Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:00.898)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathen. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Roosevelt Montas, the John and Margaret Bard Professor in Liberal Education and Civic Life at Bard College. We're here today to talk about his book, Rescuing Socrates, How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. Dr. Montas, wonderful to have you on today.
Roosevelt (03:13.34)
PJ, it's great to be here and please call me Roosevelt.
PJ Wehry (03:17.6)
Absolutely. So, tell us. I mean, I love it because your subtitle is very succinct to the point. But if you don't mind expanding, why this book?
Roosevelt (03:29.704)
So this book is sort of three things at once, or it weaves together three different strands. One is sort of autobiographical. It tells a little bit about my own education and the peculiarities of my trajectory. Having come to the US as a teenager, or almost a teenager, 12, not speaking English, ending up in an elite residential college and getting a little education, and sort of the ways in which that
sort of education changed my own life and shaped my own life. And then another strand is about higher education generally. Why the kind of education that I was so fortunate to receive is rare in higher education in America. Why is it important that it not be? Why it matters? So it's an argument and a critique on behalf of liberal education of American higher education.
And then the third strand is that I do that by looking at four particular writers or particular authors that I encountered along the way and which had a distinct and profound impact on the life that I have ended up living. So those three things sort of discussion of these writers in a way that's accessible, sort of for a general reader, not in a specialized academic way, reflections on my own life and my own education. And then thinking, I think quite seriously about the nature
and purposes of higher education.
PJ Wehry (05:01.71)
Thank you. Great answer and leaves a lot of threads. I'm trying to decide which one to pick up on. So you kind of, also in the introduction say it's personal and polemic. Just to kind of lay out for us, what do you feel like you're really defending and what do you feel like you're really critiquing in the higher education space?
Roosevelt (05:24.68)
I guess one can put it quite simply. American colleges and universities in general are not educating the whole individual for a certain kind of whole self-reflective meaningful life. Education has become very compartmentalized. On the one hand, it's very professionally focused, sort of job market oriented, skills oriented, which is fine. That needs to be part of college for sure. On the other hand, it's become the part that's not.
sort of professionalizing and job-oriented has become very dominated by niche interest within the disciplines, philosophy, English, history, computer science, very niche. And it's almost like no one has minded what the whole package is. And there is a thing called general education in the college curriculum, which is supposed to be that. It's supposed to be the part of the college experience, the part of the curriculum that looks at the whole person.
And that prepares a person for a life of meaningful engagement of the world, of self-reflection, of what one might roughly say flourishing, human flourishing. And that part, the general education part has been tragically neglected in American higher education. Most universities and those of you who are seeing this or listening to this who have been to university will probably have experiences, which is that you go to college and you
are given as a general education, a set of requirements, distribution requirements, where it says something like, take three courses in the humanities and two in the social sciences and two in the quantitative sciences, et cetera. And all of these courses that you take are in departments and disciplines, they're all doing their own thing. And there's very little intention, attention, thought about what the whole package looks like and what is it that we want an individual who's generally educated to have. So that's the critique that we are failing at
educating whole people that we're failing at educating for democratic citizenship, we're failing for educating for human flourishing. And that is quite serious because it has large scale social implications. And one of the one of the reasons, one of the underlying conditions for the kind of dysfunctional and deformed politics that we are living in the midst of is
Roosevelt (07:52.006)
that failure of higher education to prepare students for the kind of thoughtful, reflective, civically engaged life in a democracy. So that's the critique. That's why it's a polemic. And I have very strong ideas about how general education should be done. I've been doing it. I've a whole career teaching general education at, at Columbia University, where I was also the director of its center for the core curriculum for 10 years.
So I have a lot of ideas about what is the way to do it and what is the way to not do it. And part of this book is an argument to colleges and universities about their failures in general education and a kind of call for reform in general education.
PJ Wehry (08:41.102)
Thank you, great answer.
As we kind of think about, I want to talk about the authors that you have picked and that you love. Why did you feel the need to not only make it polemical, why did you feel the need to make it personal as well?
