John Donvan:

Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where we are totally psyched to be participating in the Atlantic ideas and — I’m sorry. That’s old school. We are totally psyched to be participating in the Atlantic Festival, and of the words that came out of my mouth just now, six of them have Latin origins. They are “intelligence” and “totally” and “squared” and “participating” and “festival” and the preposition “in.” Oh, and also “origins” is — has a Latin root. Two of the words that I spoke, “psyched” and “Atlantic” — they’re etymology is originally Greek, and so is the etymology of “etymology,” the point being — it is obvious that classical Greek and Latin have made a very, very deep imprint on all of us, how we speak, which would also affect how we think. But also, the fact that Latin and Greek, from the classical era two millennia ago, represent a body of literature that, over time, has been elevated to an extremely high kind of pedestal, with, kind of, the recognition that mastering this — the classics, and especially reading them in the original was really vital, both to understanding western culture and to preserving it and continuing to enrich it. But we’re asking whether that deference was justified and is it justified today? Or is the relevance of these classics the way that they have been traditionally taught and talked about, somewhat overdone? And even, is it possible, that this tradition towards the classics has also caused harm? We are here to debate this question. Are the classics overrated? And on that question, I would like to ask your opinion before we actually meet the debaters.

Female Speaker:

They are.

John Donovan:

They are? That’s the answer? We’re done? Okay.

[laughter]

John Donovan:

You remember that part about “keep an open mind and hear both sides”?

[laughter]

John Donovan:

We want to ask your opinion — to register your opinion by asking you to go to your phones and tell us whether you would be a yes or a no or an undecided. You can scan the QR code behind me or — get out of the way. Alternately, you can go to IQ2vote.org to complete this poll. So, I’ll give a few minutes to — I’m just going to wait for faces to turn upward toward me again. Okay. It looks like most everybody’s done. You can continue to do that. All right. So, now that you have that done, here is the big moment, and I would like your attention again. And again, your round of applause as we meet our debaters. Please, first, let’s welcome, arguing on the yes side — the classics are overrated — here is classics scholar and president of the American Council of Learners Societies, Joy Connolly.

[applause]

John Donovan:

And taking the no side, that the classics are not overrated, is cultural critic and contributor to the Atlantic, Thomas Chatterton Williams. Thomas, come on out.

[applause]

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Thank you.

John Donovan:

Thank you. All right. Thanks to both of you for joining us and, again, there’s still time to put in your vote or to poll us — to tell us where you stand on the opinion. But let’s get to it. We would like each of you just to take a few minutes to tell us why you’re a yes or why you’re a no. And Joy, you’re up first for that. You answered yes, that the classics are overrated and since that is really more of a challenge to the status quo of the last several centuries, we decided to have you go first, and why do you argue that the classics are overrated?

Joy Connolly:

Well, let me answer that by offering you a thought experiment and kind of ideal to begin, and that’s a world where we all have time to read great books. That’s already a fantasy, but we all have time to read great books dealing with issues — pressing issues, tough — big questions that are written across the planet. They’re produced across the world, right? And this is my fundamental point in the limitation — the weakness I see of the classics as they exist today as the tradition. And I say that as a classical scholar who loves the individual texts and not saying the individual texts are overrated, but the tradition — the classics as they exist now is created by scholars, by intellectuals, by members of the public over centuries in western Europe and then North America, and celebrated in two ways. They were celebrated, these Greek and Latin texts produced 2,500 — 2,000 years ago, as the best, as exceptional, as extraordinary, as models of exempla. And they were also celebrated as the origins and foundations of western culture, and it’s that combination that’s toxic — has had toxic effects. And I would divide them into two kinds of effects. One of them I call the plant effect. I think of Greek and Latin books as a plant that’s gotten tons of water and tons of fertilizer, and it’s grown and grown and grown and its leaves have gotten so big that it’s overshadowed and made invisible, actually, all the other plants. The Sanskrit plants, the Mayan plants, the Chinese, the Arabic plants — literally impossible to see, right — under the Greek and Latin plant. So, there’s the plant problem. And the second problem is distortion problem, and this is more complicated. I expect we’ll argue about this a bit. The [unintelligible] of the emergence of the classics, both in the sense of an intellectual field — classical studies, and also a bunch of books you can buy and put on your shelf. This emerged, this list of texts, at precisely the same time that Europe, and then America, was dominating and exploiting and oppressing the rest of the world. And the two developments are intertwined. The classics do — and I — it really — it’s painful for me to say this and acknowledge it, to a certain degree, but they are. They do reinforce that sense that Europe is the place where history began. It’s where history is made. This is the sense, I think, that’s conveyed. And the overshadowing, then, of achievements and thought in the rest of the world is the problem. So, it didn’t have to be this way. I think we can do better. I think we can be more creative. I think we can be more curious about cultural production around the world, and I think we can tend — and we should tend a bigger, better garden.

John Donovan:

Thank you. Thank you very much for opening.

[applause]

John Donovan:

Thomas, you are the no, because?

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Well, I — first, I would just want to thank everybody for coming out tonight and sitting in a very windy environment in the river.

[applause]

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

And it’s hard to follow the freestyle of Supremes. They were amazing.

Joy Connolly:

[laughs]

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

But, for me, it’s really meaningful to be here with you and to talk about the power of the classics, just down the river from where I studied philosophy at Georgetown and where my life was really transformed by coming into contact with Socrates’ injunction to know thyself, and part of what knowing thyself meant for me was, kind of, slipping the yoke of identity that I had been trapped in for the first 18 years of my life, when I really understood myself as being boxed into an abstract color category that delineated everything that mattered for me and cordoned off my life from other lives, other times, other geographies. And for me to even have gotten to Georgetown depended on a very fortuitus accident with my father, who is a black man from the segregated south, born in the 1930’s, old enough to be my grandfather, coming into contact with Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, and as a young boy, eight or nine years old, and asking himself, “Who is this man Socrates whose face is reproduced in this book, who was so important that thousands of years later we still talk about him. And wanting to understand who Plato was, who Socrates was, wanting to ask himself, “What is a meaningful life?” at a time when his country told him he was a second-class citizen — these ideas, these other geographies, these other times linked him to a tradition that was bigger than the present that he was trapped in, and I think it gave him a sense of his humanity that was much more expansive than whatever it was his society told him he was supposed to believe about himself in the here and now.

