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>> sit down so we can get started, please. good morning. welcome to the 31st annual national conservative student conference here at short washington university and hosted by young america's foundation. my name is patrick astin. deinonychus foundation is a premier organization to educate students on the principles of limited government, individual liberty, a strong national defense and traditional values. young america's foundation also host a campus lecture series

through which you can have such speakers as newt gingrich and ann coulter. for re information about the election program or young america's foundation i urge all to go to www.y. e. f. did order or call us at 800 u.s.a. 17. and now for this panel's moderator. doctor lee edwards is a distinguished fellow and conservative of the heritage foundation, an adjunct professor at the catholic university of amica and chairman of the victims of communism memorial foundation which dedicated t the 2007. he is the author of 20 books including biographies of ronald reagan, barry goldwater, edward meese, histories of the american conservative movement and the heritage foundation. his works have it translated into chinese,apanese, swedish and french picu is the founding direcor of the institute of public him at georgetown university and a fellow at the institute of politics at the john f. kennedy school of harvard. spec is a past president of the philadelphia society and has been at the hoover institution.

doctor edwds also appeared on many leading television and metaprograms. is his upcoming book i a poverty of william f. buckley, jr. which will be published in the spring of 2010. has a bachelor's in english, duke university and a graduate work in paris. in addition to receiving his phd d the countryside in virginia with his wife who assist him in all his writings. please welcome doctor lee edwards. [applause] >> thank you, patrick. and good morning, ladies and gentlemen that it is a beautiful day in washington. and a great day to be alive. especially if you are young conservative. [applause]

>> we sitting here on the stage and ju sitting there in the audience aeed on one thing. books can change a life, and even the course of history. they certainly made a profound difference in the life of ronald reagan. in mid-october of 1965, my wife and i spent two days traveling with reagan in southern california when he was considering whether to run for governor of that state. at the end of the second day, reagan took us up this steep, winding road to his home at the pacific palisades overlooking los angeles, to service some ice tea and cookies. while he and nancy were in the kitchen, i walked over to the bookcases in their library didn't and begin examininghe titles. they were almost without exception works of history,

economics and politics. they included consertive classics such as the road to serfdom, witnesseconomics in one lesson, and a book i had never heard of. fredric bastien, the law. well, that wasn't good enough for me so i began taking out the books from the shelves and looking at them. and my wife said no, don't do that. i said it's okay. looking around. and they were dogeared, these books, annated. and here i realized was the personal library of a serious, thoughtful individual. who had arrived at his conservatism the old fhion way, one book at a time. history is filled with examples

of books that inspired and motivated. for good and for evil. without karl marx is, marxism might have remained an obscure theory and not become the power of obsessed ideology that caused the deaths of an estimated 100 million victims in the 20th century. without thomas paine's common sense, the american colonists might have been inspired to challenge the greatest military power on earth and when they are an hour's independence. without russell kirk's the conservative mind, servitors and might have remained ignorant of its rich intellectual heritage, and the conservative movement might have remained nameless. now, some post guttenberg modernists argued that new

media, like the internet, have rendered books irrelevant. and our 24 sevenths society you often hear th dismissive comment i don't have time to read a book. well, as one u.s. president was one to say, poppycock. a recent heritage foundation survey revealed that books me a lifelong district in their thinking andheir actions. the economics in one lesson's, head of the pacific research institute, was not part of her college curriculum, but it gave credence to my own views which on campus were seen as unpopular and even radical. economics in one lesson, sally said, served as a guiding light, not only through our college but throughout my carr.

every american student should read one day in the life of avon. that was thedvice from "the wall seejournal" who said that the short novel explains why we fought the cold war and why we won it. barry goldwater's the conscience of a conservative, said john goodwin, head of the national center for public policy, laid the foundation for all its good and worthwhile in the modern conservative movement. and i am happy to note that yog america's foundation agrees with goodman'sssessment and published a paperback edition of conscious of the conservative back in 1990. maybe it is time for another edition. ron robinson, are you listening wax well, let me add here. the roots of american order by russell kirk.

