Eric Adler on the New Humanism

Welcome back to the new thinkery. My name is David Barr and with me is always this my good friend Eric Adler. Eric, how are you doing? Oh, it's great to see you all the time.

It's great to see you. Yeah, my good friend. How it's for you. How are you doing?

Well, Greg, how are you? I'm also well. So let me ask you guys. Let me ask you guys.

Is it duck season? I don't I think it's earlier in the fall. No, I think I think it's that bit season. Oh, geez.

Wow, that's like me bad. Alex. Eric Adler is muted, but he is laughing. So is that a Looney Tunes joke?

Yeah, it's okay. Yeah. Oh, I picked up on that very nice. You say yeah to him when he makes that corner joke?

Well, great. I mean, a Bob at joke last time and nobody bit at it. Because I have a higher brow show than that. I see.

I picked up what you did there, too. So I'm excited. Eric Adler, the chair of the Maryland Classics Department, if he's not, I don't care. I used to chair in my book.

He should be. He should be. And every is colleagues would share it immediately amongst all of them anyway. So I mean, what's that?

So we, so Eric is, I think, he's a recurring guest, right? The most episode. You think he's a recurring guest? He says the most episodes.

Oh, almost. Yeah. Yeah. And it's to the point where we've actually sent Eric a microphone.

We bought him a microphone and sent it to him because we just need to be having him on the show. Now, usually we'll have him on to talk about Setonius or some X rated episode in Roman history because, you know, he's a classics professor. But boy, were we excited when we heard that this classics professor wrote the Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer, more correspondence. And so I want to start with the question, Eric, this seems totally besides what you do professionally.

So how did it come about? Thank you, David. And thank you also for having me on as usual. I like to think of myself as kind of the Alec Baldwin of the New Thinkery that I'm kind of not just angry and slightly bloated, but also that I come on, you know, as a guest with some regularity.

Also guilty of murder. Right. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, just in the court of public opinion right now, I think.

I mean, I'm not certain that that we can actually say that without lawsuits, Alex. Also, did you call your daughter a pig? Yes. Yes.

I did. Yeah. So I guess that's another two for three, I guess. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. But I have, as far as I know, I have not murdered anyone. This is already starting off wonderfully.

Yeah. You know, we rise as from here. So basically, I got interested earlier on in my career in the history of the humanities, because I was really interested in how to defend the humanities and how to defend the classics as best I could. And this is not really a subject that was focused on in graduate school.

It was very professionalized and very much focused on reading Latin and Greek and professional scholarship and so forth. And so I had this vague notion that Latin and Greek used to be much more important in American higher education than they are now, but I didn't know why. But I was interested in trying to come up with the best defense possible of the classics and the humanities. When you're a classics professor, you're often asked to kind of defend the value of what you do.

Oh, yeah. You guys are doing a real bang up job. Yeah. Well, my colleagues do some wonderful things.

They are appealing to huge swaths of the population with their exceedingly mainline views on matters. But anyway, I had my own way of possibly doing this. So I wrote a book that came out in 2016 from the University of Michigan, press called Classic the Culture Wars and Beyond. And that book, which was my second, is an examination of the role of classics in American higher education in the 1980s and 1990s.

And as one chapter of that book, I wrote a history of classics in American higher education all the way from the 17th century with the founding of Harvard University or Harvard College, which was originally called New College, all the way to the present. And so I did a great deal of reading for that chapter. And one name that kept on coming up in my research was this guy named Irving Babbit, who I'd never heard of before in my life. And his name came up in all of these histories of American higher education.

And he was listed as someone who was a prominent defender of the classical and modern humanities and a prominent critic of the directions in which American higher education had begun to move since the university movement began essentially in the late 19th century. And his name came up so much in the literature that I felt like, boy, I ought to read something by this guy. I don't know something. He's a prominent defender of the classics.

So I took his first book, which turned out to be his first book from 1908 out of the library, a book called Literature and the American College Essays and Defense of the Humanities. And I read it. And to my surprise, it is the best book on what's happened in American higher education that I think has ever been written. And those of you and I know you guys, I can count you among them who like the closing of the American mind.

I think you would really like literature in the American College too. It has different emphases and so forth. But it also at the same time tries to give this sort of synoptic and philosophical understanding of sort of where things went wrong. And when did that book come out there?

That book came out in 1908. 1908. 1908. And does he prognosticate any in the book?

Do you think he would have seen what's come the present moment or does modern technology play too much of an X factor? No, I think he would have seen what's coming. I really do. And I think that you can even read in the book and you can see that he perceives that the humanities, especially the classical humanities, are being marginalized and the way that the curriculum has been set up in the late 19th century as opposed to the earlier college curriculum, which was humanistic, that it was deliberately crafted in order to minimize the humanities and the role of the humanities American higher education.

So he really is very good about that. And so I kind of took that away. He played a very minor role in my second book. When I talked that away and I thought, well, you know, I might want to work on him in the future.

And so ultimately then I wrote this book called the Battle of the Classics, which we did an episode on that came out in 2020, in which he's a more prominent figure in it. It's not only about Babbitt, but Babbitt's sort of the linchpin of it. And I focus a lot on his educational ideas. And then from that, I got the idea to do this correspondence because I spent as part of my research for the Battle of the Classics.

I spent a week at Harvard and the Harvard University Archives. And that's where I first discovered this correspondence between Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmermore Moore, his best friend and fellow new humanist fellow leader of the New Humanist Movement. And that's when I saw it read it quickly, but I thought, wow, this is a really interesting correspondence and tells us something about these two guys and about their movement that you really wouldn't get from their published work alone. And that's when I came up with the idea of coming out with an addition of that particular work.

So I do see it actually linked to my work as a classics professor. And so far as Babbitt and Moore were both classically trained, Moore spent some of his time as a classics professor. And they were prominent defenders of the classical humanities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So I don't want to you serve David's line of question.

I know he was going to ask about whether there was any romantic inclinations between Babbitt and Moore. But more to the more to the point, what do you think comes out in the correspondence that's not found in that work you mentioned? Because you mentioned you can see their movement more clearly. What is it that we get of their movement for that?

So there are a lot of things. First of all, some of them are simply pragmatic. You get some sense of what they're actually attempting to do and setting up a movement to begin with. And you actually get to see some of the tension between Babbitt and Moore, whereas Moore was always a more blasé about being part of any particular movement, whereas I think Babbitt was very interested in crafting one.

Another major part of their discussion is the kind of partial break that they had in the early 1920s when Paul Elmer Moore moved back to Christianity and started to write Christian apologetics. And Babbitt was much more ecumenical in his approach to reveal religion, and he didn't like that. And so the two of them started to have fights about religious matters in their letters to one another. And you get some sense also of kind of what they really think.