Roosevelt (09:01.276)
Yeah. So, you know, part of the point of liberal education, which is the, think the most precise term to describe the kind of education that I'm talking about, liberal education, the point of a liberal education is to equip an individual for a life of freedom. The delivery of the thing that a liberal education delivers.
is a certain kind of human being. It is not a body of knowledge, it is not a profession, it is not a job, it is a certain direction of growth in a human being. So the point of liberal education is super personal and super subjective. So it seemed to me that if I was going to make the case for why liberal education matters and how liberal education works, that personal voice, that reflection and exemplification
of what it has done to one particular life, one that I know very well and one whose the outcome of that education you are hearing, you are reading as you experience this. because liberal education is so personal, it's so subjective, its meaning is so rooted in the way in a person's life, I wanted to put that forth. I wanted to not just argue, but illustrate and show.
So that is why I reflected in my own life. guess another thing, and this is a secondary reason why I reflected on my own life, is because of the circumstances of my life, because I'm an immigrant, because I grew up as poor as a person can be in America, because I had so many disadvantages coming in, and yet a liberal education was able to equip me and tool me and help organize a life that I think has been meaningful and flourishing.
In my particular case, the impact of a liberal education is particularly obvious, is particularly visible. So just, that's, you know, even people who come from the highest privileges and who have not had, who have had every advantage in growing up, even for them, liberal education can be, and often is profoundly transformative and meaningful. But I think in my life, it is so obvious the way in which a liberal education helps shape the person that I am, that
Roosevelt (11:22.502)
that it provided, I think, a good illustration of what I'm talking about and what the arguments are about.
PJ Wehry (11:32.238)
Forgive me if this question sounds ignorant. As you're talking about that, when you talk about what the value of a liberal education is, one of the things that gets developed would be empathy. I think that's right. There's the whole person. Am I on the right track with? Yeah.
Roosevelt (11:51.398)
Absolutely, absolutely. Because I mean, one of the way to describe empathy is your capacity to experience the world from somebody else's point of view. And that is really hard. That is really tricky. That requires cultivation and that requires a kind of refinement of sensibility. A liberal education focuses a lot on
the ways in which people have encountered and responded to the fundamental dilemmas of human existence. And you'll have a lot of different points of view, a lot of different takes, a lot of different theories. And the way to get their benefit is to take them seriously and try to see the world from that point of view. And the same thing goes with literature, which is another big part of the liberal education.
curriculum, literature constantly draws you in to experience the world from somebody else's point of view. These are fundamentally empathetic exercises. These are exercises that expand your sensibility, expand your sense of humanity and the diversity of human experiences that there are. So absolutely, a liberal education is one that cultivates empathy.
sort of the kind of emotional, psychological empathy, but also kind of magnanimity, kind of intellectual capaciousness that I think is also related to empathy. I should say one other thing that while a liberal education does this and should take that very seriously, it is not the only way or the only place to develop empathy. And your personal relationships, your family relationships, the traditions in which you grow,
play a huge, overwhelmingly dominant role in developing that. So I don't want to say that, you know, send us to college somebody who has absolute zero empathy, who's absolutely self-focused and, you know, obsessed with their own needs and interests. And in four years, we're going to deliver it to you, an empathetic person. That's not the way it works. But certainly, a liberal education pushes and encourages growth in that direction.
PJ Wehry (14:15.714)
Well, so this is where I was going to ask, cause you, what you said was that you want to show how someone who had, the poorest you could be in America could be, tooled and organized. You talked about the education, think, tooled and organized your life into a meaningful life. And then you said, even a rich, someone who grew up with a lot of privilege could use this. And part of me, when you talk about that, it seems from my experience that,
Roosevelt (14:30.652)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (14:46.648)
People who have grown up with need understand the need for community. very, like, it almost seems to me that not that they need it more, but they need it just as much maybe for different reasons, like someone who's very privileged. But because they don't need, they don't have to build meaningful community. They don't necessarily need empathy if they've always had what they needed. Does that make sense?
Roosevelt (15:01.864)
Yeah. Yeah.