it is a story of how five cities, athens, rome, jerusalem, london and philadelphia shaped america. days gone by, william f. buckley, jr. this is a beautifully written autobiography by the founder of the american conservative movement. ethnic america, by thomas old, our foremost lack intellectual examines some of the ethnic groups, jewish, irish, german, afrin-american, that make up amera and suggests why some of had a greater impact than others. let me be clear about one thing. a book is a book is a book. it's not a snippet or a scrap or a fragment. a book contains thousands of words, hundreds of pages, which

permit the author to develop thoroughly his ideas and his arguments. for his characters in a novel. a book doesn't have to be printed on paper. the success of audio books proves that. i would also like to see if you words about the kindle. amazons eleronic meter. the kindle is about the size of a book. it weighs less than a pound and it can hold more than 200 books, and offers access to several hundred thousand titles at about $10 a pop. but i must confess, i prefer the printed and bound book. there is something tactical interrelating about holding a book in your hands like holding your wife in your arms. successful reading, according to

georgetown university professor james shaw, a great read and a great writer, requires three things. sense of self-discipline, a personal library, and good guy i might add that you also need a good lamp, a comfortable chair, and your favorite nonalcoholic beverage. i realized that self-discipline is not a popular virtue these days and these modern times, but for conservatives, self-discipline, the ability to apply yourself to a goal is vital if you want to learn what is really important and apply that knowledge in your lives. the building of a small personal library, and i emphasized small personal library, perhaps just a dozen or two books, will take time and thought. and it will be impeded by the fa as father shot puts it, that we live in an age that is reluctant to accept, if not

hoile, to the idea that some things such as books are better than others. but conservatives know, as russell kirk wrote that sound books about the human condition and about the civil social order could arouse a healthy intellectual reaction to preserve order, justice, and eedom. as to guides, well, i don't hesitate to suggest reading the write books. a guide for the intelligent conservative, published by the heritage foundation. and i believe that all of you have been given a bookmark listing the 101 bks in the heritage guide. one of the best books about reading is mortimer adler's, how to read a book. first published in 1940, and revised and updated many times since. here are a couple of doctor akers axioms.

passive reading is impossible. we cannot read with our eyes immobilized and our minds asleep. don't try to understand every word or page of a difcult book the first time through. writing down your reaction will help you remember the thoughts the author. and i can attest that ronald reagan follod this advice. books, especially of history and philosophy, should be read in relation to each other. you can't properly understand the federalist papers, for example, and let you also read the declaration of independence and the u.s. constitution. the best books reward you in two ways. but there is improvement in your reading skill that occurs when you tackle a difficult book, but more importantly you become wiser about your sel at about

the great and enduring truths of human life. what difference can books make? i like the answer of jeffrey nelson, a former college president, now executive vice president of isi. books of the right kind, by men and women of imagination and perception, are indisnsable in the forging of order, fedom, justice, and the authentic progress of civilization. select the region begin. but first let me introduce our panel for this morning. harry crocker is a former journalist and political speechwriterho has spent the last several years as a book editor handling mostly political books and publishing here in washington, d.c.. the author of several best selling historical works including his latest book "the

politically incorrect guide to the civil war," which has been praised by the west point of the "washington times," among others, for its great scholarship, great storytelling and great fun. a graduate of vanderbilt university, doctor benjamin wicker, is a senior fellow with the discovery institute at seattle, washington, and also at the saint paul center for biblical theology. the author of seven well-received books, his most recent and most provocative is "10 books that screwed up the world." doctor elizabeth kantor is the editor of the conservative book club, frequent contributor to human events, and blogs at conservative book club.com. she received her degree at the university of north to live in chapel hill, which experience helped her to inspire to write the politically incorrect guide

to english and american literature. ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming our first battles, harry crocker. [applause] >> thank you. i have worked in the book business most of my working life. i never thought you parrot the pleasure of holding a ook as to holding my le. out of the house she would take a. i would say i love you as much as i love holding the road to serfdom. [laughter] >> i remember -- they usually have is recommended book list for christmas. and asked him what books he would recommend. and said well, for you ericans i think you ought to start with the bible and shakespeare and work your way up from there.

likewise, i think we need to start with the bible her. it seems to me fundamental to read the bible. aside fm whatever divine nature we might attribute to it, you cant be a literatperson in western civilization without having rd the bible. and i'm not overly concerned with what translation you might choose. personally, i think it is important to read the king jam james, but the revised standard, they are all good. i ink it is fundamental to start with the bible. [applause] >> i also think the most important subject is history.