Babbitt and his published work, perhaps because he wasn't a Christian, was always somewhat cagey about his religious views. His religious views come out more clearly in the letters and they do actually in his published work. But another thing is that they also comment on one another's writing throughout the correspondence. And so you get some sense of actually what their views are of one another's writings in very important ways.

And you get a clearer sense of what they actually believe. And so I think that that comes out from the correspondence as well. You know, we should have done this first and you talked a little bit about who Irving Babbitt was, but who was Paul Elmer Moore? And if you want to touch on Babbitt as well, just to give folks some background, you mentioned they're both glasses at one point at more was as well.

But what else should folks at home know about these guys? And to piggyback on that, because they're part of this movement of new humanism, what is this new humanism? And to piggyback on that, point point. Well, that was really worth it, Greg.

Thank you. I hope that that makes a cut. Jake, again, we use that in the sneak has been. Ooh.

So to start, so these two guys are the two leading figures of an informal movement of literary and social criticism. It's commonly called the new humanism. Irving Babbitt lived from 1865 to 1933. He was a classically trained professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard University.

And Paul Elmer Moore was his best friend. They had both been in graduate school together at Harvard. And Paul Elmer Moore was a literary critic and sometime professor and editor. He was editor in chief of the nation.

The magazine that still exists to this day from 1909 to 1914. It was somewhat different in its inspiration and emphases in Paul Elmer Moore's day than these days. I think it's safe to say. And the two of them were best friends, intellectual allies, and were the kind of leading figures associated with this new humanist movement.

Both of them had strong classical training from their earlier days. But both of them, their graduate training, they both had master's degrees and not PhDs. Both of them in their master's degrees actually focused on Sanskrit, Pali, and Indian philosophy. So that was their background there.

And both of them ended up being the sort of major figures. Paul Elmer Moore almost won the Nobel Prize for literature. He was put up a couple of times for that. So he was seen as one of the greatest literary critics of his generation, maybe the greatest literary critic of his generation.

And Babbit was a very influential figure both at Harvard where he became this very popular teacher, but also as a writer as well. And the two of them got many accolades. So if I want to talk about what new humanism is, I guess more generally, that's a more complex topic. And I will do not full justice to it in the discussion.

You'll have to read humanistic letters and hopefully some work by Irving Babbit and Paul Elmer Moore to get a fuller sense of what I mean by this. But both of them linked the humanist movement to ethical dualism. I think that was a key thing that they spied in the humanist movement sort of implicitly from in its historical aspects beginning in Roman antiquity. But then they sort of saw the movement were broadly and linked to anyone who sort of believed in this kind of spirit of ethical dualism.

They called humanists, even if they weren't historically associated with the humanist movement or not. They believe that all true humanists recognize that human beings possess both impulsive desires, what the philosopher, Ory Bergson, who was the huge rage of French philosopher called the Elan Vitale or vital impulse. And the ability to restrain or affirm these desires, what Babbit called the frame Vitale or inner check, which he also called the higher will. In order to live a good life, human beings must learn how to engage their inner check, refraining from base and selfish desires and affirming those impulses that are conducive to respectful and productive and civilized life.

Are you talking attention, David? Yeah, yeah, inner check, David. Inner check, yeah. He's learning some self help here, I think that's going on as well.

That's very useful. So, Babbit stressed that in order to live a good life, human beings must learn how to engage, like David might, his inner check, refraining David from base and selfish desires and affirming these more conducive to civilized life kind of things, even if you live in North Carolina. So, Babbit stressed that every human being is the product of a civil war in the cave, a conflict between one's lower will, one's natural impulses, and a higher will, which is a sort of inner check on impulse. And they saw two threats to this humanist kind of dualism.

One, they called sentimental naturalism, which Babbit and more associated with the romantic movement, and which denies the base inclinations and human beings and believes that human impulses are naturally good and you just have to revel in them. And then second, what they called scientific naturalism, which they associated with Francis Bacon, which avoids this civil war in the cave in favor of human beings' mastery over nature. Although they both recognize some values in romanticism and I think in Baconianism, Babbit and more believe that the complete dominance of those ideologies, naturalistic or monistic ideologies without a humanistic dualistic counterweight would lead to personal and civilizational misery. And they attempted also, especially Babbit, but more did this as well, tried to show how the changes that have occurred in American higher education in the late 19th century were deliberately moving away from humanist impulses toward these kind of naturalistic impulses that they thought were going to lead to chaos in the world.

And World War I, I think, had a major influence on them in sort of saying, aha, this is the kind of thing that happens if you don't believe in a kind of dualistic spirit of humanism. One final thing before we get to some questions about this, I suppose, is that they were rather ecumenical in their views. And Babbit was interested, especially, more to a lesser extent, but I think was as well, in kind of updating the humanist movement to encompass more than its historical confines would suggest. So that they would focus on various Greek figures who weren't humanist in this particular, you know, they wouldn't call themselves humanist, it's a Latin word, humanitize is a Latin word, but they still would link to the humanist movement because they believed in the spirit of ethical dualism.

And then also they saw various Eastern thinkers, Buddha and Confucius, most clearly, but Jesus as well, as linked to this spirit of ethical dualism too. So they were interested in kind of broadening humanism so that it was a kind of worldwide movement rather than simply a kind of Roman and Renaissance movement and trying to update the curriculum, if you will, for American higher education in the future, so that it could be more representative than the sort of historical humanist movement had been beforehand. Yeah, what's odd to me, Eric, is that you said that you had first heard the name Babbit in graduate school? I actually was a professor by that time.

Yeah, so I think Greg, Alex, certainly me, I never heard the name or I would always confuse it for a novel written by Sinclair Lewis. Nothing to do with her, and Babbit. Actually, it does have to do with Irving Babbit. So it's really hated Irving Babbit and Paul Elmermore.

And he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, beating out Paul Elmermore. And in his victory speech, he called the new humanism a doctrine of death. These guys, in the short biography you laid out, seem to have exerted an enormous influence on their time and their peers, right? So you think they enjoyed the modicum of worldwide fame and certainly fame in the United States, but now nothing, right?

So the four of us hadn't heard their names. They just kind of, I don't know if they've gone away, so if their influence is still around or, I mean, what explains their fall from the public eye? Yeah. Do you have enough proselytizing or is this a kind of?

I think Greg wants to pick you back on me, Greg. Go ahead. What hope is there for Barre, Priy, and McBrayer, if Babbit, and more have no. We're going to rely on Eric Adler's great-grants on to unearth our texts and tweets to one another and trying to piece together who we really are.