Roosevelt (15:10.992)
Yeah, I think this is true. That is that very often people who have great disadvantages, that often happens in communities. It is sort of the whole communities that have great disadvantages. It's you and your brothers and sisters and your cousins and your neighbors. And the way to survive, the way to thrive is to form these very thick communities. So often many of those sort of human qualities, solidarity,
and compassion and empathy get developed, get cultivated in those contexts in ways that sometimes an affluent and privileged upbringing doesn't allow because you, in many cases, you have the means to isolate yourself. You have the means to live in a gated community and to curate every kind of experience that your child has and to sort of buffer yourself from many of the harsh realities of the world.
so that's absolutely true, but I do want to, to, to sort of also on the other hand, so many things have an, the other hand, on the other hand, there is something about, poverty and lack of resources that it, can be humanly degrading and that can lead to the underdevelopment of human virtues. because if you have to,
PJ Wehry (16:30.03)
Mmm.
PJ Wehry (16:34.893)
Yeah.
Roosevelt (16:39.89)
hustle and sometimes cheat and sometimes just do whatever you have to do to survive. That imperative for survival may in some situations cause you to compromise other aspects of your humanity. poverty is not merely ennobling. Poverty can also be degrading.
PJ Wehry (17:02.71)
Yes. Yes. Yeah, and I apologize if it came across that way. I 100 % agree with that. Yeah. And my goal wasn't to be like, people with, I don't know, my point wasn't to create like victims out of, you're like, no, they have it so easy that they don't have to think about other people. You know, like those poor, you know, that's not my goal. But I just think it through and you could see.
Roosevelt (17:08.456)
No, no, no, you did not at all. You did not at all. Yeah.
Roosevelt (17:21.926)
Yeah, of course, of course. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (17:29.666)
the different ways, I mean, and empathy can show up in different ways. Yeah, there's different, I really want to, if you don't mind, you talk about tooled and organized your life. That seems maybe adjacent to empathy, but it seems slightly different too. Even like this ennobling thing is even slightly different than empathy. And I can, as I look at Augustine and Socrates and Plato and Gandhi,
Roosevelt (17:45.448)
Mm hmm. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (17:57.838)
I don't know if Freud nobles you. That seems like maybe he does. don't know. But these are certainly that there's a, you can trace like this humanist tradition, which I think has always been tied to the liberal education of ennobling the person, which is kind of what you speaking to there. What does it mean? Can you talk through like kind that tool, what you meant by tooled and organized and you talk about ennobling as well. That's really fascinating to
Roosevelt (18:23.41)
Yeah, yeah. Well, thinking about sort of tooling and organizing, one of the ways in which liberal education liberates is in equipping you to handle and navigate the complexities of your own psyche. Our personality, our psychology, our inner life is, contradictorily layered. You want
things that you can't have at the same time. You want to eat all of the desserts, but you also want to be trim and lose weight. You want to be fit, but you don't want to work out. You want to be a skilled musician, but you don't want to practice. And those are just like very simple and trivial examples, but it runs very, very deeply. The way that our capacity for desiring
is absolutely independent from like logic and from possibility and from kind of the reality principle. And one of the ways in which one can become unfree at a personal individual level is by being unable to manage, to organize, to orchestrate these conflicting impulses, desires, forces within us. So a liberal education
to achieve its goal of maximizing your freedom has to equip you somehow for a kind of inner integration that allows for the maximal exercise of choice and of choices that maximally contribute to your flourishing. So a liberal education has that sort of personal, liberal dimension. There's a collective dimension too.
about how to live with other people and create a politics, social situation in which freedom is maximized on what you contribute and how you make that happen and how you navigate that. But this inner personal dimension really is, can be, I think, described as allowing you to organize the inner constellation of drives, forces, aspirations, hopes, ideas, beliefs.
Roosevelt (20:51.026)
to organize those in such a way that they are chains, that they are not limiting factors, but enable you to develop maximally, to flourish maximally. And I think ennobling is something like that too. This idea of nobility, it hearkens to the notion that there is such a thing as human excellence. That there are...
ways of living that are more excellent than others, that there are pursuits that are most more choice worthy than others. And because a liberal education asks you to reflect on the character of the human good, on what a meaningful, flourishing good life looks like, what is the good life? How do we live well? Because it asks you to reflect and to in some sense approach answering those questions.