The classics are so powerful, and they were such a liberating force for my father. And when I talk about the classics, I have to say — here, I am not an expert. I’m not a trained classicist. I don’t read Greek or Latin. I’m an amateur. And when I talk about the classics, I talk about these ideas that then influenced a chain of ideas and a tradition that shaped the world that we lived in, and we do live in now, and I don’t think these ideas are particularly the best or important because they are classic or because they are Western, but because they are ideas that stood the test of time and shaped the world that we have to inhabit, whether we like it or not. This is what enabled my father — this mastery of this tradition was what enabled my father to transcend the limitations of the circumstances that he was born in, and so, I think that we do — specifically, we do poor and black and brown students a real disservice when we tell them that these ideas are not for them. These ideas equip them to navigate the world that they need to navigate, whether we like it or not. And so, I don’t think the classics are overrated. I think they’re actually grossly underrated in the here and now, and we need to actually, probably, bring back more of — I appreciate that. We need to bring back more of a, kind of, serious respect and reverence for them and not to get sidetracked by very narrow and present-ist ideas of identity that block us from seeing what’s universal and what’s fully human.

John Donovan:

Thank you, Thomas, very much.

[applause]

John Donovan:

So, Joy, what I think I heard Thomas say is — he was going to say all of that anyway, but some of it is in contradiction to what you said — is that the lessons of the classics, the values implied by the classics, are uniquely original and uniquely seminal to the culture that we live in and have been, by and large, a very positive force. Do you dispute that?

Joy Connolly:

It’s a great question, and let me take an example that isn’t one of the — exactly one of the values you mentioned, but it’s a theme that people often appeal to when they’re trying to draw the line between the ancient Mediterranean and the United States or the west, and that’s democracy. Right? And equality. So, these are two ideas. They’re two words that we see in ancient Greek texts. They mean extremely different things to the original writers and the original audiences of these texts, and they have meaning to us now. So, we can choose to draw a line connecting us, you know, kind of red thread through highly unequal and highly undemocratic societies and histories of thought going through the last 1,500, 2,000, 2,500 years. We can choose to draw that line, but my question is why must we when there are other modes of thinking about participatory governments, about what it means to be a human living in relations of obligation and affection of other people? Themes that will do us just as much good and, I think, deserve to be put in conversation, but in — as — in a relationship of equality with these texts that we have grown to revere and hold up in an uncritical way, I think, and make [unintelligible] connections that are actually, historically, not accurate.

John Donovan:

So, are you saying that the recognition that Thomas would give to the classics is a choice, but it’s not an imperative? Take that back to you.

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Well, yeah, I just — I guess it’s always surprised me that honoring or acknowledging that one tradition is, itself, a tradition, even if the boundaries of that tradition are porous and are not nearly as exact as we’d like to think. I never understood why having a tradition be delineated means that you can’t acknowledge and respect or contemplate other traditions. It’s just — here is a lineage of thought that led to where we are. There’s a lot of other thought that was going on that we could also be interested in, but these are the ideas and the text that meant something to many of the generations that came to shape us, and that does mean something. I mean, James Baldwin said something that I think about a lot, you know. He said, “The negro” — at the time, he said, “The negro, you know, is a product –” he said — James Baldwin’s an older dude, like, he said, “The negro is a product of America and no other nation. America is a product of Europe,” and those are just facts. And I think that, you know, we have to — we don’t have to always, I think, trouble ourselves about not including every single facet of the world we live in in every single conversation we have at all times. There is some value to just saying that there’s a thread and there are many threads, but this is one thread, and I don’t think it diminishes other traditions to say that this is a tradition that we revere and that did lead us to where we are now.

Joy Connolly:

I think, though, that at this moment and this time, and I compare, you know, where we are to say a thousand years ago, where people are, you know — find it difficult to get their hands on books, you know. It’s not easy to pass texts down. You can see why a tradition of copying that would be pretty narrow, where people would copy and then write new texts that would be in very close conversation with the text that they knew. We don’t live in that world anymore, and I think we live in a world where, you know, we demand global solutions and global thinking together to problems like climate change, democracy, equality, issues of gender, issues of racial equality, and the big questions of what is truth? What is beauty? Those, too, I think, benefit from a global and more cosmopolitan connective comparative conversation than the one that the red thread traditional conversation lends itself to.

[applause]

John Donovan:

I want to explore, Joy, your use of the term “toxic.” What’s toxic about the classics — has been toxic about — and I know you’re talking about — by the way, I don’t think you’ve made clear that you love the classics, that you teach the classics, that you study the classics, that you’ve got your masters in the classics, and your doctorate in the classics, so just — you’re a big fan. So, I’m guessing you went through a bit of a conversion period in all this and does that have to do with this sense of toxicity?

Joy Connolly:

I did. I mean, the toxicity, I think, comes from this sense of erasure that I started to feel when I was teaching at NYU and the core curriculum 20 years ago, and I started doing what a lot of my colleagues have done and continue to do. You — this is a course — a core curriculum course that no longer exists, precisely because our thinking has evolved in good ways, you know, kind of — western civilization class. It was called Conversations of the West. And what I found myself doing was trying to sprinkle in, around the edges, conversations that would push my own thinking, because I found, you know, myself kind of working in a groove that, you know — kind of retelling a story, and I could feel myself not thinking sufficiently critically, without enough perspective on these texts that, you know, that I knew well. So, it led me through a lot of anxiety, largely because I wasn’t kidding when I said I had a fantasy at the beginning of people who had time to read books, because my big worry is that students and, you know, all of us, but especially students in American universities aren’t reading books at all, you know. Forget what books. History majors have fallen by over 60 percent since 2008, 2009. Literature and languages other than English and in English, majors — the number of students studying these areas have declined rapidly. So, that’s part two of my conversion, because I started asking myself, “Are we, perhaps, not meeting students where we are? Are they feeling excluded?” And here, the — to kind of close off in response to what you said, Thomas, I think it is true that, for some students, access to classical texts and engagement with them is empowering and, you know, changes one’s life. For other students, that’s not the case. They feel excluded. They ask, “Where am I?” and they start to see the historical connections between European, economic, political, technical domination and a writing of intellectual history and the history of thought around the world that’s European but, because the Europeans have pushed everybody else out.