That's true. Alex Priy, who keeps on this pace, I mean, he's going to write everything other than the Bible by the time he's deceased. So we're not worried. We're not worried about it.

It's on my list. Maybe a new Quran. I've got a PDF waiting for when the nuclear holocaust occurs. It's been really my prior life.

So yes, it's certainly true that they became, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, they became very famous. And in fact, as I talked about in the show notes a little bit, there was a debate at Carnegie Hall in New York City that was apparently very well attended in 1930 between Irving Babbit and some critics of his. So he was very well known. They also were very influential.

I mean, T.S. Eliot was one of Irving Babbit's students and he was close for a time at Paul Omermore as well. Walter Lippmann had been one of Babbit's students and he was very influential afterwards. It wasn't a huge fan of Babbit as a student but became more amenable to him over time.

They influenced Benadet O'Krochi. They influenced a large number of thinkers. I suppose that the Russell Kirk book, the conservative mind, is kind of an example of that because Russell Kirk was very influenced by them as well. So they have had influence and I think there's continued work on them, especially Babbit.

More is perhaps a little bit more obscure these days than is the case. But one of the things that happened was that around 1930 when humanism became this huge topic in American intellectual circles and magazines were talking about it and newspapers were talking about it length, a number of culture warriors wrote in about humanism and they didn't really understand it very well. And they wrote really kind of crazy and mean-spirited stuff about Babbit and more, which they never really replied to. And so they kind of suggested that these guys were fascist somehow which is absurd or that they were kind of political extremists, which I think is also really wrong.

The movement was not sort of really focused on politics as opposed to literary and social criticism. But that major thinkers like Ernest Hemingway got really mad at the humanists and Edmond Wilson got really mad at them as well. And then there was also movement from the right. T.S.

Eliot became more religious and broke away from humanism. G.K. Chesterton became critical of the movement because he thought it was irreligious. Alan Tate had similar concerns as well.

So I think that was part of their sort of downgrading is that they got kind of pilloried by a bunch of culture warriors who really didn't understand what humanism was really about. And that sort of caused problems. I think another issue was that both of these guys were kind of anti-socialist definitely, an anti-status to some degree in their political commitments. And once the 1930s come, you have the Great Depression.

And that obviously isn't going to be a particularly popular approach to affairs. And so they also die younger. I mean, Babbit dies age 67, 1933, more dies a few years later in his early 70s. The second generation wasn't really as strong as the first generation of humanists as far as their work was concerned.

So it just kind of faded, I think. But at the same time, they had had had influences. You can see people like Isaiah Berlin or Benadet O'Krochi or Arthur Lovejoy, they have influenced over various people, but they're just not household names any longer. I have two questions just since we're still on the subject of humanism.

One is I was just wondering if you could speak a little bit more about the mix of East and West. Your introduction was really fascinating. That was one of the parts that fascinated me most. Like how they're trying to combine Plato and Confucius and Buddha.

If you need, I can ask the question a little more critically to try and push. Like, does the mix work? How else can you just say it? Is it just fascinating to me?

So maybe say more. And the second question I have is, as you've been reading this and as you've been becoming more enamored with the new humanists, it sounds like it's not just antiquarian interest. Like, you think it's sort of a healthy ethos. And in fact, and I agree part of your intro again, like I think that they're right that this I see this in higher education, this tendency to focus only on the desires, for example, this scientific naturalism, if I remember the terminology properly.

So two questions. One, what about this mix of East and West and then secondly, it's not just historical. Do you really think there's something to turn into something like humanism? Yeah, those are great questions.

Let me see if I can do my best with them. One, I would say is that Babatimor as I suggested, both studied Indian literature and philosophy, Sanskrit and Pali and so forth. So they're really into it. Babat, it's hard to tell what his religious views were precisely, but if he had any kind of view of revealed religion, which it's hard to tell, he's probably closest to Buddhism in the kind of lesser vehicle formulation.

And Paul Elmermore for a time was pretty close to Hinduism. I don't think he was really technically a Hindu, but he saw Hinduism as superior to his boyhood Calvinism. So they were really in this. And I think that they were what you might call lumpers rather than splitters in their thought.

They were kind of ecumenical kinds of figures, at least for some time, more kind of moves in the direction of Christianity and that sort of disappears to some degree from him. But they were interested in seeing the ways in which various human traditions are actually similar and not just different. So I don't think Babatimor, who are incredibly learned guys, they weren't foolish enough to believe that Confucianism is just like Christianity, just like humanism and so forth. I mean, obviously this is not something that they would have thought in any way shape or form.

But I do think that they believe that there were certain kinds of common principles among thinkers, like dualism, that you can see in, really important thinkers from different traditions, that in traditions, in many cases, it did not cross pollinate very much, if at all. And the fact that they did not cross pollinate, and yet at the same period of time, they had these similar approaches to the challenges of life suggest that there might be a kind of wisdom of the ages that you can find in these different thinkers, and that it might be more useful actually to see what that wisdom actually is and to throw that to students and sort of think about how they ought to live their life. That idea that- I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't need to end, Schopenhauer already do this. Well, you guys are going to answer that better than- No, not me, pal.

I don't know, Alex and David are looking like, you know, but Alex and Greg are looking like they don't want to take that question either. But I do think that they perceive that there was something similar in various human traditions about the challenges of life, that they use the name humanism to try to explain that. And it's not, again, it's not that they thought that those things were precisely the same, but that those similarities might speak to, especially given the fact that those similarities are among core thinkers that have been seen as the most valuable thinkers from those particular traditions. The fact that they have some ideas that overlap is really interesting and suggest that different civilizations have come up with similar responses to the challenges of the human predicament.

And I think that they want to do a compass into humanism. Now we've been very much in the air and I know David wants to ask a question about their influence on Archibald McLeish, but I think it would be good if we got concrete and we turned to some of the letters of the correspondence. How about that? It's April 1902 letter to Moore.

What's interesting about this letter? I believe in this letter that it discusses inter-aliyah Moore's response to that introduction to a book by Ernest Renon 1823 to 1892 at French Orientation. And the French Orientalist and Semitic scholar. Please go on.

Oh, first of all, Alex, that was, I mean, I've never, I know you're an articulate guy. I mean, you're somebody who's written book after book after book. I think I can stop now. But at the same period of time, there's a certain kind of inter-aliyah, like thrown in a Latin quote.

I mean, you have very, very learned character and I just want to take a moment to mention that. So that particular letter, and I'm so glad that you set that up, Alex, in the not hamfisted way that you did. From 1902 talks about the historical sense and I actually added that because I was interested in what Straussians would have to say, particularly about that letter. So, by and large, what they're talking about is Babat's discussion of the historical sense and how it grows in the 19th century.