history is the extent of politics. we need to study actual factual histor rand who wrote that multi-volume history of the world, i think he once said that western civilization is caesar and christ. since we have covered christ i suppose we should go to caesar. and will again i think you could read virtually any roman historian, plutarch, you could also start witcaesar's commentaries especially for those people who like action. there is something about the roman world, there is lot about the roman war would bring with us today. it is important to understand, we're going to have several books all touch on this. when i was growing up in the 1960s, 1970s, one early thing that clung to me was the ar of decline. in large part was driven by my understanding of the military

history because during the vietnam r, i have seen the fall of saigon. and i thought, you know, this cod be a. this could be riots in the street and social upheaval and evolutio so for me, i was thinking when i grew u to be an active participant, public affairs, my goal was to stop this decline. among the books i read on this was one probably have never heard of. it was a book by montesquieu. and it was called to hit me right in the face. it was consideration on the greatness of the romans o decline. that's what i wanted to know. if you can't find that book, virtually equally good one is machiavelhian discourses. because he is concerd with some of the various same question. these are the same practical books. they are trying to draw eternal lessons eternal lessons about government.

you should also read, you stick large parts of it with a grain of salt, the decline and fall of the roman empire. it is massive. i don't know if you can read the whole thing which is tremendous. hershel actually read the whole thing. you could read condensed versions as well. given is very wrong about religion. but he is very right about a lot of things also. and it is splendid, splendid reading. edmund burke, reflectionr on the revolution of french. i don't like to put this book on their list, but i hope all of you have read it, aorb it. if you haven't i encourage y to do so because the first time i came to washington and started interacting with my fellow conservatives, i thought you must not have read this book to require remember going to a party that was thrown by someone

who was quite famous right now, and he said was throwing a celebration the french revolution party. i thought you got to be kidding me? i thought that was crazy then. i still think it's crazy now, but a lot of the principles that berkeley that would seem to be vital and crucial and true are things that i think rob a lotf people been in a knee-jerk way the wrong way. that they misled the age of chivalry is gone. how many conseatives today actually have no problem with that? how many of us today would say th back the other great thing about burke, every paragraph is quotable. i found this in my detriment as i was flipping through the book again and wanted to quote huge parts, but never never more should we behold a generous loyalty to rank and.

that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of a heart which kept alive even servitude itself the spirit of an exalted freedom. who talks like that now? but who would also support things like that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart. sometimes in our libertarian lebration of freedom i think we lose track of these more impoant baseline values. burke is also great at pointing out how feudalism and monarchy were the essentials to limited government. and how their abolitionist friends met tyranny and inevitably. we should think about is also when we think about what is a good and proper government, what sort of government we would think about exporting to the world. burktalks about how these, there are quotes of it, again just very briefly.

the old el and chivalry field from rankings from fear, plus and assassinations it will be anticipated that prevented murder and prevent coffiscation and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims which form the political code of all power standing on its own honor and the honor of those who are to obey it. get rid of these ties between people. what do you have? only brute force and power. he also warns us when we strip away tradition, we strip away what is most valuable in life. as he says on this scheme of things making is but a man, the queen isut a woman, a woman is but an animal and an animal in the ghest order. i don't think too many of us want to go there, but that's the direction that a certain form of

false to my mind might take us. so on a similar note, i think you should read the life of johnson. johnson has almost biblical authority. and the only good reason he liked burke is fun to read. for example, it is johnson who tells us the first whig, or the first liberal, was the double. he is also a great reminder of something i think again pecially those of us who are invoed in politics in an active way, can also easily forget and to get it is to forget we are conservatives. famous line of johnson, but how small of all human hearts endure, that part which laws are kings. cause or cure. politics, ideology, it is not the be all and end-all of life. doctor edwards mentioned russell kirk. i hary agree the conservative mind, absolutely essential reading. ifor nothing else, all

politics, all political questions are really moral questions. that is very true. startup with braun was saying we americans should set up a bible and shakespeare. lets you do shakespeare. if y guys want to be participants in politics, you need to learn about leadership, and a good way to learn about leadership is with shakespeare's henry the fifth. it is classic. henry the fifth there was this rousing, stirring battle cry of a play. it ends on a very downer note. and i think that's important also. it reminds us in the way of mick powell's old line that all political lives and in failure. they all end into your. that is the cough of their prime. that all political lives and in theater, and with this ending, because that is the nature of politics and the nature of life.