It encourages, leads to this ennobling, it leads to this understanding, clarifying and embracing the values of the highest life, the values of the most noble life. And sometimes that can be controversial because there's one way in which you all like to think that all lives are equally noble, that every way of being is equally valuable, that every way of being is equally good.
And while every way of being has a dignity, there's a dignity and a value that's irreducible, that you cannot lose, and that simply comes with your condition of being human. Without challenging that, we can specify and understand that there are forms of organizing your life. There are pursuits and there are ways of being that are indeed admirable and choice worthy and to be preferred.
PJ Wehry (22:28.451)
Hmm.
Roosevelt (22:45.628)
over others. And that's the noble life.
PJ Wehry (22:49.792)
So
I think sometimes dignity gets used in two different ways, right? Like there's an equivocation there. So what we could do is we just talk about dignity in one way and we could talk about excellence or nobility in another. Like everyone has dignity in one sense, but then like there's also a sense where it's like, um, we don't think, yes, yes. And, uh, and
Roosevelt (23:02.609)
Yeah, that's right.
Roosevelt (23:10.086)
Not everyone has nobility. Not every action is noble. Everyone has the capacity for. Yeah. Sorry.
PJ Wehry (23:18.432)
Well, like, no, no, it's fine. You're exactly that's exactly what I'm getting at. But also, I think part of it is sometimes we run into this where dignity also is like something we associate with our stance or our manner. So something can be undignified, right? So there is an equivocation between like someone can cannot have human dignity and someone can have human dignity at the same time because dignity covers right like someone who is living
Roosevelt (23:34.706)
Yeah. Right.
Roosevelt (23:44.776)
That's right.
PJ Wehry (23:48.212)
in their own filth. mean, you talk about a very sad example, right? You're like, that's not dignified, but they're still human being, they're still have human dignity. so, and I think to, yeah, so being very at the same, allowing both those things to exist at the same time. And I think it's useful probably not to use dignity in the same sense there just to like, just to have human dignity and excellence and nobility. So people understand what we're talking about. Yeah.
Roosevelt (23:52.198)
Mm-hmm. Right. Right. That's right. Yeah.
Roosevelt (24:13.35)
Yes, yes, exactly. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (24:19.072)
Okay, sorry, I'm I'm working through it. Yeah. let me ask you this. And I want to be able to talk about the authors you chose. Cause I mean, it's a great selection, but, with all that said, think there's a natural segue to here to why people who don't have a liberal education don't understand the value of it, which goes back to your, even like why it has to be personal and not just polemical. can you talk a little bit about.
Roosevelt (24:22.26)
Hehehehehe
Roosevelt (24:40.978)
Mm-hmm.
Roosevelt (24:45.309)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (24:47.276)
what that disconnect is, why it's so hard for people to understand what reading the classics do for you. Like what that value is, what does it mean to flourish?
Roosevelt (24:53.095)
Yeah.
Right.
Roosevelt (24:59.248)
Right, yeah. Before answering the question directly, I'll say this to preface it to make sure I am not misunderstood. Going to college and studying the classics is not the only way of getting a liberal education. I know people who didn't go to college who have a liberal education. I know people who got a liberal education without reading. The town I grew up in,
PJ Wehry (25:10.222)
Hehe.
Roosevelt (25:27.212)
in the Dominican Republic had a lot of people who were what we would call illiterate. They never went to school. They never learned to read and write. Yet they manage in various other ways to construct the kind of thoughtful, self-reflective, meaningful intellectual life that I think that liberal education also produces. So having said that, people who experience the form of liberal education that is offered
PJ Wehry (25:40.653)
Yes.
Roosevelt (25:55.29)
in colleges and universities, especially the way that it was done traditionally, because it used to be pretty much standard in colleges and universities. That is that you, the way I think about it, the way it looks like in a university is you, there's small classes, discussion-based, where the professor is not like the expert in the subjects as much as the conductor and fomenter.
and arbiter of a conversation among all of the participants. It is organized around encountering great works, classics, fundamental documents, could be works of art, could be music, could be films, but works that grapple with and productively challenge you to think about the deepest questions in our life and our society.