And he perceives that Moore was writing something about this misunderstood what Babat was getting at. And Babat talks about the fact that he thinks that something called the historical sense existed only among a very few number of people in the beginning of the 19th century, but at the end of the 19th century, it was a much larger sentiment that many more people had. And I suppose, and this is getting away from what they actually said in the letter, but I think one thing that could be related to this is industrialization, so that a sense in 1900 life seemed very different from what it seemed like in 1800. And so it was harder as opposed to 1400 versus 1300, where traditional patterns of life might be very similar, I suppose.

But then another is the so-called movement of historicism, associated with Leopold von Ranka, but other thinkers as well, who had professionalized the study of history to make it so-called scientific, and that one could actually study the past and write about the past as it occurred. And I think that this is sort of part of what they're talking about as well. And so what Babat's talking about in that particular letter is the idea that more people now in his day have this historical sense than they had in the early 19th century. So they have a sense that the present is very different from the past.

But his criticism is that these people use that historical sense for very frivolous purposes, and that frivolous purpose is to sort of wallow in how different and how novel the past was from the present. With the implicit idea that there really isn't anything one can learn from the past. The past is so different from the present that there really isn't anything you can learn from the past at all. And so Babat in the letter is trying to talk about how you can combine the historical sense, a recognition that things were different, and at the same time maintain a kind of concern for human nature overall, and to learn things from the past.

Rather than just sort of just say, oh, well, it was very different at this time and so forth, so there's nothing we can learn. So by and large, how can we keep a sense of the importance of history and the differences of history in the past versus today, but maintain the idea that you might be able to learn from the past certain kinds of principles that are always involved in the past. And so there's a sense that are always important as opposed to things that are just different from the past versus the present at the same time I think there's a line and I don't know I'll say it before Alex does from my show notes, where Babat says, I sometimes wonder whether it is possible to combine the historical sense with any respect for absolute standards. And I think that's one thing that he's trying to get at from the study of great works from the past is this sense that you can actually learn about what human nature is like, not only for the past but always for human beings, while at the same time respecting the fact that the past was different from the present.

And I'm not just back to Alex and Greg and David, but I gather that Strauss's understanding of kind of universalism versus particularism is at least slightly different from that but I wondered what you guys thought about that particular question. I mean one line that comes to mind is in natural right in history page 32 where Strauss is trying to, I think it's one of the most important paragraphs in the book, certainly in the first chapter, he says the following, he talks about the experience of history. And I think it's very important for granted that it is a genuine experience and not a questionable interpretation of experience. The question was not raised whether what is really experienced does not allow of an entirely different and possibly more adequate interpretation.

In particular, the experience of history does not make doubtful the view that the fundamental problems such as the problem of justice persist or retain their identity and all historical change, however much they may be obscured by the temporary denial of the relevance, etc, etc. And so I think he would agree to a certain extent that there is the possibility let's say of trans historical knowledge, but he would, he would raise the question of whether the trans is thinking of it in terms of history is exactly right or whether what we experienced this history is not something else and he would say this is, I think ultimately that what we mean by history is something like convention or law, and that the regime and the laws derivative from the regime are somehow more primary and he develops that more in chapters three or four so I think there's a kind of affinity and disagreement at the same time on this. What's the disagreement? I was just going to you can skip the sentence I like where he says it's grasping the problems as problems that through this is where the mind liberates itself from its historical limitations he was stressing the knowledge I was just stressed that that justice is a problem for humans across time and across culture and civilization seems to be somehow fundamental.

What was the difference can you just try that again for me Alex. Well, just whether whether the phenomenon that you're trying to transcend is properly understood as history or probably understood as convention chapter one by distinguishing ancient conventionalism from historicism and then conventional is not mentioned again. Until chapter three, and there he argues for three and four looking at it more in terms of the law and the machine. That's interesting so I mean I think that Babbitt more were both to some degree influenced by Burke and I think that some of what they're saying is this I think Burke in notion although you guys would probably know this better than I and I know that Strauss was critical of Burke's approach to these issues was the notion that for the most part human beings grasp the universal through the particular.

So it's through sort of daily life or through reading something or something that actually is particular that one gets a sense of the transcendent in the universal and I gather that that's at least slightly different and maybe what you're talking about about history is convention Alex is sort of part of that difference but I gather that that might be part of you know Strauss's criticism of Burke. I think if you will is that he just fundamentally disagrees with that or I don't know or maybe partly disagrees with that where Alex might you say is there an agreement if you will between the notion of the historical sense and its import in in Babbitt and more in their discussion versus what Strauss might have to say about that particular topic. I think I think Greg wants to jump in on the Burke question or something but I think on a on a question of agreement that history is not simply a sort of fundamental premise of all thought that all thought is nearly as joyfully determined. On both of their minds and attempt to sort of escape that tendency which emerges late maternity nationalism coming out of maternity and this greater awareness and this greater sort of sobriety and sort of quote unquote sobriety I should say they both seem concerned with.

You could say maybe they disagree about the illness and agree that there might be possible solutions that are not being entertained seriously. Okay, great. That's helpful. Yeah, thank you.

I mean I was my earlier question about sort of focusing on what's similar across these Eastern Western philosophies might be a issue here as well. I wondered to what degree Strauss would have conceded that, or would have thought about I mean doesn't speak much about Easter I can't think of any mention he ever makes a Eastern philosophy. I mean that often comment about some future philosopher from Burma that's the only thing. I mean does he consider that Jewish philosophers as part of the Western tradition to unproblematically he does okay.

I think that's I mean not unproblematically but they were influenced by Greek philosophy it's a philosophical part is Greek. about this anyway, class lectures when he's discussing Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Yeah. You just want to talk about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, really bad tonight, don't you?

I don't really have much to say past that. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know where you go. Wait, did I miss the second part of your question? No, I think we might have missed. There was a second part.

There was the East West thing. But then you were there was a second. We can come back to it. But I mean, my big question there was, I mean, it seems like this is an academic to you.

It seems like there's something valuable in humanism that somehow, if there were more of them, or if that spirit animated the university more, universities would be doing a better job. Yes. I do think that one of the things that they make very clear, and again, I'm not suggesting that Babbitt more were unimpeachable thinkers. Nothing they ever said was wrong.

And just to follow that, like a Bible or something like that, I mean, no, no Strauss, right? Right. They made mistakes like anybody else. And some of their mistakes, I try to highlight in the introduction to the book.