and i figure that is very true as well. myinth book is i think with all things, one thing that we often forget about, we're always playing defense. is we neglect to think about what sort of society would really like to have. when we are looking for that society i don't think we look at political theory. i thk frankly you should look to fiction, the novels. books that focus on individuals and how they lived their lives and the universe. and the book tha always work for me in this regard is a book by siegfried as war port. the first world war. tremendously brave officer. almost unbelievably brave. lords over a bethought if you ever wanted to find the epitome of an english german, look to him.

he wrote a trilogy, novel, called the complete memoirs of george sure spend. it's very autobiographical. essentially his life fictionalize. if you know the poetry, it is very circassian. beautifully written showing an incredible tolerantell-rounded human being. crucial volume. the second is memoirs of an infantry officer. the shows this young man growing up in rural england learning country sports and leading what to my mind is a life lived in a truly conservative society. a society where in fact politics is ver remote. people naturally hava sort of christian order to their life. it is a book from the late

19th or early 20th century. and i think when you remember, it may be that we need to achieve in politics, it is a goal, the ultimate goal is not to make us all hyper political beings. i often hear people say we should take over the school board. we should get more women in politics. all of those kind of things that i disagree. and better, we abolished the school board. we abolish public schools and we have school volunteers. [applause] >> my last book, is a book by george orwell. some of these people i've been mentioning were not card-carrying conservatives. but i think they are still worthwhile to us. orwell was a socialist, but orwell's political journalist, literary journalism here much of

these things as outstanding examples of style. i am a professional book editor. if i want to teach the young scholar today, i would say look to orwell. but also orwell was honest. he is painfully honest. and his painful honesty which makes many of his essays greatly conservative and defending conservative values. and crucially for me, i really think for all of us, perhaps this token future is defense of language as it should be. orwell is one of the first really great offers to focus on the language is a political act and suits, not just democracy

but also tearing. that is my short list. i would be happy to take questions. thank you very much. [applause] >> okay. i'm going to give you really good, great good books and really great evil books. that is, i will start with the latter because in a way they are more exciting in perhaps the worst sense. that is, they are easieto get into sometimes been really good book about good things, but as dante recognized, that is always a question about what the state of our soldiers that that should happen. i wrote one book called "10 books that screwed up the world," and harry crocker, my editor made me add five more to that. so there is really five more, 50% plus more.

there are several actual very good reasons to read great, evil books. primarily, you need to understand that evil, that the formation that the generation in society is the result of not accidents or stupidity, but all too often great intelligence gone awry. that is, the deep formation of what makes us most human a so we need to understand that great, bad things as plato and aristotle reminders, several times, can only because by great men. and great, evil men write great, evil books. and we live in evil times. and as i argued in my first 10 books, that screwed up the world, we need to understand those books that have the most malformed our current culture. okay? so we don't want to excuse evil as people do when they get caught by saying i made a mistake, or i did something

stupid. it's evil and we need to understand what deep and profound evil is. so what should you read to know some of the most profound teachers of evil? machiavelli's prince's is one of the greatest books on evil of all time. and he is an astoundingly influential author down to the modern-day, if you ever studied the history of engla you understand how poor machiavelli in his and went in destroying england. thomas hobbes leviathan. i've learned more about contemporary political life. i almost don't have to open a newspaper by reading hobbes leviathan. in anything i've read in the last 350 years, it is the textbook. it is the heart of modern liberalism. it is especially in his focus on rights as it is to virtue.

so hobbes well studied opens up exactly what's going on now. and that is a book written or published in 1651. that's why it' important to read people have been dead for long enough to have been wise. rousseau's second discourse was written in the middle of the 1700s. rousseau gives us the textbook for the sexual revolution for the sexual destruction of the family, he is also the grandfather of marxism. that is, you should go back to the sources, even further back than some of the more famous folks and rousseau gives us as a worthy american gigolo the self destroying man. and we have all too many of those. charles darwin's descent of man is the textbook of modern eugenics. it's the source of the reduction of human beings from being made

