New Humanists

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In his comedy Clouds, Aristophanes turns Socrates into the arch-sophist of Athens: financially voracious, obsessed with verbal trickery, and preoccupied with irrelevant investigations. In most of the dialogues written by his student Plato, however, Socrates is not an arch-sophist, but the archenemy of the sophists: unmotivated by money, able to disarm their semantic wordplay, and concerned above all with living a virtuous life. 

That is what makes the Euthydemus dialogue so fascinating. In this Platonic dialogue, Socrates meets his friend Crito, and in an enthusiastic fluster, he tells Crito that the two of them simply must go become the students of the two sophists who are visiting Athens. In order to convince his skeptical friend, Socrates recounts his conversation with them, and the sometimes bizarre demonstration of their supposed wisdom. 

Dr. David Talcott, Fellow of Philosophy and Graduate Dean at New Saint Andrews College, joins Jonathan and Ryan to discuss the dialogue, and what it shows us about the role of education and philosophy in political life, and to draw some parallels with other Socratic dialogues.

Plato's Euthydemus: https://scaife.perseus.org/library/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0059.tlg021/

H.I. Marrou's A History of Education in Antiquity: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780299088149

New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/

Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.

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What's the matter with meritocracy? Shouldn't college acceptances and jobs and awards be distributed on the basis of merit? The alternative, some sort of quota system, seems unjust and intolerable. 

In his book, Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot makes a case against meritocracy. This is the subject of Chapter Two: "The Class and the Elite." While admitting that every "honest man is vexed" to see people who have obtained positions "for which neither their character nor their intellect qualified them," Eliot argues that the doctrine of meritocracy is a radical position. Far from being a conservative or even moderate outlook, true meritocracy requires a total transformation of society, in which family and cultural life must be re-engineered by committees of elites. 

Eliot distinguishes between the old concept of aristocracy and the new concept of elites, categories we tend to confuse. He argues for the necessity of an upper class to maintain manners and standards and taste, which he says is required for the perpetuation of great art and high culture.

T.S. Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture (in Christianity and Culture): https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780156177351

New Humanists episode on Chapter 1 of Notes Toward the Definition of Culture: https://newhumanists.buzzsprout.com/1791279/episodes/18764670-defining-culture-episode-cvii

Paul Fussell's Class: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780671792251

David Hicks's Norms & Nobility: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781538195352

New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/

Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.

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Pop culture. Cancel culture. Judeo-Christian culture. Everyone likes to talk about "culture," but what actually is it? One of the greatest writers of the 20th century, the poet and essayist T.S. Eliot, wrote a short book, Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, attempting to answer exactly that question. Written in the latter days of World War Two, as the Allied nations began to realize that Germany's surrender was imminent and that it was up to them to rebuild European culture, Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture was part of a broader anxiety among European and American elites about what the postwar world would look like. 

In Chapter One, Eliot proposes three necessary ingredients for the existence of high culture: the durability of social classes, regionalism, and the balance of unity and diversity in religion. He also gestures towards two possible definitions of culture: first, simply that which makes life living, and secondly, the incarnation of the religion of a people. Jonathan and Ryan discuss Chapter One, as well as related matters, such as California cuisine.

Alan Jacobs's The Year of Our Lord 1943: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780190864651

T.S. Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture (in Christianity and Culture): https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780156177351

Richard M. Gamble's The Great Tradition: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781935191568

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780060652920

Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780199538744

H.I. Marrou's A History of Education in Antiquity: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780299088149

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "Why I Am Now a Christian": https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/

Charles Taylor's A Secular Age: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780674986916

New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/

Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.

Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

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When the Loeb Classical Library was launched, the greatest language teacher of the age, W.H.D. Rouse, wrote an essay meant to promote the Loebs by extolling the magnificence of Greek literature and Latin literature. And boy did he. "Your mind cannot live without them. All the great intellectual impulses begin in Greece; the modern world only grows crops from the Greek seed." While Rouse admitted that his space was short, and so he had to "be dogmatic," this essay, "Machines or Mind?" is a worthy read, not least because of its response to the utilitarians who'd prefer we abandon the humanities and instead bend all of our time, effort, and resources to making more machines. One of Rouse's 21st century heirs, Senior Fellow of Classical Languages at New Saint Andrews College and founder of Picta Dicta, Timothy Griffith, joins the podcast to discuss the essay, Rouse's place in the tradition of humanist education, and whether the Aeneid can properly be called an epic.

W.H.D. Rouse's Machines or Mind?: https://antigonejournal.com/2024/11/machines-or-mind-loebs-rouse/

Picta Dicta: https://pictadicta.com/

W.H.D. Rouse's Latin on the Direct Method: https://scholalatina.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Rouse-Appleton-Latin-on-the-direct-method.pdf

C.S. Lewis's Preface to Paradise Lost: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780195003451

New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/

Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.

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Liberal education is for the man of leisure: Either a gentleman engaged in politics, or a philosopher engaged in contemplation. What role, then, can liberal learning have in a mass democracy? In the lecture "Liberal Education and Responsibility," the political theorist Leo Strauss defends his statement that "Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant. Liberal education is the necessary endavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society." Along the way, he also discusses religious education, the distinction between the gentleman and the philosopher, and the insufficiency of the great books movement. Wyoming Catholic College professor Pavlos Papadopoulos rejoins the podcast for another dive into Strauss.

Leo Strauss's Liberal Education and Responsibility: https://archive.org/details/LeoStraussOnLiberalEducation/Strauss-LiberalEducationResponsibility/

NH episode on Leo Strauss's What Is Liberal Education?: https://newhumanists.buzzsprout.com/1791279/episodes/18277048-big-bad-leo-strauss-feat-pavlos-papadopoulos-episode-ci

Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781451683202

Jonathan Swift's The Battle of the Books: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781507890530

Mark A. Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780802882042

Greg Lukianoff's and Jonathan Haidt's The Coddling of the American Mind: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780735224919

Pete Hegseth's and David Goodwin's Battle for the American Mind: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780063215054

Robert R. Reilly's The Closing of the Muslim Mind: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781610170024

Allan Bloom's translation of The Republic of Plato: https://amzn.to/49ZMPIs

Alexis De Tocqueville's Democracy in America (trans. Harvey Mansfield): https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780226805368

Cicero's Pro Archia Poeta: https://amzn.to/4buKd7W

C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780060652944

Josef Pieper's Leisure The Basis of Culture: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781586172565

New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/

Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.

Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com
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