But at the same period of time, I do think that they hit upon something that was really, really important, which is the idea of the movement away from character development as being important at all in American education. And I think that you can really see that very clearly, and that there was a deliberate movement away from humanism toward what they're talking about. I think that's the world we live in right now. And one of the things I was thinking about, especially in regard to recent events, is that contemporary academic culture, it is tended to be perceived as naive to believe that you could read great works of literature and possibly become a better person as a result of that.

Like by and large, professors are just going to think that that's kind of silly and naive and so forth. At the same time, these same professors tend to believe that abolishing a police or getting rid of the American criminal justice system is the most complex and erudite and clever response to human problems that we are currently seeing. Why would someone believe that? Why would someone believe that the struggle possibly to be a better person is somehow kind of risible or laughable or something that sort of beneath the concerns of an academy.

And at the same time, these kind of radical institutional changes, which I think in many cases, a third grader would see as disastrous, are seen as a high defection. Well, I don't think that that comes from nowhere. And I think it comes from the kind of downgrading of a concern for humanism or character development more generally. And it kind of focus on other ways of trying to solve human problems.

And I'm not suggesting that we should never look at our institutions and the problems with our institutions and so forth. But I think we have completely avoided the notion that we might be interested in crafting better people. And that's what they were concerned about in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And we're seeing the fruits of it now, I think, in many cases.

I totally agree. I want to move on to another letter, but before we do, and if this is too far afield, we can cut this. But I'm very sympathetic. I think I try to do that here.

And you visited me here. We try to model a good life for these students that we have. We try to be involved with them outside of school, take them on hikes. We exercise whether we read.

We do think that this matters to life. So twofold question. One, what would it look like to try and actually put this into practice? Is it only the kind of thing that could be done at like a small school like Ashland?

Or is there a larger institutional change possible? And then my second follow-up question is, I have colleagues here, and I read the news about what's happening at some of the bigger universities and some of the more prestigious universities currently. And people are appalled and don't see how it could possibly happen. I'm thinking myself, do they not go to the same graduate schools I did?

And it's so pervasive. I mean, it's everywhere. And so I guess the second part is, I mean, at those places, they seem so far gone that I don't see how you're going to recapture the idea of character formation at the dominant schools, like Steve Blackships and the IVs and the next year of 20 or 30, non-IVs. It would take a long time, I think, to say.

And we have to recognize that we're the kind of curriculum that we have is really a curriculum that was largely crafted in the late 19th century and augmented in the early 20th century. And that's sort of largely what we're dealing with. Majors comes from the late 19th century. And distribution requirements come from the late 19th and the early 20th century as well.

So we've been dealing with this same approach to higher education for over a century. And it's an approach that is based on deliberately anti-humanistic principles. And I think Babbat and Moore would suggest, and I agree with them, and I don't think they'd be the only ones to suggest it, is that the shape of a university and the shape of higher education is really an extension of its curriculum. And this is one of the things that I find very strange about some people who have many good criticisms of what they call the neoliberal university.

And yet they don't seem to recognize that it's an extension of the kind of curriculum that they actually favor. It kind of puts your own adventure curriculum, whatever's most popular and so forth, whatever it is. It's very important. That a curriculum should be a blueprint for the sort of adult that we're interested in creating.

And look at the curricular blueprint we have. It's a blueprint that suggests that things are only important insofar as they're popular, that there's nothing of any intrinsic importance, that the educated have nothing really to tell people who are uneducated about what they ought to know in order to be educated people and so forth. It's not really a surprise under those circumstances that we end up getting the kind of leadership class in the United States and sort of more generally educated people that we've got. And so I think that it's going to have to mean a major change in the curriculum.

And it would be easier to do it small colleges than at large universities, but there have been steps that large universities have taken as well that I think could be very useful. Honors colleges than the big universities. I just want to say real quick before we move on, like, you know, someone or readers are gonna go to their local bookmonger and they're gonna see this tone and they're gonna look and see like these essays and this correspondence and this other. But what's the heart of it, it's so nice to see you when you're sort of in full form like this.

You can see what's really at stake here. Like this actually, this isn't just like two letters between friends, this is about the future of the university and the effect that the university has on, the character of the entire country. These aren't academic, this isn't pedantic, this is like these are serious questions about how we have to live and what kind of human beings we ought to be creating. That's right, that's right.

And I think that it's also a kind of civilizational question. Because if we end up having kind of disastrous leaders for society who are mal-educated, who cannot reign in their base impulses, we're going to lead to a world of misery and chaos. And you know, they would point to World War I as a kind of example of that. Now again, causal relationship between one of the others is complex, but I think that there's something that would be said for that as well.

And maybe in the past month or so, where we've seen what's going on in a number of elite American college campuses, there could be a kind of wake up moment. And sort of people recognizing, my God, I didn't realize it was as bad as this. I didn't realize that these institutions were as kind of tilted as they are. And they are really right.

And they sort of didn't recognize this stuff. Now again, the inherited prestige associated with some of these elite universities is so great that it's hard to think that there's going to be a very serious movement to kind of reform them. But I still think it's a fight worth having because it really is about the future of our country. And also the future of happiness.

I mean, how happy are these people are aging? Well, they all strike me as so miserable. Yeah, that's a fun part, side part of this, but yeah, they were trying to... I think that people have, I think it would be beneficial if people read more intellectual history, sort of these trends and thought.

I think if we were more acutely aware, especially academics and what happened in the dark ages, I think we assume now because we have the internet and they say, oh, the internet's forever, right? We hear this. That knowledge can't kind of go away or go underground for a long, long time, just like it did in Europe, right? Where philosophy was flourishing in other parts of the world and away for a long, long time in Europe.

And we think that, oh, as long as the books imprint or something that it always kind of be there, but this is something we risk, I think, all the time. We have to remind, that's why these fights are worth having as fights because you cannot take it for granted. It's not just, oh, they're gonna shut her a few classes, six departments. Like you can start to see this stuff go away on a much wider scale.

And you don't know what will bring it back to life. It could be in, we're in the desert for, you know, like a hundred years. And I think related then, as sort of relates to what Greg had talked about before as well, is that you should recognize, and I'm sure you do, that the Italian humanist movement, was a Renaissance humanist movement, started outside the university. So it was deeply critical of who was actually going on in the universities, and then it eventually crept into the universities, but it was really a movement, an opposition to it.

And maybe that's what has to happen in our own culture. I mean, you see some examples of this, as Nina hits as this Catherine Project, there's some online ways in which you can study Latin and Greek and so forth. And again, I'm not suggesting that any of these are panics. And you thinkery, come on.

The new thinkery is another, I mean, of course, it's hard to take Alex Priu, who's writing every academic book, or at least every book that's being read. But yes, so it's an example of trying to reach sort of a broader audience with this stuff. And I think it's a laudable desire, in part because academic culture has grown so corrupt in some ways. But then also, there's, I mean, never mind the politics of it, because I don't think that this is only a political question.