[applause]

John Donovan:

And is that — I just want — “toxic” is such a strong word. You know, it means poisonous, essentially. That’s where you see the —

Joy Connolly:

I think — I mean, when you make traditions invisible, you are poisoning them. That’s my plant imagery. It’s like that leaf spreading is killing things beneath it.

John Donovan:

Your response?

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

First of all, I want to say it is cold.

[laughter]

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

I’m freezing. So, respect to all of you all.

[laughter]

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

It is cold. So, something that always trips me up and kind of bothers me is the — when we talk about — when both racists and anti-racists talk about the classics, they often talk about whiteness and they talk about systems of oppression that are much more recent than somebody like Socrates or Plato would have been able to conceive of themselves as being a part of. We apply a presence prism of whiteness to ancient Athens. We say — and racists like to say that, “this belongs to us,” and increasingly I hear anti-racists saying that this belongs to them, too. And so, I [unintelligible] kind of step back and separate our, kind of, 400-, 500-year-old notion of whiteness, which was born out of the collision of Europe and Africa through the slave trade, and the exploitation of Africans and others in the new world through slavery. I want to separate that from peoples and cultures and histories and ideas and texts that existed prior to any such notion of color category. Socrates didn’t walk around Athens irritating everybody, thinking, “Here I am, a white man, asking questions of other white people.” He was an Athenian, and if you were from Sparta, you were a barbarian to him. You weren’t a barbarian because you were still Greek, but you were not part of his world. And if you were outside of the tiny geography of Greece, you didn’t belong to a race, with him. And so, I think that we really get hung up on notions of who we are that are not nearly as supple enough to deal with the kind of ambiguities of what past peoples would have been, you know — how past peoples would have been conceiving of themselves.

Joy Connolly:

And here, I want to say I get very nervous and upset when I see strands of thought — claims that, for example, of a man cannot write a novel in a woman’s, you know, first-person voice, or a person of color can’t write a novel or a poem or a history of — involving white people, because, you know, that — I think, if we go down that path, we’re doomed, and I think we agree on that. But by the same token, I think it’s incumbent on all of us to, again, think bigger and think outside the traditions that, you know, like it or not, I don’t see us resolving the classics as a source of, you know, claims of white supremacy and a source of claims of excellence and exceptionalism that, you know, that is overrated. That does misrepresent, I think, the value of the classics, because it is vulnerable to being claimed, partly because it was constructed that way, you know, for this purpose as reinforcing claims of white supremacy and domination. So, I actually want to get past that argument, because we’ve been having it now for some years, and say, “What are we going to do next? What are we going to do to encourage young people to read great books?” And I don’t think the answer is in a defensive return. I really think it’s in a bigger, as I say, more cosmopolitan approach to reading, but that will be — pull us out of our — the traditions and relationships and kind of heritage conversations that we’re used to having, and it will be different. I think we actually don’t know, entirely, what that will look like, a truly cosmopolitan discussion of great books.

John Donovan:

Joy, you graduated from Princeton. You’re not with the department now, but you came up through that department and you know it. I want to share with the audience — maybe you know this, already — that after the death of George Floyd, one of the institutions I went through in internal self-reckoning was the classics department of Princeton. And they made a few decisions. One was to drop the requirement that, to qualify for a degree for a department, you actually had to learn the languages, that you could go through them in translation. Oh, I was just asked to re-ask that question in my ear because of the airplane, which was described in my ear as a big, big plane, but I didn’t see it. Joy, so — Joy, you are a graduate of the classics program at Princeton. You’re not there now, but you know that department, and after the murder of George Floyd, that department was one of the institutions that went through a period of self-reckoning, and they made a few decisions, and one of them was no longer to require students who aspire to get a degree in the classics to actually know Latin and Greek. And the second thing was they put out a number of statements, and I’ll read one of them. “The history of our own department bears witness to the place of the classics and the long arc of systemic racism.” Now, I’m skipping. “We condemn and reject in the strongest possible terms the racism that made our department and our field inhospitable to black and non-black scholars of color, and we affirm that black lives matter.” I want to first go to you for your reaction to both of those developments, Thomas.

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

My reaction is very similar to my colleague John McWaters’s reaction, at the time. The idea that, to make a field more inclusive for black and other non-white students, you have to lower the bar of entry — I think that gets close to what I would consider a racist idea. It’s deeply insulting to me, and I say this as somebody — like, I didn’t study classics. I studied philosophy. I didn’t study ancient Greek and I didn’t study Latin, but were I to have joined the classics department, and were that to be the field of study that I were pursuing, and were someone to say that for me to be fully accepted there —

John Donovan:

Let’s let this plane go over.

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

I’m sorry?

John Donovan:

I’m hearing another plane, now. Okay. You were saying, for you to be —

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

For Princeton University to say, for me to be fully included they would have to lower the bar of what had traditionally been required for mastery, I would feel that, you know, that I was there in a tokenized kind of way, and I would feel that my — what I was bringing, in terms of my diversity, was attesting to some type of oppression that I’m supposed to represent, and I feel like that’s a very difficult way for me to enter the field, feeling on equal terms with other people that would still be mastering those languages. It’s not that everybody would stop mastering those languages. It’s that, for me to be there, it’s considered necessary that that becomes voluntary.

