Since you asked me about Tuesday's seminar on Persuasion, here goes.

I don't mind seminars on works of fiction as long as the issues involved touch at least tangentially on "great ideas". Remember that fiction was seen by Enlightenment philosophers as a great way to educate common people without actually expecting them to wade through philosophical swamps. I've come to see Jane Austen as very much of a champion of smart, creative people who find themselves in a dull, oppressive social system. This dialectic still exists today, after all, and her solutions (learning how not to be being easily persuaded, for example) still apply.

My reactions to this particular seminar are "complicated". I'm glad that most of them had a good time, but since I'm kind of old now much of the back and forth sounded like the chatter of bright children who were a bit too impressed with themselves. I've run hundreds of discussion groups at the Ninth Street Center and we always had an unwritten rule, inspired by Quaker meetings, about avoiding idle chatter. We often used to focus on one or two people who really needed our help, usually because they were having difficult personal problems of some sort and were motivated to open up on a psychological level. When you don't have this kind of motivation in a great book seminar, what's left? Well, you can show off your I.Q., you can compete to see who read the text most excellently, or you can just enjoy the sound of your own voice bouncing off the walls, while ignoring the frowns on the faces of those who have to listen to all the noise.

I remember being that young. I was painfully shy, yet even then I knew that just being the loudest in the room would not necessarily help anyone, especially me. Most of the seminars I attended seemed more storm than substance, so I just listened. Over the last 4 decades I've learned to listen carefully and to discern who's really looking for insights, and sometimes wisdom, as opposed to who came to the superbowl to cheer and jeer. When I see a celebration rather than a seminar I feel a bit helpless. Would it do any good to tell children to act like adults? No. Children are children. They need to act like children. They need to know they can get away with being loud right up until the day they themselves see how empty an exercise that is. And some of them will never find any higher purpose in such a setting. I saw the same disappointed but frustrated look on several of the adults around the room. Serious people like Steve and Larry apparently felt the same sadness that I felt as the conversation slowly became more sound than substance.

In a wider context, there are what you might call those after-effects of a St. John's education that I find have left scars on the entire community. I always come to a seminar with the question, "Why are we reading this book? Why do people not only enjoy but respect this book? What can we learn from this book that can be applied to our own lives?" None of these questions were addressed on Tuesday. Even in 1965, seminars were often opened with the silliest of questions, focusing our attention on some random detail of plot. St. John's quite often reveled in the little details rather than seeing the "big picture". Are we supposed to be learning important things from these books? If not, then why are we even there? To play an academic game invented by some long-dead nerd who lived in his parent's basement?

I could go on and on, but let's just say that, once the "antiquarian" biases of conventional alums are put aside, creative and independent individuals can still get some real "business" done in this context. (I can't tell you how many people tell me that they come for the conversations that occur before and after the seminars rather than the seminars themselves.) That's why I'm always glad to see people like you, John, Laura and Juliana (who I miss terribly) show up. People who don't just rant in public, but who actually listen, actually think, and actually address carefully-worded statements to one or more of the people in the room who actually need to hear what's being said.