Should we still be venerating works by Plato, Shakespeare, Woolf, and company as “great books”? Should we still be reading them at all? These are the questions we're asking in this week's show.

“西方经典”的批评者提出了两个非常合理的论点。首先，主流主流是白人直男。这其中的一些原因可能是偶然的，但仍然存在一种非常现实的危险，即读者开始相信白人直男的声音是唯一有价值的声音。或者，更糟糕的是，作为思想家和作家，白人直男比其他人更有才华。显然，这将是一个可怕的结果。

Second, the canon stretches back to a distant past with attitudes very different from those of our own. Its texts often make highly troubling assumptions about gender relations, sexual preference, race, and empire—attitudes that generally go uninterrogated. At times, these texts even make argumentsdefendingsuch prejudices, as when Aristotle infamously claimed that some human beings are born to be slaves. That wasn’t just aweakargument; it was adangerousargument, one that helped to license a centuries-long history of oppression.

Given how widespread the bad ideas are (Horace on women, Rousseau on “noble savages,” Dante on homosexuality…), it’s understandable that some have started to see the entire cultural history of the West as a history of oppression, and its “great books” as simply a collection of specious justifications for it.

但经典的捍卫者可能会同样合理地反驳说，西方文化不是一个庞然大物，“伟大的书籍”也不是。当密尔庆祝民主时，柏拉图却鄙视民主。亚当•斯密热爱资本主义，让-保罗•萨特却讨厌它。但丁认为地狱是由永恒的爱创造的，尼采机智地反驳说天堂是由永恒的仇恨创造的。虽然有些《圣经》的作者反对同性之爱，萨福却用优美的诗句拥护它。权威作家几乎没有达成任何共识。

What’s more, many of these authors were firebrands, at least in their time. Quite a number of them, including Montaigne, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Diderot, Mill, Sartre, and Beauvoir, ended up on the Vatican’s “index” of banned books. If you’re on the Index, surely you’re doingsomethingright! Some, like Socrates, Jesus, or Giordano Bruno, died for their countercultural beliefs. While people like Dante were busy reinforcing the status quo, these radicals called, at least to some extent, for liberation, whether from priests, tyrants, bosses, chauvinists, imperialists, materialists, or the patriarchy.

It’s also important to remember how influential these texts have been. Many of today’s literary writers draw on earlier texts—think of all the allusions to Homer’sOdysseyin Toni Morrison’sSong of Solomon. And many beliefs and practices we take for granted today have their origin in centuries-old writings. Can we fully understand our present unless we know something about the past? (Consider what a difference it makes to know what the words of the Second Amendment meant at the time.)

And let’s not forget, finally, that some of the books in question are works of great beauty (Sappho’s lyric, Shakespeare’s sonnets,Pride and Prejudice…), works that brought important new aesthetic options into the world. Even when those works are flawed, I’m not sure we should always choose to stop reading them. Ralph Ellison’sInvisible Man, for example, is perhaps somewhat weak on gender but brilliant on race and identity, and stunning in terms of its formal innovations. That’s a book I’d really want to keep around. In cases like that, I’d hate it if the baby got thrown out with the bathwater.

So what should we do with the canon? My tentative proposal would be threefold. First, we should continue to expand it, by including more writers from historically disadvantaged groups. Second, we should read it critically. And we should teach others to read critically; readers must never assume that the “canonical” authors are right about everything, or even that they are taken to be right about everything. Matthew Arnold was wildly wrong when he depicted the canon as “the best that has been thought and said”: it’s so much less than that, and it’s also so much more than that.

Finally, we should read the canon for more than justideas. At its best, the canon isn’t a set of statements: it’s a set of questions. It’s a conversation. It’s an invitation to its readers—allreaders—to continue that conversation, finding ever better answers amid changing times. It’s a playground in which we can cultivate important habits of mind. And it’s a set of models for how to write beautiful books.

We can never be complacent about the “canon,” since its dangers will always be with us. But if we work hard, I believe we can inoculate people against those dangers. And if we do so, we’ll open up a whole world to future generations of readers eager to become part of the age-old conversation.