John Donovan:

It — but it — I could see it, also, opening the door to a lot of white students to go into classics, as well.

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

But, let me —

John Donovan:

Let’s let that go.

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

When this passes, let me flip the question back to you. To open the door to calculus, do you need to stop requiring that people know how to do calculus? I mean, to open the door to physics, do you need to change what’s required of understanding how gravity works? I mean, it’s strange that, in the — in order to be inclusive, the field itself must stop being what it has been, as opposed to trying to get more people to master the field. It’s just something that I think is very strange about the current moment, and it’s not restricted to classics at all. It’s the idea that we don’t have enough people involved in X, therefore the problem is with X. Not enough people passed this standardized exam to get into [unintelligible] therefore, standardized exams are racist. It seems to me that we have the problem exactly backwards.

Joy, again, I — you are not with the Princeton department, so you are not speaking for them nor defending them, but I’m sure you have an opinion on the positions that they took, and I want to hear what they are.

Joy Connolly:

I do, and I just have to say one would think that the adrenaline of debating would warm one up, but, in fact —

[laughter]

Joy Connolly:

— it’s very cold, so forgive me if I’m shivering. The — I actually take this — interpret this pretty differently, and so, forgive me for getting in the weeds of, like, the curricular change for one minute, but I think there are two things going on here. One is that these degrees — these, you know, undergraduate, bachelor’s degrees with language requirements were defined a long time ago. I mean, I don’t want to say how long, but certainly decades, when a lot of students came into universities like Princeton, having taken Latin or Greek in high school. So, they could look ahead to if they wanted to major in classics, you know, a year or two of language study to pass exams and gain a certain mastery, but then they would go into reading texts pretty fluently, one hopes — at least. Taking history, archeology, you know, all the classics in interdisciplinary fields, and what happened is — more and more students came into departments with no Latin or Greek at all, but they were interested in the topics, so they found themselves spending, you know, these years between however old they are — 18 to 22. These years of college that are so, you know — years of great intellectual exploration, doing, you know, basic language training, and that’s not the most — I mean, I would be the first to say I don’t think that’s the point of a college degree in classics if you’re not going on to a doctorate. If you’re going on to be a professor or to do research, that’s a different story, but that’s, you know — the department does still allow people to major, you know, taking languages. They just don’t require it, and I think that’s appropriate for a day in age when people are drawn to the texts, but they can study rigorously in translation. They’re doing work in digital humanities. They’re doing work in history and archeology and, you know, interdisciplinary work. I think that’s absolutely appropriate and does great justice to the complexity of the text, raises all kinds of questions about translation and really good faculty, like the ones at Princeton, know how to deal with — they can do a lot with teaching and translation that makes the most of an undergrad education.

John Donovan:

But would not necessarily something get lost? The music [unintelligible].

Joy Connolly:

Absolutely, but a lot that’s lost when you’re trying to cram, you know, with weak grammar skills and limited vocabulary and you’re, you know, you’re half memorizing texts instead of really reading them. So, you know, a lot is lost. Study is imperfect. It goes on our whole lives, so I don’t think that’s enough of an [unintelligible] —

John Donovan:

And the other part of my question was about the confession that the department made to its long history in the arc of racism. Does that speak to you, to a truth that you know?

Joy Connolly:

I think anyone, you know — partly because, as I said, the field has been — had so many barriers to entry because the language requirement kept out people from, you know — went to less well-funded schools, who tended to go to private school and not public, so I think there’s an understanding and an acknowledgement there of an historical fact, that the field, because of its privileging of language — and I didn’t even actually get to this point, you know, when you said we’re not really doing classics if we’re not really studying the languages. A lot of my colleagues these days would say that’s not fair. That’s not true because there are faculty in classics departments doing history of philosophy or history of science or other fields — history of archeology for which language study really isn’t, you know, the primary skill required.

John Donovan:

But that critique seems to go to the administrative behavior of the department, as opposed to what’s in the text. So, what’s in the text, if anything — I didn’t hear you make that argument, but what’s in the text that is toxic?

Joy Connolly:

Oh, I — that’s not a line of argument I would descend. And here’s where I agree with Thomas, that, you know, the text — I’ve — I won’t try to restate what you already put. I’m not — I don’t see in classical text a toxicity of their own.

[applause]

John Donovan:

So, when we’re saying — you’re arguing that the classics are overrated. It’s not the authors and what they had to say, but it’s how they’ve been used?

Joy Connolly:

Correct.

John Donovan:

One of the — so, one of the —

Joy Connolly:

Correct.

John Donovan:

Okay, so the — yeah. And one of the ways that — the critiques that I’ve heard, in terms of how the text has been used has been, for example, over time to, you know, justify slavery, being in slavery, etc cetera. So that — you spoke so much, Thomas, about the virtues that you’ve found in the text. There are also vices there, and I just want to ask you how you process that.

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Well, I think that you can use many things that we value for dual or more purposes. The Bible was used to justify slavery. I wouldn’t say that, therefore, we should consider Christianity to be white supremacist. I mean, there are very flawed interpreters of messages. There are very flawed people at any given time using technologies that can also be used for good. There are very — I mean, we have to separate how something was used or misused from the thing itself. And so, I don’t think that that’s on the — it’s not the fault of the classics any more than it is the fault of the Old Testament that slavery was justified by people that did really horrific things to other people. Nuclear power can make nuclear weapons, or it can make clean energy. I mean, there — it just seems to me that that argument doesn’t really compel me one way or the other. Is it an argument that you feel that you would adhere to?

