’s important is you learn what you’re about to lose, at your own pace, however long it shall take.
Hey … I read all 1200 pages of Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations,” unabridged version, by keeping a copy next to the toilet and reading in 3-minute intervals every time I sat down to take a shit. Took about a year of “shitty reading.” Because I’ve actually read it, all of it, every single page, I can tell you with great confidence that the economists who blather about ‘a rising tide lifts all ships’ to justify their quantitative easing and trickle-down economics nonsense never actually read the theories they claim to cite!!!
Each week (or so) I will add to this list until I’ve gotten through all 50 books (plus the introduction):