And then those courses are, there's a degree of commonality where a lot of people from different backgrounds are thinking about the same things, encountering the same works, having those conversations. That form, that sort of model of liberal education, people who experience it in college often for the rest of their lives,
think of that as the most important aspect of their college education. They could have been engineering majors, they could have been art majors, they could have been econ majors, business majors, pre-med, et cetera. They can be scientists and entrepreneurs and engineers or academics. A lot of times they come back and say, those courses, those experiences were the most important ones in the person that I have become. They are the thing, they are where I got the most value in my life from college. Now,
If you don't have that in college and you simply do your pre-professional training or whatever, you won't know what you're missing. You won't know what that could have done for you or does for you. So it's easy then to, if you did not have it, but your life turned out okay. You were successfully professional, professionally successful. have a,
Roosevelt (28:16.872)
meaningful and rich life, which you can totally have without a liberal education as such. That is the structured model that I'm talking about. It might be easy to think back of a college and say, you know, we don't need that. That's a waste of time. That is a waste of resources that has no value. is just kind of the fluff of college and we can cut it out. We can close those departments and just focus on those skills and hard knowledge that you need for the job market.
And it is people who often have not had a liberal education that achieve positions of leadership in university administration and are ready and willing to adopt that view and just sort of think of that as excess, as sort of elite, as...
and extravagance and indulgence that we can no longer afford and therefore we're going to shut down those departments and just get people to learn job skills.
PJ Wehry (29:18.554)
And to be, to be clear, as you're, you're talking about this, I know, you know, this better than I do. I just see a couple of articles, but every couple of months I'm seeing you're not talking about a straw man here or some kind of boogeyman under the bed. Like they are closing down departments like this. Yeah. This is something that's happening.
Roosevelt (29:34.952)
Yeah, Absolutely. And it is something that we as a society that would impoverish us and the social, you know, the social cost of which is not immediate. It's not like, you know, next year you have a dearth of liberal arts majors and therefore there's some kind of social crisis. But over time, the quality of our discourse, the quality of our our interactions, the quality of our politics.
quality of the social fabric phrase. And as I said before, even before the latest wave of just simply destroying those departments, the fact is that those departments were not coming together to produce the kind of liberal education that I argue for in the book. And already we have seen the impact of that in society.
One other one qualification about that again, I'm always you know, on the other hand, there is and this has been very palpable to me since since writing the book that there is a sort of movement, a sort of groundswell of interest in this form of education in many colleges and universities. So whereas in the 80s and 90s and some of the odds, what you had was a dismantling of liberal arts programs.
PJ Wehry (30:36.344)
Yeah, no, it's fine, yeah.
Roosevelt (31:01.83)
Right now you have many programs that are kind of starting, people who are rethinking what the curriculum should be. there is a, while you have a macro trend of weakening of the humanities and of the liberal arts in colleges, you have an insight of that, a kind of counter trend that is restoring and reviving the kind of liberal education program that shaped me and which the book I wrote argues for.
PJ Wehry (31:29.278)
I actually, she used to babysit our kids and then she went off to college, which I'm trying not to be bitter about because it was really, it's really, she's a great babysitter, but she left to go to, it was a pilot program exactly on the great books and he had just started and that happened the last like, two years ago. Right. And so, it's interesting to see that, right. It's interesting to see people being like, maybe we shouldn't lose this. just to clarify, go ahead.
Roosevelt (31:51.644)
Yeah, Yeah, exactly, exactly. My new job, I'm just gonna say my new job at Bard College, when you introduced me as the John and Margaret Bard Professor in Liberal Education and Civic Life, part of the reason I have that title is because I will be the inaugural director of a Center for Liberal Education and Civic Life at Bard College.
We have not made a public announcement. This is not a public announcement. I'm making it. I'm simply saying that there will be a public announcement. That's right. There will be a public announcement. But VAR is launching this initiative, the Chang-Chafkin Center for Liberal Education and Civic Life, whose mission is to promote and support this kind of curricular change in colleges and universities all over the place.
