ARE THESE THE `GREAT BOOKS', OR IS IT JUST INDOCTRINATION?

Professor Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri State University, offered us some interesting information in a news release this week. These folks have secured a $1550 grant from the Missouri Humanities Council to study the "Great Books that Made a Difference".

Precisely what "Great Books" will be studied? Don't confuse these with the "Great Books of the Western World", the University of Chicago series inspired by the late Robert Hutchins, which many fine homeowners have purchased for their libraries. In the upcoming course of study your tax dollars are funding, it would appear that only the Politically Correct need apply.

The list, according to Dr. Nickell:

"The Population Bomb", by Paul Ehrlich, who, together with this book, has been conclusively discredited and revealed to be a false prophet of doom in matters of human population, ecology and food supply.

"The Other America" by Michael Harrington, a harshly critical, isn't-America-awful look at poverty, written by America's leading socialist theoretician.

"The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan, the bible of militant feminism by America's dreariest and most strident critic from the left/feminist perspective.

"Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson, one of the seminal tracts of modern environmentalism, which did as much as any work to foment unfounded ecological panic and a phony scare about the dangers of pesticides. (Other selections are Vance Packard's "The Hidden Persuaders" and John Griffin's "Black Like Me", as to which yours truly must confess ignorance; but it's fair to conclude that neither was a monthly selection of the Conservative Book Club.)

Hmmm. .... What do you suppose would be the reaction were I, or some other conservative, to secure a grant from the Missouri Humanities Council for studying the Great Books that have recently influenced Americans' lives?

Let's just have ourselves some fun today. Let's suppose that, having secured such funding to the tune of over a thousand tax dollars, I set out to select a reading list for a proposed "Great Books" class. Call it the Freedom Syllabus:

1. "Suicide of the West": Written by the late, distinguished Professor James Burnham, this is a 1964 classic that explored the pathology of liberalism as an ideology whose purpose and functions are first to encourage, then to reconcile us to, and finally to bring about, the suicide of Western civilization.

2. "Mere Christianity": The classic, slim volume of Christian apologetics by C.S. Lewis, the renowned British author, critic and scholar (or just about any other work by C.S. Lewis).

3. "The Road to Serfdom": A classic 1944 work by Austrian free market economist Friedrich Hayek, stressing the inherent folly of statist/socialist/big government "solutions"; that socialism would impoverish any nation whose leaders tried it; and that Germany's National Socialism (NAZISM) and Soviet-style Communism were two ghastly sides of the same, socialist coin.

4. "Witness": The classic, true-life story of the late Whitaker Chambers, an ex-American Communist Party member and TIME magazine editor who, upon renouncing that Party to become a passionate anti-Communist, gloomily feared that he had left the winners to join the losers, in the titanic struggle of the 20th Century. It's also one of the great stories ever written about the eternal struggle between faith and atheistic materialism.

5. "Enemies of Society": The classic, brilliantly witty 1977 attack on the "fascist left" by internationally acclaimed British historian Paul Johnson. This scholarly work boldly identifies those pursuits that are civilizing, distinguishing them from the false ones that destroy civilization. (Other Johnson possibilities would be his sweeping "History of Christianity" or his masterful survey of recent world history, entitled "Modern Times: The World From the '20s to the '80s").

6. "The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Our Students": Written by acclaimed University of Chicago scholar Allan Bloom, this is a searing critique of the intellectual poverty of modern education and the appalling state of what passes for mass culture in America today.

Other candidates for inclusion might be former Treasury Secretary William Simon's 1978 book "A Time for Truth", an impassioned cri de coeur warning Americans that the 1970s' malaise and stagflation were the result of "a fundamental assault on freedom that is transforming the country." Or former Rep. (now HUD Secretary) Jack Kemp's 1979 book, entitled "An American Renaissance", an inspirational tract arguing that cutting marginal income tax rates would produce non-inflationary growth and unprecedented prosperity. President Reagan and the movement he led enacted these reforms during the 1980s, producing the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history.

We might also profitably study "Breaking Ranks", which Commentary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz wrote to describe his odyssey from radical liberalism to neoconservativism. (Podhoretz names names, gives dates, and relates how, for him, the breaking point came during the Vietnam War when his fellow salon radicals began spelling "Amerik a" with the "k" to indicate their view of our resemblance to Nazi Germany).

Who can doubt that my Freedom Syllabus would earn me a faculty horse-whipping on the campuses of the overwhelming majority of colleges Southeast included? Consisting as it does of freedom philosophy books with a Judaeo-Christian God at the center and democratic capitalism unapologetically defended my Freedom Syllabus is verboten, anathema, not worthy of being considered.

In 1950, the great critic Lionel Trilling of Columbia University could state that the only American intellectual tradition was a liberal one that there simply did not exist any American conservative intellectual tradition worthy of the name. In 1965, CBS newsman Harry Reasoner could (and did) visit Houck Field House here to address a teachers' meeting, and claim that the fact that there was not a single conservative working for any of the major networks reflected the fact that no valid conservative critique of American society existed.

Neither man could seriously maintain this position today. As Reasoner spoke during the '60s, conservatives licked wounds suffered in the Goldwater debacle the year before. But even as he spoke, we were developing the critique of liberal governance that has controlled no, dominated American politics ever since. Beginning in 1968, conservative candidates have won five of the last six presidential elections, four by historic landslides. By 1988, liberalism was so completely discredited that liberal Democrats everywhere ran from it Michael Dukakis most especially included. Liberalism had indeed become the philosophy "that dare not speak its name."

How did this transformation occur? How did it come to pass that the Reagan Revolution swept first America, then the world? (Those who doubt it can look not only to formerly Communist countries but to Sweden, model for the Western socialist welfare state, which this week dumped the socialists and chose a conservative party promising freedom and a market economy. The world left/socialist/Communist enterprise has collapsed utterly, but at Southeast, we're going to imbibe our "Great Books" economics wisdom from Michael Harrington, the nerdy little socialist who hates America).

The answers, in part, are in the books I have listed on the Freedom Syllabus. Those answers will not be found in the hate-based critique of America and democratic capitalism that are the stuff of Professor Nickell's little reading list.