STANFORD DOCUMENTS
657
Faced with those frozen in dogmatic religious belief, I would make
them aware of the formidable power of Humean skepticism.
The greatness of Plato's
Republic
as a perennial philosophical
text is that it lends itself to the exciting counterposition of arguments
and sentiments with respect to themes that have contemporary vi–
brancy such as feminism, censorship, the defects of democracy, the
snares of totalitarianism, and many others. And this without re–
liance on the feeble dialectic of Socrates' interrogation; the teacher
can further this open approach with occasional reference to sup–
plementary reading.
Thirdly , some of the criticisms of the course are clearly bizarre
and others manifestly unwarranted . One of these criticisms asserts
that the content and standards of Western culture were restricted to
"elite members of Western society." But under the social conditions
of the past who else but the elite could be the creators of culture?
History has winnowed out the elite contributions of the elite . Does
this criticism imply that the elite contributions of the past are beyond
the capacity of Stanford students? What has happened to the pursuit
of excellence? Not so long ago Dean Norman Wessells declared that
Stanford "continues to assemble on the faculty a group of persons
who are among this country's - and indeed the world's -leading
scholar/teachers." He goes on to say that "the University's under–
graduate body is elite by anyone's standards ." With a teaching body
and student body of this character, what objection can there be to a
study of the elite culture of the elite? What else has come down to us?
We are also told "that the elite ideas are not the totality of
meaningful ideas in a society." Of course, the elite ideas are not the
totality of meaningful ideas .
If
they were , they wouldn't be elite. Yet
this tautology is offered as a critique of Western culture. There is a
wide variety of other courses in sociology, anthropology, economic
history , politics , etc. in which other aspects of society can be studied.
In
my Jefferson Lecture , sponsored by the National Endowment for
the Humanities , "The Humanities and the Defense of Freedom," I
have argued that Western democracy owes more to the trade unions
and the dissident churches than to the elite humanist tradition . But
the justification for the study of the great works of Western culture is
not political. The oft repeated charge that the Western culture pro–
gram "propounds white male values and slights the contributions of
women and minority groups to the development of the Western tra–
dition" is simply unwarranted .
Finally , the epistemology of the criticism of Western culture is
