You should perhaps feel sorry for Mortimer Adler. In 1952 Dwight Macdonald skewered him for productizing western thought. I think that all he (Mortimer) really wanted to do was make interesting connections and share them. His culture didn't offer many avenues for that kind of thing, no computers, no easily manipulated media. So, well-bound dead trees, books, sponsored by corporate philanthropy and privately endowed academia were what he was left with to achieve his goal of offering culture and connections broadly across the American mindscape.
Mortimer may have seemed to be a bit of a snob, a bit insufferable in public and private life. Certainly the Syntopicon, his device for hashing the meaning from the Great Books, was an impressive effort grounded in the certainty that he could be trusted to lead an assessment and to organize the strands of meaning running through the accumulated artistic and intellectual product of western culture since the days of Homer.
Reducing the works of western man to one hundred pounds of books on a five foot shelf was never easy. When Mortimer was eight years old, President Eliot at Harvard released his fifty volume Harvard Classics collection. He had, I suppose, the good sense to release the work with a brief introduction and no unseemly interpretive effort. It was generally agreed that these were some of the really good works of some of the pretty important thinkers, but since Eliot excluded Aristotle and Aquinas it was quite clear that he was not pretending that his five feet of freshly printed pages were anything like a complete survey of western thought.
The same can not be said for Mortimer, who -- in those days before Goofle and content management systems gave us complete control and perfect understanding of all the collected works of humanity and much of the extraterrestrial bullshit as well -- was merely trying to do the best he could to help the common man understand that even Joe McCarthy would one day go away. MacDonald's criticisms of Adler are amusing and pointed but ultimately petty and mean, in a snarky pre-gawkerette kind of way.
Dr. Weinberger today quotes the Macdonald piece without comment, including this bit,
...In its massiveness, its technological elaboration, its fetish of The Great, and its attempt to treat systematically and with scientific precision materials for which the method is inappropriate, Dr. Adler's set of books is a typical expression of the religion of culture that appeals to the American academic mentality.
The Macdonald piece is worth reading. It gave me insights into pre Wikipedia encyclopedia salesmanship for example. But one is left with the impulse to dismiss Adler because he is not committed to the intolerable and unfathomable complexity of it all, but rather willing to work to reduce the richness of western urban culture to an understandable body of work (all trivial on the face of it now that we have been blessed with Goofle... all hail Larry and Sergey).
Canons can entomb. Mort the moribund mortar. C'est la vie.
Posted by: tom | August 27, 2005 at 08:56 AM