PJ Wehry (32:20.846)
You heard it here first.
PJ Wehry (32:28.888)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (32:40.142)
That's exciting. And I think there is something, would one way, and this might be, I don't want to trivialize it, but when we talk about people cutting this stuff and saying, it doesn't add anything, some of this is a difference in vision of what human flourishing is. And one vision I would say is very thin and another is very thick. And maybe those aren't exact, but it's this view of running it like qualitative metrics and, or no, sorry.
quantitative metrics, it's what are the numbers, how much are people making versus the quality of your conversation, which is of course, like, are we talking about people who, yeah, yeah, like, we taught like, we're are we producing small sold students, right? Is that you know what I mean? And I, and those aren't, that's very difficult. I think hopefully for people listening, when I say someone is very small sold,
Roosevelt (33:09.746)
Mm-hmm. Right.
Roosevelt (33:18.31)
much harder to measure.
Roosevelt (33:25.49)
Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (33:36.77)
I think you know what that feels like. You talk to them and their world is very narrow and they're not interesting to talk to, but it's not because they don't know thing. It's because they're not curious. It's because there's all sorts of like, it's not just that. They're not empathetic. They're not open. And that's exactly what you're talking about. Like those kinds of people, if they become predominant, will seriously affect politics, will seriously affect social cohesion.
and really just the quality of life all throughout. Am I tracking with you?
Roosevelt (34:07.848)
I think you are. The kind of freedom that we envision in a liberal democracy like we have here, the kind of individual rights, a rights-based, rule of law-based constitutional democracy with individual freedom and collective freedom and self-determination and free speech and elections and rule of law and laws that apply to everybody, whether you're the president or a congressman or a judge, you're still bound by the law.
That kind of society is a collective achievement. That is not the achievement of an individual. That is not the achievement of an elite. That has to be a collective achievement. And it can only survive. It can only flourish as a collective phenomenon. It requires a population that is versed, that is cultivated, that is educated in the virtues necessary for a democratic, self-governing society.
PJ Wehry (34:40.312)
Hmm.
Roosevelt (35:03.88)
And the American experiment, Abraham Lincoln, talked about it as an experiment, you know, and this other civil war as a test of whether a government conceived like this can long endure. Whether the idea that people can govern themselves, an idea that historically has not panned out. Historically, people have not governed themselves. That's it. The United States was an experiment.
PJ Wehry (35:27.87)
Excuse me. yes.
Roosevelt (35:33.436)
Can this work? people govern this? And we're still trying to figure it out. I mean, that question has not been definitively answered. But if that question is going to be answered in the affirmative, and it will turn out that we can, in fact, govern ourselves, it will be necessary that that collective and that ourselves be educated in the virtues and capacities, skills, dispositions that are required for democratic self-governance. And there are, you know, there are discursive skills, empathetic skills.
social skills that are absolutely necessary for this complex task of self-governance.
PJ Wehry (36:08.589)
And there's certain types of knowledge too. mean, this is where I like a lot of, actually, you know, what, is the knowledge that comes from literature? What is the knowledge that comes from history? Right. And people don't really understand that until they actually read it. Uh, I'm homeschooling my kids and I'm watching them. My oldest boy is really struggling with history. He's like, I'm just learning a lot of random stuff. I don't get it. And then all of a I'm watching it slowly click. He's like, Oh,
Roosevelt (36:21.661)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (36:37.858)
this matters because of this. I'm like, yeah, it's, it takes time. He's 10 years old, right?
Roosevelt (36:42.362)
Exactly. And that's what historical knowledge is. Historical knowledge is not a list of facts and dates and numbers and figures. Historical knowledge is this appreciation for the living forces that created the world in which we live and whose consequences and implications we live with every day.
PJ Wehry (37:01.272)
Yeah. And us too. It formed not only our world, but it forms us. I mean, I just attack that on. Okay. Okay. I'm obviously, I'm having a great time and I could keep talking about this forever. I want to ask, so why did you pick, I mean, they're very, they're, classic authors. So, but why did you pick Augustine, you know, the, the, the Greek trio there and Freud and Gandhi?