This kind of hyper focus on narrow publication of minimal interest to anybody who's just a regular educated person. I think it's a disaster. And this is something actually that Alex talks about very well in what we can now call the second to last book on this symposium, about sort of somehow discomfort, about the fact that the best thing to do with these ideas is to lock them away from average educated people. That's a disaster as well.

That's not necessarily as sexy as a disaster because it's not a political kind of a thing. But it's also a way of making the life of the mind remote from normal people. That's a disaster, I think. To your point, this actually brings us to a point that we discussed with Jacob Halland when he was here, which is this idea that, and this is I think part of the problem of the university, is we're expecting just like natural sciences to have scientific progress in the humanities.

And so we expect it to get ever more narrow, specialized, ever more sort of distance and more jargony and technical looking. And we feel very good about ourselves as dumb hoes when we do that. But in reality, I think the alternative, which was predominant for most of the history, is that what you're trying to do is trying to not, obviously you want to further the knowledge and sort of explore texts, et cetera, on a sort of academic level. But another, and maybe even the primary responsibility of the humanist or the scholar in this regard, is to somehow remind people, every generation of these books.

And so it's not about doing the definitive edition or the definitive commentary, but it's somehow doing a commentary that makes sense for your time, for the people, and somehow being able to kindle interest in curiosity in a book. And perhaps write a book that has maybe, or some sort of currency beyond your time, but the humanities would in this, I think reading be a constant struggle for revival. And so the Babbitt's sort of articulation struggle, which again, Strauss has a similar sort of vision about this where he's sort of like, we need to sort of remind ourselves about this. It seems much more to the spirit of what Socrates is trying to do, or Greg has this sort of line which he can elaborate on, that people call themselves historians, et cetera, in different times, were actually philosophers.

And they were just trying to do what Plato did under different guys, because maybe the name was the smurched, but it was important to just sort of remind people or revive this activity. Philosophy as revival or humanism as revival, rather than progress, I think is a really important and deeply counter-cultural sort of or counter-historical narrative that you have to propose. Yeah. Yeah.

Just that way, I just wanna say, I just wanna, I mean, it seems like this actually might be a natural segue to this other letter you pointed to from 19 September 1913 on page 205 of your. That's right. Yeah, I think that shows you that the kind of problem that Alex is talking about is a problem that existed in Babbitt's and Morstay. And so that there was going along with a change in the curriculum from one that was dominated by humanism to one that's dominated by the scientific method.

There was this desire among professors of the humanities to try to see their work as scientific. And to link, according to Babbitt and Mor, their work to kind of scientific naturalism, if you will, more generally. And the letter in question from September 1913 pertains to an editorial that was written in the nation by a student of Babbitt's called Stuart Sherman that was critical of a professor named George Lyman-Kiridge. She was at Harvard during Babbitt's school days, but also when Babbitt was a professor.

And Lyman, George Lyman-Kiridge was the kind of chief figure that Babbitt associated with what he called the philological syndicate. And he meant that negatively as a kind of sound negative. George Lyman-Kiridge was a major scholar at Harvard in the early 20th century. And he was primarily a Shakespearean.

And he was enraptured by the kind of German scientific approach to philology. And according to Babbitt, this meant, and to Mor as well, this meant focusing on everything about Shakespeare except for his humane significance as an author. So focusing on- Oh my God, I know so many people like this. The philological, you know what have you.

And then he perceived that this was a kind of naturalistic, scientific naturalistic kind of Baconian project of attempting to small incremental movements in the direction of greater knowledge to the betterment of society, as opposed to humanism, which is largely, as kind of Alex, I think, articulated very well, kind of backward looking, looking to great writers from the past in a sense that you might actually learn something about how to live from reading those particular texts. Not uncritically, not you just, oh, I'm just going to do whatever Aristotle says I should do or what have you. But in a kind of more broad sense that those kinds of humane thinkers might have something to teach us. The way that publishing works in American academia and the way that the curriculum works is in opposition to that spirit of humanism and very much in favor of that kind of scientific approach to the study of the humanities.

And I think that that's been largely a disaster, that the attempt on the part of humanity's faculty to try to write like their scientists has removed their subject from being a concern to average educated people and is also not taken on the prestige of the sciences. People don't think just because this work is written in an argo of pseudoscience that somehow it has the kind of authority of cancer research. I mean, people just don't believe that. And so I think this whole thing has been essentially a disaster.

Alex, pre-awants, not to say so. If I could just read the first line of the city of Manivized jobs, I know we're sort of dancing back and forth between stress and bad, but I think this speaks so powerfully to your, and it's a good reminder, I think always. He starts by saying, it is not self forgetting and pain loving antiquarianism. It's not that we were just like forgetting ourselves and we just hate our time.

So we love to revel in the pain of comparison. Nor self forgetting and intoxicating romanticism, like we're just escaping or something like that, which induces us to turn with passionate interest with unqualified willingness to learn to where the political thought of classical antiquity. We are compelled to do so by the crisis of our time, the crisis of the West. The sense that this is not so much sort of losing yourself in a kind of romanticism, but it is really urgent.

Necessary, like we're compelled to do it. This is something that's beholden to us that we're gonna be thoughtful. I think very much speaks to the shared spirit, to the degree that shared. I agree with that.

And I think, you know, look, I'm not a philosopher by any stretch of the imagination. I've never studied Strauss formally and so forth. But one of the things that I really respect about him is I think that this idea of a return to the ancients is really serious, that he took the ancients really seriously. And I think many modern classics professors don't take the ancients very seriously.

They look at the ways in which Aristotle's views don't comport with modern wokeism or what have you, or the ways in which maybe plenty of the younger's views can fit with transsexualism today or something like that. But they don't really take the idea that what these texts say might be fundamentally true. They don't actually really believe that. I think you can kind of see that.

And so there's an antiquarian kind of feeling. And in many cases, I think with modern classes, it's not all of them, I think, but some of the loudest voices. They seem much more concerned about modern American identity politics than they actually do about the classics. And so, look, I'm not saying that, you know, everything bad I had to say about the classics is correct or scrouser, but have you.

But they took them seriously as potential guides for life. And I think that if more people did that and walked into the classroom and read in that particular way, we might have more thoughtful people on our hands as adults than we have with the more kind of frivolous way of looking at things and kind of pseudo-professionalized way of looking at things, which is the dominant tone in American academia. My university has just come up with a new research center for undergraduates that undergraduates are going to write research papers. And I guess they're gonna publish that.

That's all the rage we do it to. Right. And you know, no one even sort of thinks this, like is pretending to be a professor without having to go to graduate school? Is that really the best use, like, who's got to look at this?