Joy Connolly:

No. I agree with Thomas, here. It’s the misuse and the appropriation of texts that were written for all kinds of reasons with all kinds of motivations and that have a lot to offer to all different, you know — many, many different kinds of people to serve a certain [unintelligible] that link — I think I said quickly before. That link, you know, the contingent success of Europe starting in the 17th and 18th centuries, the great divergence, as some people call it, where Europeans did manage to establish a relationship with the rest of the world that they then justified by — or, with, partly, the lifting up of a tradition that they called their own and they constructed it as they went. They built the plane as they flew it, to a certain degree. And that — it’s the construction of that tradition and the claim of specialness that has been — become intertwined with histories — of domination and oppression that has made the — that label so problematic for me. And it’s made me more suspicious, I think, of the confidence that I, honestly, used to have — that, because I could look back at a history of a couple of hundred years of incredibly brave and courageous people, and I think of people like Frederick Douglas, or W.E.B. Dubois, who fought to learn classical text, whether in translation or in the original, who made them their own. And that used to be — again, I’m being totally candid. That used to be enough for me. You know, it’s not that I didn’t understand the interrelated histories I’ve been talking about before and then, suddenly, I had a road to Damascus moment. It was more that I began to lose confidence that the classics really could be appropriated and enjoyed, and that was enough, and that was the turning point for me.

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

If I may just add something, you know, I think it diminishes nothing from the tradition or the reverence we can have for the classics to admit that, like, the classical text — Aristotle, Plato, all — that was maintained and saved for us in the Middle East by Arab cultures when Europe went dark for centuries.

Joy Connolly:

Right.

[applause]

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

And we need to be — we need no commitment to some idea of whiteness that gives whiteness the kind of, you know, proprietary relationship to this text. We can say that, no, we wouldn’t have this really important knowledge that shaped our world if it wasn’t preserved in the Middle East by Muslim cultures. It takes nothing away from the ideas, and I think that we should, you know — we should keep the racists away from claiming these texts as their own by having that full understanding of how we even got to read them in the first place.

[talking simultaneously]

John Donovan:

I want to go, in a couple of minutes, to questions, so it’ll be a couple more minutes, but if you’ll just raise your hand, we’ll bring a mic to you. It is cold up here. I kept —

[laughter]

[inaudible commentary]

[laughter]

Yeah. Thomas, one of the points that Joy made in her opening was that the classics sort of sucked all the oxygen from the room. Not absolutely, but that its stature has tended to overshadow the recognition, input, and value of literature and other sorts of heritages from other cultures. I want to know if you agree with that, and I also want to ask you if you do, because I suspect you will, that — are we the poorer for it, as a culture?

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

I guess I don’t know if I fully agree with that, but I think it is a fact that the world is as it is, and you know, I think that you need to know certain things to be able to navigate the world as it is, and the world might’ve been otherwise, you know. You can imagine a world in which it was necessary to master the thought of Confucius, and that’s not the world that we inhabit. It might be the world that my grandchildren have, still, but it’s not the world as it is, and so, it seems to me that it’s not the most important question to ask if there are other things that the classics have sucked the air out of. It seems to me that these things matter because they have stood the test of time and they have become important.

John Donovan:

But you do think that’s an important question, I think.

Joy Connolly:

I do. I actually — it didn’t — when I said at the beginning it didn’t have to be this way, I had in mind a very particular moment in the history of classical scholarship in the 17th century — 16th and 17th centuries, there were a bunch of scholars — European scholars in Switzerland and Germany and France and England who — and this is before the institutionalization of the university. It was before, really, the professionalization of scholarly study began, and although these individuals were highly professional in their practice, and they were curious about everything. So, they studied Latin and Greek, but they also studied Hebrew, which was not easy in these days when Jews had been expelled from so many parts of Europe, so they really had to move heaven and earth, if I can put it that way, to try to learn Hebrew. They were curious about Coptic and Syriac. They were curious, although they had a really tough time studying, you know, Sanskrit or Chinese or Arabic, but they wanted to and they, you know, they write very ardently about this and wrote — and started to write, actually, as Arabic historians had before them, world histories where they tried to capture everything that was going on in the globe that they knew about, which, of course, was limited. So, it’s that — that’s a path not taken, because with the rise of the professionalization of the university and the rise of, in particular, German scholars who, for reasons we don’t have time to talk about, you know, made some quite bizarre and over the top claims about the excellence of Greek culture and the special relationship Greece had with Germany, and the rest of Europe. That’s what took us where we are, but there is this path not taken, so when you say your grandchildren might live in a world where people are studying Confucius and, as I said, you know, Arabic, Sanskrit, Mayan text — that’s a world we could have lived in, had not the history of imperialism and European domination taken over, in a sense, colonize ancient studies as it had begun to flower in that early —

John Donovan:

You know, in Washington D.C., where so much of the government architecture is inspired by Greek and Roman architecture — columns and temple-like structures — the Supreme Court, etcetera, I just wonder — Thomas, you place so much value on the values that came through these texts. How do you imagine, if at all — if you have ever imagined our culture if we hadn’t had that heritage?

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Counter-factuals are always difficult.

John Donovan:

Yeah, I realize.

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

They’re — it’s just difficult.

John Donovan:

But they’re fun.

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

They’re — I mean, if our culture didn’t emphasize some of these values, I think that, maybe, I can easily imagine a situation in which my life would be more impoverished. You know, it’s not that this society always lived up to the values, but it’s that the values, when they’re lived up to, gave me a chance to have what I feel like was a genuine shot at liberty, and the value of an education is — it’s liberating force. Thomas Jefferson was a flawed man who, in many ways, was a hypocrite, but the values that he inscribed in the Constitution are some of the best that I think anybody born into any society has a chance to be subject to. I live in France and I have for the past 11 years, and I can say that I don’t think there’s a society that I would rather roll the dice and have my life be born into more than America, and I say that living in a society that I think is very inviting and very fair, but I still think that the values that have shaped America, that come up to us through the ancients and then through Europe and that were kind of, you know, I think, even further perfected in certain ways here, despite all of what we’ve not been able to do, right? I think that I’m very fortunate to have been raised in such a society.

John Donovan:

Sir, you had a question in the front row. A mic —

Cheryl Adams:

I have a question. I have the microphone.