Roosevelt (37:03.72)
Yeah. Yeah.
Roosevelt (37:12.232)
Me too.
Roosevelt (37:20.124)
Yeah.
Roosevelt (37:26.642)
Right.
Yeah, well, yes, yeah.
PJ Wehry (37:29.934)
Before you answer, let me just say thank you. Thank you for saying Augustine's an African author because that always annoys me when he gets lumped in and it's like, wait a second, wait a second. You're like, yeah, sorry. Yeah, thank you.
Roosevelt (37:40.136)
Right, right, exactly. Yeah, people, you know, people talk about this with being dead white men, but actually lot of them, they're all dead, but a lot of them weren't white. No, but those four authors that there are a couple of things I could say about why why them one is sort of very just in credit and rooted in this in this autobiographical aspect of the book. Like these are authors that had particularly
PJ Wehry (37:50.222)
Sorry, I was unprepared for that.
Roosevelt (38:10.312)
marked salient big impact on my own development. And that's sort of random, you know, not everybody that encountered them had that kind of, they had that impact on. Um, and it had to do with where I was coming from. He had to do the moment in my life in which I encountered them, the context in which I encountered them. So part of it is sort of it is in credit, but there's another thing, uh, there, there are other, other reasons to, uh, one is it gives you a, uh, a big span of time. So I've chosen a very ancient thinker, Plato.
Aristotle, Socrates, early as we have like good documentary records for, then a figure from the sort of Middle Ages, early Middle Ages, the early in the Christian era, St. Augustine. And then a sort of a 19th century modern figure, and then a near contemporary figure, Mahatma Gandhi, who died in 1940.
PJ Wehry (39:08.611)
Mm.
Roosevelt (39:10.772)
I think something like that was he was assassinated. So there is that kind of range and you can see a big conversation happening across time which I think is one of the very important values of a liberal education that it contextualizes the present moment in this big picture. It really cuts down to size a lot of what your own world and your own experiences are. And one other thing about these four authors is that they're all
absolutely laser focused on the project of self-knowledge. They're all incredible explorers, experimenters of the self. know, Socrates is famous for saying the unexamined life is not worth living. It was about examining his own life. And in St. Augustine's most famous book, The Confessions, it's an autobiography. It's a book in which he thinks about his life and thinks about how it was that he
this little boy born in northern Africa became the person that he was when he was writing the book. And it's that whole trajectory of self-exploration. And Freud, course, Freud's whole thing was a method for self-investigation, a method of psychoanalysis, a method for knowing the mind and knowing the psyche. And then have Mahatma Gandhi, who comes from an entirely different tradition of Hindu spirituality and devotion, but who also has a very
PJ Wehry (40:31.022)
Hmm.
Roosevelt (40:37.082)
solid, powerful, and influential in his own life, Western education. He's bringing this together, but his whole life was dedicated to the project of what he calls self-realization. That is the language that in his tradition is used, self-knowledge and self-transcendence, attaining ultimate salvation.
That was his whole, that's how he dedicate, that's what his whole organized his life and what shaped his politics. says, you know, he was in the pursuit of that. He was in the pursuit of self-realization that he came into conflict with the government and with British colonial rule. And that's why he ended up fighting the British is because they were getting in the way of his project of spiritual self-realization. So those four figures in their quest and commitment to an honest,
for a unflinching investigation of the cell. That's a through line that runs through them.
PJ Wehry (41:45.038)
I want to be respectful of your time. So I have kind of two questions. This might be a short question, but with one way of thinking about what you're talking about is that there's many ways to think about a liberal education, what its end goals are, because the end goals are supposed to be subjective and kind of holistic. But one way to think about it is that someone who has gone through a liberal education successfully,
will have a mature inner dialogue. Would that be one way of thinking about it?
Roosevelt (42:19.432)
Yes, I think so. And of course, we, we, what does, what does mature in a dialogue mean? What does mature mean in that sense in a dialogue? But first let's say inner dialogue, let's take that first. That is you become aware that of their own differences and voices and pools within yourself. You be, realize that you're not a unitary, monolithic, homogeneous entity, that you are in fact a conglomeration of voices and influences and a dialogue. There's this dialogue going on inside, you know.