Other than you can put it on your CV and say, I wrote a paper that no one is ever going to read and so forth. What's the value? And I think that there's a kind of poverty of imagination about what these texts can actually do for your life. So that the only thing they can think they could do is maybe you could publish something on them and pretend you're a professor even while you're a sophomore.

I think that sort of shows you the poverty of this particular vision of education and how much more serious it could be if we looked at it from a different angle. If anyone's listening to this, whoever applies at Ashland University, we go to job talks and this then the other, and I'm always, they're always fine, whatever. I like going out to lunch with people. And I'll just, I mean, I hate to give my question to the way about what you're hobbyist, what you like to do.

And then, you know, in very late, I'll just ask, what's your favorite work of literature? And I don't really care what the answer is. Like, I just wanna hear that you've read something that it was interesting to you. And I'll tell you the number of academics, people who have devoted their lives to learning, can't name a single book that's influenced them in a single way.

It's, I'm like, how have you, how do you understand yourself to be someone who loves learning and you've never read anything that is worth mentioning? It's kind of amazing that the hyper specialization you mentioned. Yeah, I mean, well, William Phillips, this we're going very far afield, but he was one of the founders of partisan review and a socialist and someone. Yeah, yeah.

Or at least for some time, he made a distinction between academics and intellectuals and suggested that some academics, but only a small number, actually intellectuals. And so you get a lot of people who are kind of grinding out this sort of research, but it doesn't really mean that much to them. They don't have a love of it. They don't have it.

And in the humanities, that's particularly odd. I mean, if you really think about it, if you're gonna study in different divisions of the university, who has the best books? Well, the humanities has the best books. It's not really close, actually.

I mean, engineering isn't like it in a close second or something like that. It's obvious that the humanities has the best books. But why not love them? I mean, I don't mean love all of them and not be critical of them in any particular way, but why not love them enough to think seriously about the possibility that they can influence your life for the better in somehow.

And I think everything about modern academic cultures speaks against that because it's so professionalized. I'll transition back to your book on the more babbitt correspondence. I mean, it's clear that for more and babbitt, these books matter, right? And as you mentioned, the way you put it in the introduction, how he sort of vacillates it goes through various schools of thought or, you know, Platonism, Christian, Buddhism.

In a way, one could sort of say, oh, geez, I can't make it go as mine. On the other hand, you're like, this guy who takes ideas very seriously. And perhaps it's a super evident in the last series of letters you had us read, which are from 1925, where babbitt has a death in the family. And the way that babbitt and more talk about this, in a way, I mean, like we were talking about sort of poverty of people's sort of intellectual imagination and these kinds of things.

It is sort of sad when you go to, I don't mean to be too revealing here, like when you go to a funeral or when you go to a major occasion and people have nothing profound to say or nothing to say. And I don't mean, I like country music just fine as much as the next guy, but I don't know if you guys follow this, but Roslyn Carter just died. And Garth Brooks and Tricia Yearwood sang at her funeral. Fantastic, awesome, right?

They sang the song Imagine by John Lennon. Now, I'm a huge people fan. I'm a huge people fan. I guess, but yeah.

But I mean, like here's a woman who's, I mean, their public image at least is they're deeply pious people. And what you've chosen is a vacuous song about how life could be better if we were all realized that there's no God. I mean, like I just, this shows a lack of seriousness to me. And this led her the way that they're dealing with personal tragedy, but connecting it to things that they've read.

I sort of found that impressive. Yeah, so yeah. Just to give a sort of basics of it, I've had a younger sister named Catherine with whom he was very close and also intellectually close too. She had gone to Radcliffe and was a teacher of French and they worked on some projects together and so forth.

And she was killed an automobile hit her and she was walking on the highway at her job in between the two parts of the campus and she was killed. And he was very distraught about this. And so he wrote to Moore to tell him is this sort of a really interesting series of letters in part because of humanizedism. I mean, these guys died in the 1930s.

So it's easy to not to think of them as human beings, but instead of thinkers or something like that. And Moore's response, he wrote a response from November 27, 1925 to her, which I thought was really kind of fascinating. In part because Moore was very much a kind of Anglican or semi-Anglican at this time. He had moved back to Christianity.

And so he would have thought that he might have offered a kind of standard Christian response, I guess, to her death. and that is not what he says at all. Instead, he takes it very seriously. If I may read just for a moment from Moore's letter from that particular time.

On page 343, is that right? Yes, I try 343. He says, these years, this is Paul O'Mour writing to Irving Babbit about the death of his sister, these years that are coming now take away one thing after another. And to that we have to grow reconciled.

But there is something unspeakable painful in a death so sudden and so cruel and so needless. I have never been and not now able to take the common Christian view of these evils and say they must be providential and somehow for our good. Often they seem to me to bring irreparable loss. But on the other hand, I cannot look at them as the Buddhist does and regard them as the essential of life.

They strike me rather as hateful accidents or as the working of some no less hideous fatality, breaking through and thwarting the real purpose of the world. Strange as it may sound, they have come to be for me in that way the last bulwark of faith and hope. That last line I'm not. What does that mean?

What does it mean? What does it mean? Exactly, because there's something so despairing about his previous lines, there's almost a kind of suggestion that Christianity or Buddhism or maybe even religion in general is of no aid when something this senseless and tragic happens. But then he sort of turns around and says that this is a bulwark of faith, ultimately.

And maybe what he means by that is he just can't fully wrap his mind around them. They seem so senseless to him that you have to be a believer of some sort because of it. But again, I agree. I don't know precisely what he means by that, but at the same period of time, I agree that there's something kind of profound that he's doing.

He's not just saying, oh, I'm so sorry. You know, I remember her or what have you. Is there a real serious intellectual and spiritual reflection? But then he, there's that sort of turn right there at the end where he's doing this, very deep meditation.

He says, you know what? I shouldn't be meditating and philosophizing right now. I'm sorry. You're just, so it's a nice reversal at the end, I thought.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And so again, I think these are guys who took ideas seriously in their lives, not just sort of their career advancement or what have you, but they really wanted to see whether reading these texts might be a guide to how you might live a happier life, even in the circumstances of tragedy. Alex?

Yeah, I mean, you would almost expect it to be the last bulwark against faith. Yeah. Like no matter how far they reach, this is something that they can't overcome as well. Yeah.

But I like your reading because it does remind a joke, right? Where you take the limit case, right? And then when you get, you get a sort of reassertion of the divine mystery over it. And there is a way in which those moments can be construed or understood as a sort of a test or a sort of statement of it.