John Donovan:

Where are you?

Cheryl Adams:

[laughs]

John Donovan:

It’s hard to see you. It’s just light.

Cheryl Adams:

Well, I’m over to your right.

John Donovan:

I see you now, but when did you get called on by me?

Cheryl Adams:

She gave me the microphone, and I said, “Excellent.”

John Donovan:

Go for it. Can you just tell us your name?

Cheryl Adams:

So, my name is Cheryl Adams [spelled phonetically], and I’m here to say that — and I wrote this down, the influence of Africans is evident [unintelligible] the 8th century. So, what I want to know is, how do you incorporate the classics into a curriculum so that young African American children can understand how important that was for them, in the context of the African impact on literature? And how do you incorporate that so that they’ll understand that we’ve been a part of this whole literary concept from day one?

John Donovan:

Formally speaking, that is a perfectly constructed question.

Cheryl Adams:

Thank you.

John Donovan:

So, why don’t you take that?

Joy Connolly:

I didn’t actually hear — quite — the formally constructed question. I’m sorry. Your mic went a little soft.

John Donovan:

As I understood it, you said it’s obvious through the literature the influence of Africans, and how can that information, that knowledge, that participation be brought into the study for — so that African American children can recognize their place in the story?

Joy Connolly:

Thank you.

Cheryl Adams:

Predominant seems to be —

John Donovan:

I need to get to the question. Thanks.

Joy Connolly:

Thank you very much. I’m sorry I didn’t hear the question the first time. I think that, in particular, developments since, really, the 1980’s — that they go back, you know, even a hundred years if you excavate attempts of scholars to pay attention to things that weren’t paid attention to before. I mean, to think about trade and commerce, to think about the conveying of cultural ideas beyond the simple story of, you know, the beginning of the world, and in Athens, with some borrowing from Egypt and a few borrowings from the ancient Near East, and that was still the story I was being taught as a high school student in the 1980’s, and we’ve come, you know, lightyears beyond that. But we need to go further in headlining that, you know, culture doesn’t start like a seed and grow up — I’m sorry. I’m ruining, now, my earlier plant imagery.

[laughter]

But it doesn’t start that simply. It’s a product of networks and flows and contact among people, and that is the piece — that kind of contact, those kinds of flows of North Africa, the ancient Near East, the northern part of the Mediterranean, but we’ve got to make the headline of our study so that it is, you know, inviting, that it makes sense, and that it’s historically accurate. That’s the key.

John Donovan:

There’s a question in the front row. And please wait for the microphone. This gentleman — can the mic be brought around? Thanks. And would you mind standing, if you can? Thanks. And tell us your name.

Tom Meenack:

Hi, I’m Tom Meenack. [spelled phonetically]

John Donovan:

We’re not — are you able to hear?

Joy Connolly:

No. I’m having trouble hearing.

John Donovan:

Okay. I don’t think it’s you. I think it’s the mic.

Tom Meenack:

Is that better?

John Donovan:

No, we need to hear it for the recording. I just want to double check. Julia, can you tell me in my ear whether you’re hearing the questioner clearly?

Tom Meenack:

Okay, so first of all, it’s the mark of a great debate when, one moment, you’re going, “Yes, what she said,” and, “Yes, what he said,” so thank you for that.

[applause]

We live in an era where everything is under question. What’s a fact? I have facts. You have a hundred facts. I think I know what a woman is, but can you define what a woman is? So, in that context, how were the classics defined, you know?

John Donovan:

I’m going to say that that was a perfectly framed question, also.

Tom Meenack:

So, we —

John Donovan:

We just don’t have time. It was a great question. I want to say you nailed it and go for it. How are you defining it, because —

Joy Connolly:

Yeah, and it can be defined many ways. It’s a great question. I think, because I’m a, you know, I am a scholar by profession. I think of the classics as the Greek and Latin texts produced, you know, between the 8th century — it was just said, between the 8th century B.C.E. through about 400 or 500 C.E. It gets harder to figure out the end. I myself wish that classical scholars would push that definition, even working within the Greek and Latin tradition, later, and engage with texts written in Latin and Greek, you know, through into the early modern period, because there’s so much interesting stuff, including works by indigenous people in South America who learned Latin and started writing their own histories. There’s fascinating stuff out there that we’re just beginning to study. But I think — maybe you want to jump in here — that there’s also a way to think usefully about the classics in terms of the classical tradition that’s been constructed. The one that I’m trying to say is not enough for us today, but I’m not denying it exists, so.

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Yeah, I mean, I agree with what you said. I think that there’s also the — there’s —

[child cries]

[laughter]

Thank you [laughs].

John Donvan:

You know, there was a happy hour before the debate.

[laughter]

I’m now recognizing the energy

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

You know, there’s the classics that you delineate and I think what I heard you saying was that there’s the kind of — the works that are in conversation with them that span a larger timeframe, and that I think there’s some porousness in those boundaries.

John Donovan:

I’m looking for more questions. Again, in the front row, and the mic’s coming to you. Just hang on for one second, thanks. If you could stand up.

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

There’s a front-row bias out here.

John Donovan:

I’m looking — actually, is that true? It might be that I can’t see — oh, there are plenty of hands. All right, after this, I’m going to the back. It is true that I can’t see it. Thank you for calling me out on that.

Female Speaker:

Hi, I’m Michelle, and I felt like the points that you made were both so eloquent and so interesting. I wonder, from, sort of, a policy perspective, or even, like, a personal and practical perspective what we could do to change, to either, you know, expose the classics to more people of color, or to diversify, you know, the ideas that we’re exposed to. Thank you.

