Recently, I had a package to mail, so I went down to the UPS store on Mass Ave in Cambridge. (There’s more to this story, so bear with me for a moment.) On the way back, I passed one of those tiny houses on stilts where you can take free books, and hopefully replace them with some unwanted books of your own. Pawing through the usual discards, I found this extraordinary text called The Practical Cogitator: The Thinker’s Anthology. The editor, I learned, was a distinguished Boston lawyer named Charles P. Curtis (1891-1959), one of the Harvard men who invented its Society of Fellows. During the First World War, Curtis had served as a naval officer on a destroyer, and soon learned that the most basic military order is ‘hurry up; wait’. There was little he could do to alleviate the feeling of danger, but the endless boredom and stagnation of waiting was something that could be addressed. Curtis had spent his time on board ship reading Homer in the original ancient Greek, but what was needed for the sailors was a compact book printed in small type on thin paper that could fit in a military tunic, selections from writings that every educated person should have read. After World War One, Curtis got in touch with New York publisher Ferris Greenslet (1875-1959), the man who had persuaded Henry Adams (1838-1918) to publish his autobiography, one of the greatest works of American literature. Together Curtis and Greenslet spent twenty-five years culling the greatest works of human creativity, and finally made their choices. By the beginning of 1945, just in time for the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War, thirty thousand copies of The Practical Cogitator were taken into combat.
Wading today through the 692 pages of The Practical Cogitator, we get a good picture of what in 1945 an educated person was thought to be needing to read. That is to say, mostly the writings of DWEMs – Dead White European Men – although Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) does get a dozen or so lines. No people of color, not even the North African Saint Augustine. But more tellingly, almost the entire book is made up of selections from authors whose works are taught here at Brandeis at the north end of campus, in the Divisions of Humanities and Social Sciences.
To many of you Phi Beta Kappas and your justifiably proud parents, that might seem both paradoxical and hopelessly outdated. You all have read plaintive articles in the media about the slow and inevitable death of the Humanities, and the need for universities to respond to ‘market forces’ and to provide ‘task-based’ instruction so college graduates can immediately find lucrative employment. When I got my doctorate in history, my Aunt Esther looked at me with disgust and said, ‘with all the time you spent, you could have been a real doctor’. She had a point. STEM is king, discovering, building, making – doing the practical cogitating in the real world.
This is not a new topic. Back in 1956, the celebrated physicist and not-half-bad novelist C.P. Snow (1905-80) published an article in The New Statesman entitled ‘The Two Cultures’. Snow argued that Western society was increasingly split into two groups: ‘at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, who incidentally while no one was looking took to referring to themselves as “intellectuals” as though there were no others.’ At the other pole, Snow said, were the scientists, who in fact represented the wave of the future, and scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences needed to wake up and smell the formaldehyde to realize that their 2300-year reign over Western culture had come to an end. He goes on:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
Needless to say, the Humanists were having none of it, remembering Winston Churchill’s dictum that the role of the scientist is ‘to be on tap but not on top’. Their champion was F.R. Leavis (1895-1978), the cantankerous Cambridge literary scholar. His reply appeared only six years after Snow’s article, it being so personally vicious that Leavis insisted on first securing a written agreement that he would not be sued for slander, libel and general nastiness. Leavis argued that the study of literature – particularly English literature, of course – was the most vital part of a university education, and the only basis for a life worth living.
Did anyone win the ‘Two Cultures’ debate? What should you know to be considered educated? When I was in my first year at Oxford, my proud father took me to meet his boss, an elegant Class of 1917 Harvard-educated lawyer and banker, a certain Mr. Maxwell Brandwen (1896-1986) – also a Lithuanian Jew like my father, as it happens. When asked, I told Mr. Brandwen that I was studying history. ‘Ah,’ he inquired, ‘what do you think of Professor Lewis Namier’s interpretation?’ Well, I had never heard of Lewis Namier, whose theories went out of fashion soon after Mr. Brandwen had learned about them in about 1913. I’ve since become a kind of Namier expert, and make sure to say a few words about him in my lectures, so as to spare my students the humiliation I felt more than half a century ago. Until the day my father passed away, whenever he was losing an argument with me, he would narrow his eyes and say, ‘I have two words for you – Lewis Namier.’ Parents have memories like elephants – don’t forget that!
There once was a famous Oxford classicist in the nineteenth century named Benjamin Jowett (1817-93), whose translations of Plato and Thucydides were standard in their day. His students wrote a little poem about their teacher that went like this:
Here come I, my name is Jowett.
All there is to know I know it.
I am the Master of this College,
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge!
Until the end of the nineteenth century, science was not hived off behind an iron wall of disciplinary protection. You could still get grants for doing experiments in your living room on weekends and publishing the results in serious scientific journals. Humanities, especially the study of Greek and Latin literature, was still thought to be the height of educational prowess. As late as the Second World War, when Churchill’s scientific advisor Frederick Lindemann (1886-1957) complained about English scientific ignorance, the wife of the warden of All Souls College replied, ‘Don’t worry professor, anyone who has an A in Classics could get up science in two weeks.’ Even in my day, in the mid-1970s, the students who finished top in Greek and Latin were the ones sought after by banks, insurance companies and investment houses, on the assumption that economics would be a cinch for anyone who had mastered the classical body of knowledge.
So do you feel educated now after four years at Brandeis? What does an educated person really need to know? Even without knowing about Lewis Namier, when my aforementioned father went to fight in the Second World War, he wasn’t given a copy of The Practical Cogitator, which had not yet been published. Instead, he got Readings from the Holy Scriptures Prepared for the Use of Jewish Personnel of the Army of the United States. It came with a message from President Roosevelt dated March 6, 1941, and I see that my father wrote his name and serial number on the opposite page, although what he would have done with a Bible in English is beyond me. I suppose that it was thought at that moment in time that a Bible was really all a person needed to have read to be called educated.
I had wanted to conclude my remarks by suggesting that there were probably some practical things that you didn’t learn at Brandeis that you should have done. My original plan was to bring a fitted sheet on stage and fold it, which is one of the hardest things many people do in their lives … but after numerous YouTubes, I had to admit defeat. I then tried to learn to moonwalk in the hope of impressing you, but I keep falling over. I can tie a bow tie from scratch, though, but we don’t have a mirror here or the time to show you. Those actions don’t involve a lot of cogitating, but I hope that even you Phi Beta Kappa braniacs did learn some practical things while being educated … like listening to other viewpoints, respecting the people with whom you interact, and what Brandeis likes to call social justice.
As for me, having failed at folding a fitted sheet or learning to moonwalk, or any other really practical skills in my time at Brandeis, all I can do now is to leave you with the mildly challenging practical split-fingered feat of the Vulcan Cohanim blessing: ‘live long and prosper’.