Maybe that's how he means it. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Yeah. Right? One small thing here is you never, we all know academics when we spend our lives around them. And we all know the person who comes up with a really inappropriate scholarly response to actual human suffering, right?

Right. That's so common. Yeah. And this seems not that at all.

It seems genuine. It seems heartfelt. It seems like they're searching. I mean, it name drops in the first line, but it doesn't seem like it's name dropping for the name saying name dropping.

It's like really trying to wrestle with where can I find meeting? And it's the things I've left not in my whole life. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, and again, to go to sort of Alex's point on this, I think the reading is largely the same, that maybe he's suggesting there are certain things that his human beings will just never understand. And as a result, you sort of for more, that means you really have to be a believer. You have to believe that there's a higher power and that there's some, you know, plan behind this, but we're never going to be able to figure that plan out.

But again, of course, that could be read the different way, which is that you actually shouldn't be a believer because there are senseless things in the world that we can't actually take in a different direction, but more wants to take it in the particular direction that he takes it. Yeah. You know, I, this reminds me, I just had a conversation with a colleague of mine last night. She was a historian by training.

And she's just telling me that her kid asked her, you know, when she was younger, the kid asked her, why did world war two start? And she's like, you know, well, we really need to go back to the Industrial Revolution. And she starts relating all this stuff and blah, blah, blah. And it was like, you know, how we're talking to her kid and her husband, who's not a historian goes, why don't you just say, because Hitler's a bad man.

Right. I thought it was such a funny remark, but you do get a sense that there's a kind of, this is to Greg's point, there's a kind of scholarly tendency that distances us from the basic sort of observations and problems or experience. Right. I have a question to take us back a step here at some point.

Eric, who do you imagine reading this book? And how would you imagine them reading it? So I read a few letters, the ones you recommended a few others. And that's sort of how I would imagine reading it, sort of not straight through necessarily, but maybe picking up a letter here or there.

But who did you have in mind for this when you were sort of? Yeah. Yeah. So I think people are going to go all the way through the book are probably pretty hardcore and very interesting.

So there is a smaller number of people who are very interested in this movement, who are, you know, have you. There have been some scholars, you know, who have worked on Babbitt and more and so forth. And there are people who are sort of chomping the bit to get their hands on it. Interestingly, this is the only book I've ever written where people wrote me and asked me when it was going to come out, which I thought was really weird, because I thought it was more esoteric topic.

But I did get a handful of emails asking, you know, when can I get this and where? So there are some people who are quite curious. And I do think that as a story, there's a kind of arc to this friendship. You know, letters start in the 1890s and they go all the way until Babbitt's death.

And they go through tragedies and their families, they go through religious changes, a kind of semi-fight that the two of them have over things. I mean, there is a kind of human story to it as well. At the same period of time, I do think that there will be people who will be interested in particular elements of the correspondence and may not read all the way through it, but be more interesting particular issues. So for instance, Paul Elmermore was editor-in-chief of the nation.

People who were interested in kind of what, you know, journalistic life was in the early 20th century, you might be particularly interested in that. People who are more interested in religious matters, you know, might be interested in that. People are particularly concerned about, you know, the fight against the college curriculum and so forth might be interested in those particular letters and so forth. I hope though that the introduction that I wrote to the book does give you a basic pressy about what new humanism is and what they believed.

And so you can actually kind of read it before you actually read Babbitt and more of themselves and get some kind of basic sense of what they're actually trying to do. But yeah, I do think that many people, perhaps most people who read this will be picking for various things. I mean, they do talk about, they were both friends with C.S. Eliot, you know, Robert Frost and this kind of stuff.

So people who are interested in some of those things might look at a letter or two merely because of kind of historical curiosity. And that's probably what most will happen. But at the same time, I do think it really works as a sort of story all the way from the end. So when's the story?

Do you have a favorite novelization and then the movie? Well, first of all, I feel like the next two projects have to have Alex Priu because if Alex Priu is involved in the next two projects, they're gonna come out next week. I mean, you know, if I do them by myself, we're talking maybe a decade, but Alex Priu is just, you know, the most prolific son of a gun I've ever seen. This is an unrelated story, but you know, who the person who alerted me to Jet GPT was Alex Priu.

Just an unrelated story. Okay. Weird. I noticed some sort of interesting, you know, linguistic things.

Infilicity's books had a little bit of like a computerized kind of a quality to it, but it was well written. People are saying, people are saying. I think they're wrong, but people are saying. That might be just jealousy speaking, you know?

It could be envy. Thank you, Cologne, you know. I wish I had the exact verbiage. I wish I had the exact verbiage of one of my favorite Trump tweets, like, what is it got Merry Christmas to the haters and losers?

I can't help that they're all fucked up. Do you know that? I don't remember that. But he's a perfect example of the kind of leader we have in society who's not humanistically trained.

If you want to talk about someone of low character, I mean, you know, I hate to say it. That's that's the kind of way to go. I do not remember particularly. Speaking of this recording, dates of letters, September 28, 2014 at 621 p.m.

At Real Donald Trump tweeted, Every time I speak of the haters and losers, I do so with great love and affection. They cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up. That's your once in future president of the United States of America, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah.

Future Caesar, future Caesar, new season. History weeps. I mean, it's just to think, you know, what Washington and Jefferson would say about this fellow being I mean, they're sad that they're sad that they're not as good of a president as he was. That's what they was saying.

Exactly what they said. With a possible exception of Lincoln, maybe. Far, you have any criticism of that? No?

I remember that I guess it stands. Yeah, far as yeah, he's a big Lincoln guy. So that's saying a lot for his Trump. He's just a big guy, period.

That's true. Yeah. This was great. I appreciate it.

I was always proud of you on the show. I was a performance by Eric Adler. You got to come back on again. So much gentlemen, it was great to be with you.

I love the show. As you know, I'm a completist. I've listened to every second of every episode of the New Things. And thank you for all of the texts on the days of the release of the episodes pointing out all the historical inaccuracies.

We don't know what we do without you, Eric. I try to kind of keep you guys on. There are nice emojis in there. So that always helps.

The book once again is Humanistic Letters, The Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer, more corresponds. And by Eric Adler. You wrote that beautiful introduction as well. You have a question for Mr.

Chris, we encourage folks to go out and read it and get anything else about the books by Eric Adler. It's just a lot of fun stuff out there. Battle of the classics. Battle of the books is by a more important author.

Thank you so much. Of course. Anything else, Alex? I'm good.

Thanks again, Eric. As always, a sort of, I have to say, it's actually David and Greg on the side of it. You were in a copy. Always sharp, always quick, always on top of our jokes and able to pivot.

I mean, you're like a boxer. He's a champ. Sort of. Very kind of.