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

That’s a great question. I think that what I try to do and what I find very, actually, effective whenever I get in front of crowds of students who come from less-advantaged backgrounds or students who are not necessarily always told that the classics or such texts are for them, what I try to do is I try to talk about some of the fundamental ideas that I think actually do matter to them. What is a meaningful life? How can I live a meaningful life? What is the good? What is, you know, what is the bad? What is a life worth living? How do I flourish? You know, these are questions that I think — actually, if I can be one hundred percent honest, I think these matter to people whose lives are a little bit less privileged more than they sometimes matter to people who have very comfortable lives. And I think when you talk about the content of the ideas in such terms, I don’t feel like you’re putting a barrier of elite culture between the audience and the ideas and I think that they can really see how it does apply to their lives. And so I think that what we need is — there was an amazing book that came out last year, Rescuing Socrates, by a Dominican-American scholar, Columbian Roosevelt Montas. And he teaches this stuff — you know, he doesn’t just teach at Columbia. He goes back in the Bronx and he teaches this stuff to students who don’t really have a lot of privilege, and he says that these are some of his most inspired students. And that’s certainly been my experience. I think that we have to get out and we have to show people who don’t necessarily have the vocabulary what is at stake and why it matters, and I think that would do a lot to kind of closing the gap. And I think that — yeah.

John Donovan:

Okay, I want to — Let’s hear from the back.

[applause]

Male Speaker:

[unintelligible] you can hear me. Okay. Hi. I’m [unintelligible]. I’m a bit of an amateur history nerd myself, so, Joy, I wanted to ask a question that teases a part of something that you alluded to that I thought was so important. When we talk about the classics, typically, we sort of cut it off at 476, which excises the entire Byzantine history. We lose the Alexia, the story of a strong and powerful woman leading her empire. We lose the [unintelligible] and so many other things, but that leads to my question, which I promise is not just a comment. Given the very notion of classics, cherry-picking some parts from a very rich tapestry, and what sort of bias do — happen at work in creating that cherry-picked definition of classics? And —

John Donovan:

That’s one question, so go for it. Thank you.

Joy Connolly:

That’s already a huge one. That’s a great question. It’s — there are so many ways to answer it. I’ll say that when the tradition becomes more Christian, that becomes a problem for the filters after the enlightenment, because they’re secularly biased. They become pretty anxious about including a lot of Christian writers. They want to make the new academy, which was just being invented in the early 1800’s in Germany and then spreading around Europe and coming to North America. They wanted to be a secular institution, primarily serving the state, and so, there’s a heavy bias towards public affairs in classical — in Greek and Roman text. That’s not too dissimilar, actually, from the bias in Chinese text, because there’s a similar interest in state affairs and public affairs and educating citizens — educating, you know, civil officials. So, that’s — those are a couple of the filters. There’s a concern about religion and there’s a real interest in civic virtue and how to live well as a citizen in company with other people. These have been, you know, incredibly generative over time, even though I do still want to put a big skeptical — let’s think critically about drawing that red line from, you know, Athens and Rome through whatever European cities we feel comfortable — and then, too, Washington D.C. The philosopher Anthony Appiah calls this the “golden nugget problem,” that he says, you know, you have this — these ideas. You think of them as a golden nugget being passed and then, oh, they get sent to — into, you know — to Arabic scholars for a while, and then they get passed back to — and he thinks that, you know — he uses this image to kind of pull apart the idea that there is an essence to Greek and Roman text that kind of filters down over time. He thinks we need to look at that assumption a lot more critically, and I agree with that wholeheartedly.

John Donovan:

So, I’m sorry. We have to wrap on the questions to keep to time. However, we’re going to ask you in a couple of minutes to — we’re going to poll you again. And while we’re waiting for the results, we may unofficially take some more questions during that gap in time. But right now, we want to give each of the debaters a chance to, one more time, make their case. And as you were the yes before and went first, you’ll go first again.

Joy Connolly:

Great. First of all, I want to thank you. I was so shivery when I came out at the beginning. All my thoughts of gratitude flew out of my mind along with the wind. So, thank you so much for coming and staying, and I want to thank Thomas for being such a generous minded and friendly and fun interlocutor even — I think we do disagree. We had to struggle sometimes to find disagreement. I suspect — I feel, anyway, one point where we profoundly agree is a worry about people not reading and you know, my — I’ll put it this way, that the economic pressure — the financial pressure on students right now, pushing them to — and their parents or whoever’s paying for their tuition or worrying about the debt, to focus on, you know, employable skills. I don’t dismiss that. It’s a serious concern. I take students’ concerns absolutely seriously, so we need to do some serious rethinking here about the way universities and colleges, for one, are valuing these texts. Do everything we can, as you said, to encourage students to think of big ideas and big risky tough questions as exactly what they should be spending at least some of their time in college thinking about, and then beyond. So, I’m going to make one final pitch for thinking big, thinking creatively, being more curious and not being comfortable with the traditions we’re used to, but creating new ones. I think we can actually make a world where we value Confucius next to Plato, and historians of Greece alongside Arabic historians and Mayan text alongside Sumerian ones, and that’s the world I want to live in. But thank you very much. Thank you.

[applause]

John Donovan:

Thank you. I missed a line in my script. I was supposed to say, “Joy Connolly, one more time.” Now I’ve said it.

[laughter]

Thomas Chatterton Williams, your chance to summarize.

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Yeah. Thank you, John. It was a pleasure for me to be here. I think I was shaking in a way that I don’t want to go back and see the film. Like, I was just shaking the whole night, but — I feel like the breeze was blowing through me. But I just — for me, I think that, you know, the idea I just want to leave and build toward I guess and leave on the stage is ideas matter. A lot of what we’re up against is the kind of vulgarization of culture, full stop. And the delegitimization or the devaluation of reading, of historical knowledge, of thoughtfulness in the social media, technologized culture that’s really not as thoughtful as it should be, and that the thing that I think obscures what matters most is this, kind of, this insistence that identity trumps all. And I think, when we talk about the classics or we talk about books or ideas that we should be paying attention to, we should kind of put aside whether we share an ethnicity or a skin color or a physical appearance with the person bringing the ideas to our awareness and we should judge the books and the ideas based on whether they’re good or bad, whether they’re useful or not useful, whether they’re worthy or not worthy. And I think that if we can keep that in mind, we would have a much healthier interaction with some of these texts that really have stood the test of time and they have for a reason, so that’s why I think that, you know, the classics are not even close to being overrated. I think that we have to get back to a culture that cares about books before we can even have that kind of a dismissal. Thank you.

