Classics still have great value

Published 12:00 am Monday, July 28, 2003

Some multi-culturalists condemn traditional education curricula as being obsolete and useless. Why read "dead white men," they challenge, when

the politically correct thing is to read women and people of color (whether dead or alive)? In an attempt to be contemporary and exercise their liberal disrespect for what preceded them, they condemn the classics out-of-hand. While such multi-culturalists may know what the classics are, they understand neither the meaning nor worth of a classic.

A classic is a work that got to the core of human experience and so relevantly addresses fundamental issues that it transcends the provincialism of its place and parochialism of its time that it persists as both universal and timeless.

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Classics are found in all genre. It includes not just books and music, but drama, art, and other forms of conceptual expression. Classical works have lasted and they will last. Their inherent worth is grander than their utilitarian value.

A classic will not wear out; we can only neglect it. If we are unfamiliar with the classics, we surrender a substantial portion of our heritage and cut ourselves off from the cultures that formed us. Consequently, we have an inadequate understanding of who and why we are. Lacking this orientation, we have difficulty learning who we are to become and what we are to do with our lives.

Some of my students have presumed upon my praise of the classics as meaning a work must be very old before it can be valued. The greatest advantage of age, however, is the opportunity to forget what ought to be forgotten so we can preserve what we dare not lose. At the same time what is now recognized as classical literature was being written, for instance, frightfully bad things were also being written. That they are no longer extant demonstrates this; that classic works have endured testifies to the fact of their classical quality.

This is certainly not to say nothing of lasting value has been created in recent years or even in our own day. If we allow a generous time span, surely something new will yet become a classic. But our generation, perhaps even era, has no way of knowing which. We dare not confuse what is but traditional or customary with what is truly classic. We must acknowledge humbly that the contemporary quickly becomes old-fashioned and then forgotten.

A critical difference exists between what is old and what is old-fashioned, however. The fact of the matter is that classics are not only not old-fashioned but, by their very nature, unfashioned and unfashionable. They refused to conform to the fashions of the day of their creation or to be destroyed by the fashions of subsequent days. They escape the confines of small minds and leap into infinity. Fashion passes quickly, and the classics endure.

Let us innovate boldly and adapt discriminatingly. But let us preserve the classic and be nourished by it.

Dr. Wallace Alcorn's commentaries appear in the Herald on Mondays.