Unsung Heros--Mortimer Adler

The encyclopedia salesman who was a prophet

The old man at the bar seemed friendly enough, so we got to talking.

The sad state of politics came up. He spoke up.

“I remember this guy in the 1970s, Mortimer or Marty something, who went around giving speeches about how the kids needed to be taught to think, or we would lose our democracy. He had an encyclopedia for sale, all about ideas, not facts. Rumor was he didn’t even have a college degree. Nobody took him that seriously. Looking at things now, that’s too bad,” he said, with a grimace.

The above passage is a total fiction, but, as they say, fiction is a way of telling the truth by lying.

So I don’t apologize.

Mortimer Adler didn’t get his undergraduate degree--he was at Columbia--because he couldn’t pass the swimming course. But he was brilliant and got a PhD anyway.

He was the ultimate intellectual, devoting his life to ideas. His company in Chicago produced an encyclopedia about the great ideas of Western Civilization, featuring all the great writers from ancient Greece on.

A different door-to-door salesman sold me the set of books just as I was getting out of the Navy. It included a special volume which cross-indexed the key ideas of our civilization against the various thinkers who had commented on them. You could see what the notables thought about equality, for example. This was long before the digital revolution and represented an enormous editing achievement.

Earlier, a wealthy Chicago family, Walter Paepcke and his wife, had become concerned about a cold war where business leaders could not understand or articulate why Western Civilization was worth fighting for. Inspired by the Great Books Program at the University of Chicago and Adler’s leadership in that cause, they founded the Aspen Institute in the Colorado resort town in 1949.

It was a great partnership while it lasted. My parents went to the program in Aspen, and my wife and I followed later. We had advanced reading assignments, and the sessions were led by luminaries like Chester Bohlen, former ambassador to Russia. The materials started with the ancient Greeks and ended with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

It also echoed my college education in the early 1960s, when a survey course called Western Civilization was required for all students.

Just before I graduated Stanford, my advisor, a Czech national, wondered to me why American students “never protested anything.” Shortly after, the Berkeley campus exploded with anti-war protests and everything changed.

The “Western Civ” requirement held on for a few more years, but was killed off by the arrival of activist Jesse Jackson, whose slogan was “Hi Hi, Ho Ho, Western Civ has got to go.”

Western Civ was also euthanized at the Aspen Institute, as new generations objected to the “white men” who dominated the Great Books.

Ever since, reading and math in the US remained at mediocre levels, even as spending per pupil surged.

But Adler never gave up. His crucial concept was that students had to learn critical thinking as opposed to rote memorization. They needed to face teachers and defend their ideas, like students under Socrates. He felt it was crucial to a functioning democracy, whose future was at stake.

A grateful Columbia gave him an honorary degree, featuring a bathing suit as a symbol they had finally waived the swimming requirement.

Adler shuffled off this mortal coil in 2001.

He remains a hero.