[applause]

John Donovan:

So, we would like to poll you now for a second time. Now that you’ve heard what the debaters had to say, and I want to say one thing. We aspire in this program to get people who disagree with one another to at least listen to one another, and it was really, really clear that the two of you participated in that way, and I just want to say thank you for how you had that conversation.

Joy Connolly:

Thanks.

John Donovan:

And so, we’re curious to see — we like to see how many people here change their minds. It’s not an imperative, by any means, but to us is an indication that some listening happened, so we want to ask you to scan the QR code again, or go back to IQ2vote again and complete the second poll, and we’ll see if we had any sort of shift in opinion. I’ll give you a minute to do that, and then, so, there were some questions that we weren’t able to get to and since we’re now outside the polling portion of the program, I just — while we’re waiting for the results, I’d just like to give some more folks a chance. So, right in the center, there. You’re wearing a white scarf. Do we still have a mic that you can — did the mics disappear? All right, so just shout it out.

Male Speaker:

Okay, so, I want to refer back to the question, which is — are the classics overrated? My question is, like, do you think you’re, possibly, like [inaudible] at each other, because, like, both your [inaudible] and yeah, like, is to broaden our structure or white supremacy, or is it like, the more ideas [unintelligible] who is doing the rating here?

John Donovan:

Can you — you just got a mic, and you — I would boil down your question. If you say it’s overrated, who’s doing all of this rating here?

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Good question.

John Donovan:

It’s a great question. But can you just phrase it into the mic for us so we can hear it in the recording?

Male Speaker:

Yeah, so my question was — are the classics overrated really depends on who’s doing the rating and how it’s rated currently, right? So, if something’s rated really well, you might want to compare it to that. So, I think — yeah, we would have to define who is doing — what kind of, yeah —

John Donovan:

That’s a fantastic question.

Male Speaker:

— back to this —

[talking simultaneously]

John Donovan:

Who would like to take that?

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Yeah, I would say that was a strong man developed by Intelligence Squared [laughs]. No, who’s doing the overrating? I think that it’s actually — my honest feeling is that that’s a debate being had among elites in certain elite college spaces and, actually, if you get out and you talk to people for whom these questions matter a lot, if you explain to them what’s at stake, I don’t think that they think the classics are overrated. And I’ll tell you, like, from experience. My father, who I mentioned earlier, 85-year-old black man from Galveston, Texas, grew up under segregation, raised my brother and me with no money but in a house full of books, and one of the things he kind of — one of the roles he played in our community was he was kind of the local gadfly and he had a lot of Socratic conversations with anybody who would cross the threshold into our house. Some of the people that crossed the threshold into our house were kids who sold drugs, kids who ended up going to jail, kids who got in trouble, and when they sat down at his desk and he talked to them about some of these questions, and he tried to motivate them to know themselves as well, I don’t think that any of those kids, even if they couldn’t fully right their lives after coming into contact with my father — some of them did right their lives and some of them even ended up going to places like Harvard. I don’t think any of them would come out saying that they believe that the ideas they discussed in my father’s study were overrated or were even, in some way, racialized as white. I think that those would be the first people I would want to talk to and ask if the classics are overrated, before I would get into, kind of, some elite bubbles where there’s a different conversation going on.

Joy Connolly:

Can I —

John Donovan:

Yeah, I just want to ask our producers, are you waiting for me to — are the results ready? Okay. You wanted to answer —

Joy Connolly:

Can I answer quickly? I think I agree that the rating that I have in mind is largely within the university, the people designing the classes that are still called Western Civilization or sometimes just “Civ,” like, this is civilization, and that — I just think can’t hold, and partly can’t hold because the American college and university is now a thoroughly globalized entity, right, and we’re proud of that. It’s a great advance. We have faculty recruited from all over the world. We have students recruited from all over the world. The pandemic has put a, you know, a wrinkle in that, but we hope to get back to a fully globalized, you know, people community within the academy, and I really believe that there are good questions being asked by students, by faculty, by parents, by trustees, by all kinds of people saying, “Why is it that, you know, 50 years after starting to have a conversation about getting rid of a world where we have a class called “Conversations of the West” which is intellectual history, and then “World Cultures,” which is everything else? I mean, that’s — we don’t want to live in that world, I think, anymore, and yet, when we talk within the academy, even with experts — scholars of literature, scholars of philosophy, we still are asked, “Well, but are there any texts one would teach in a great books class that’s more than western?” Of course, there are. Of course, there are. But that’s where I think the overrating — I might use the word “revering” does the work of crowding out and silencing that. That is wrong, both in terms of historical representation, accurate representation of how the world works in terms of production of thought, and it’s wrong because it does damage. It doesn’t — it’s not a good education for students or for citizens in a global world.

[applause]

John Donovan:

Okay. Come on out, Marlette. We have the results. Thank you so much.

[applause]

All right. We want to see how many of you shifted your position. Before the debate, 30 percent said yes, the classics are overrated. 55 percent said no, they are not. 15 percent were undecided. In the second poll, 32 percent said yes, the classics are overrated. 59 percent said no, the classics are not overrated, and 9 percent were undecided. But we found through our magical manipulation — not manipulation — analysis.

[laughter]

Analysis. Analysis of your data — that is going to haunt me forever.

[laughter]

We found through our analysis of the data that 34 percent of the people here changed their mind one way or the other, so a lot of you listened, and we are really, really pleased by that. I want to thank you. I want to thank the Atlantic Festival. I want to thank you all for keeping an open mind. I want to thank our debaters. I’m John Donovan. We will see you next time.

Joy Connolly:

Thank you.