Sometimes people say, you know, should follow your heart. And I say, well, my heart is a committee, a contentious committee. So it's like that's like a very clear or open, helpful directive. If I can figure it out, if they can, if my heart can agree, fine, but it often can't, it's locked in this. So being aware of that, being aware of that inner dialogue, right? And then what does it mean for you to be mature? It means to have a certain order, stability.
PJ Wehry (42:53.73)
Wait.
Roosevelt (43:17.448)
a certain depth, that is you are aware of the sources and the history and sort of how your experiences fit in this larger context. What you said about empathy, right, you have a sensibility for how this looks from the outside, not just how it looks from the inside. You're not completely immersed and caught up in it. So those are aspects of what I think we can call a mature inner dialogue that a liberal education absolutely cultivates.
And obviously not the only way to develop them, but my God, person who goes through higher education to have a structured, intentional, intensive, equipping, intensive tooling to engage in this kind of dialogue would grow towards this mature inner dialogue.
PJ Wehry (44:15.438)
Thank you. And it seems, it's shown up a lot in my own work and my own study. And to hear you talking about it, really to feel, I I love what you've expressed. I feel my heart really knit with a lot of the values you're talking about. And I think it's such a needed thing, not just like, for America and for American, but it's just like such an important human thing. And so, well, let me say, I appreciate it. I appreciate the work that you're doing. For a final question, cause I want to make sure that,
Roosevelt (44:40.008)
Thank you.
PJ Wehry (44:44.558)
in respect for your time for someone who has listened to us for the last 45 minutes.
what would you recommend they do or they think they meditate on for the next week? Besides, of course, buying and reading your excellent book. What else should somebody do? They should read your book, they should read Freud and Aristotle and Plato and Augustine and see it through your lens and they should grow in that way. But apart from that, something that they could just immediately take away and do for the next week, what would you recommend?
Roosevelt (45:17.106)
Yeah, if someone is inspired to either undertake or intensify this project of self-knowledge, this project of inner growth and inner development, I would say two things that are really, well, let me say three things that are really fundamental. One is make a commitment to it and set some time aside. Say I'm going to, whether you're gonna say you're gonna take a class or decide you're going to
Set aside this particular hour, build it into your schedule, but take some time. Dedicate some time to this project of self-cultivation. The second thing I would do is find stimuli, find provocations, material that challenges and questions you and raises this kind of question. And we have a great corpus of novels, films, philosophy.
a rich museum, there's just a rich array of human creations and productions that are precisely about what it means to be human, that get at the heart of the questions. That's the second thing. set the time aside, find the material. And third, don't do it alone. A liberal education is a thing that happens from person to person and among people. It is not about just reading the great books. It is about reading the great books
and talking about them with other people. So find a friend, a colleague, a relative, somebody who wants to do it with you. Somebody who wants to go see the movie and then have coffee and talk about it. Or somebody who's gonna read the same book as you. Somebody who's gonna go with you to the museum. Somebody who is going to be an interlocutor in this process of understanding what in the world is it that we are here doing and experiencing.
What is this whole thing about? One person, two people, three people. know, one great thing that used to be done a lot before and it's not done that much anymore is to have like dinner parties. Invite three or four or five friends. Have some good food together and have a stimulus, have a topic, have a short story or a poem or something that is going to
Roosevelt (47:39.13)
Everybody is going to focus and reflect on and comment together. That's a liberal education right there. And not only is it like good for you, it is enjoyable. And it is the kind of thing that, you know, when you're on your deathbed, which all of us are going to get to at some point, nobody from that vantage point says, you know, I did too much of that. I did too much of sitting around with my friends, talking about the big fundamental questions about, about our
PJ Wehry (48:02.635)
Yeah.
Roosevelt (48:08.52)
You can't get enough of that and every hour that you spend doing that is going to be an hour well spent.
PJ Wehry (48:16.27)
Montes, Roosevelt. Wonderful to have you on today. Great answer. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Roosevelt (48:22.034)
Thank you, PJs. Really a pleasure.