Over the past few weeks Insight Labs has been asking our alumni and friends to submit books they think everyone should read to make the world a better place. We initiated the project in support of our upcoming Lab with the state humanities councils of Illinois and Indiana. Eighty people from various walks of life submitted their choices, which were then aggregated into a crowdsourced syllabus for the 21st century.

Among our respondents was Larry Van Meter, associate professor of English at Langston University and long-time friend of the Labs (he chose Dubliners). But as a teacher of the humanities, Van Meter also had some interesting opinions about the list as a whole. Here’s what he had to say:

What is your overall impression of the books on our list and the themes we identified from them?

I was impressed with its “multi-voiced” quality. It’s comforting to see readers valuing contributions from those whose voices have been repressed historically and/or silenced (subordinates, women, minorities, homosexuals). The fact that there is even a platform for those “voices” to be heard is a relatively new phenomenon. Epistemology, by which I mean in terms of “validation of knowledge” and “production of words,” for most of human history has been used to support systems of power and domination. The rise of Western democracies is due in no small part to underrepresented voices finally having access to media: we found out that those voices are legitimate, a phenomenon that enabled us to re-evaluate “official” epistemology.

What kind of books were you surprised to see on the list? What books might you have expected to see and did not?

I was surprised there weren’t more novels. Perhaps this relative paucity of novels is a function of McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” aphorism: the context of the question–i.e., choosing a book on the basis of its making-the-world-a-better-place-ness –may have motivated the choices in a different way than, say, “What are the most important books?” would have.

I was pleasantly surprised to see so many theoretical books, such as those by Stanley Fish, Cornel West, Paulo Freire, Wilhelm Reich, David Suzuki, G.E.R. Lloyd, Jared Diamond, and Robert Hughes. We are living in a golden age of theory, with so many brilliant minds examining the humanities from so many perspectives–gender, race, psychology, sociology, politics. . . it really is amazing. I mean, these people are right here, right now! If I had a beef with the list, I would like to have seen works from feminist film theory (Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Tania Modleski, bell hooks), which is one of the most bold and courageous fields in scholarship.

A premise of this list was that the humanities are important to solving the world’s problems. Do you accept that premise? Why or why not?

Yes, I absolutely accept that premise. I’m reminded of two artists who addressed this question. Picasso said that his “painting is not made to decorate apartments, it’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.” And Woody Guthrie wrote on his guitar “This Machine Kills Fascists.” While these statements articulate how artists perceive the power in the humanities, I’m struck by the uneasiness underpinning those statements: as if these artists knew that in the twentieth century, people might perceive the humanities as something other than a powerful historical-political force.

And their uneasiness was warranted. In the 1940s, The Frankfurt School (Horkheimer and Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm) pointed out that capitalism’s power was such that, like the Borg, it can just absorb threats into its superstructure (the truth of which plays out on your TV, where Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan songs are used to sell commercial products). But that absorption is not The Law: the Humanities can be a powerful force for resistance, dissent, and reform.

What do you think the list of books and the participants’ responses tell us about teaching or otherwise promoting the humanities today?

Most of the books were challenging, which to me seems confident and hopeful. My experience teaching literature has taught me to aim high; I’ve begun some courses with the idea that I would start with a too-challenging story or essay to gauge “where they are,” and then presumably scaling back based on their response. But I’ve never had to scale back. This speaks ill of me, right? That perhaps I’m imposing low expectations on my students. . . and then I find out that they’re ready for the challenge, that maybe I’ve set the bar too low. Students are in school because they want more, but we make a mistake if we perceive that desire only in material terms. They want greatness, not just exposure to greatness, but to be great. Great books give them access to greatness.

My take on conventional “Promoting the Humanities” endeavors is that they shoot so low as to give the impression that they are designed to fail. I’m sure that there are people who sincerely believe that getting a professional athlete who dropped out of college to “advocate” reading to kids is a good strategy. . . but it’s not. The only thing it advocates is that it’s great to be a professional athlete. Promoting means to go higher, right?

Image: Johanes Gutenberg, 16th-century copper engraving