in the image of god to being just another animal that should be treated just as we treat animals. if you want to know what goes on behind our comprehensive health care push, you should read the descent of man, because that will form the spirit of it. let's get to some good books. great, good books are sold changing. they are the things that will let you know that you have a soul and what it was made for your college is a time when you will have enough leisure, i hope, you have to make that leisure, to study these great books. and i'm going to list two to begin with that have the most effect on me that warlike getting slammed by an intellectual to buy for. okay? read dante's divine comedy again

and again, even the paradiso. okay? but read it with a translation and commentary by one of the great minds of the 20th century, dorothy sayers. dorothy sayers commentary alone is a classic. it is an extraordinary insight into what it means to have a universe ordered by wisdom and love. plato's republic. i can't say enough about it. i felt like i was wrong dry after reading i but what you understand and plato's republic is that the order of your soul is a reflection of the order of the regime in which you live. that is, if you live in a disordered regime, you can almost help to have a disordered soul, and disordered souls make disordered regime so that they are related. so you have this relationship between what is called the city

and the soul. and plato provides an astounding analysis of the decline of souls and machines together. just for your own barometric reading, we are now at the point of extreme democracy falling into journey. when i found that out, i think i was breathless for the next 25 years. read proverbs. in our particular regime, we hope prudence or wisdom at a minimum. and we affirm the passions highly. everything is passion-based. proverbs reintroduces you to the kind of practical wisdom about human things that should defin the basis of our reflection, our way of life, and enhance all politics if we have to be dragged into work with it. okay? i agree, absolutely with doctor

crocker that our imaginations need to be retrained. they are almost entirely corrupt. that is, our imagination should be trained by wisdom, not by sort of twittering and, you know, sort of th equipment of morning cartoons which has become our news services. so you need something that deeply trained your imagination and passions in accordance with wisdom. and i highly recommend shakespeare, of course, because he compels you to slow down. you can speed read shakespeare. or if you do you should feel that you have violated a great sacred thing. okay. i would read as much jane austen as possible, which means everything she wrote except maybe with north and gravity. but jane austen needs to be read and what is so wonderful about austin is the fact that there are marvelous movies on her

novels. absolutely marvelous and there is nothing wrong with movies and if you want sentences ability or pride and prejudice, do it about 150 times. that is what we did at our house. you will be trained to love only a great movie. as you will be trained only to love a great novel. that is, it will form a new a distaste for what is voelker, cheap and thoughtless. and the bulger and the chief and the thoughtless is what rules us now that is of the condition of those who are moving from extreme democracy anto tyranny. and on that happy note, i leave you. [applause]

>> it's a great privilegeo be able to talk to the next generation of conservatives about what books to read. i am echoing to actually give you a list, partly because this book, "the politically incorrect guide to english and american literature," is essentially full of reading less. eight of them, one for each of the first eighthapters, goes to the whole history of literature written in english. instead of telling you or urging you to read certain books, what i want to do is try to persuad you, try to sell you on a theory of how to pick books or what kind of books to read. essentially i'm going to make the case that not just even though, but especially if you want to stay involved i politics, it's absolutely crucial that you not spend these infoative years of your life, your use, reading essentially

political books. especially that you don't spend it reading about contemporary politics. even though i am the editor of a conservative book club, that is what i do for a living. brothers plan time for you to read about contemporary ents and politics later. the books that you ought to be reading now are in a word the classics. that is, books that made it into the canon, not for political reasons but for reasons of quality, because they were the best books, because they were books that were superior in truth and goodness and beauty, to books that didn't made into ndidate i'm talking abouthe great works of plato to t. s. eliot, that were central to colle curricula up until about and i was thinkin about this, up until about the time that you all were born. u've probably heard the story of how in 1987 students march

across the stanford college campus with jesse jackson chanting hey hey ho ho western culture has got to go. that time around the late '80s, was a time when professors across t country reconfigured their reading lists getting rid of the bad dead white males and replacing tm with authors picked for the gender or their politics or their ethnicity or their sexual orientation, or for some sort of victim status. of course, not all the classics completely disappeared. college is still taught aristotle, shakespeare, but they began to teach those classics really differently. i want to give an example or a couple of examples about shakespeare. traditionally for about 400 years, literary critics intelligent readers, college pressors, said essentially

three things about shakespeare. there were three reasons that shakespeare was valued. they said he was universal, of universal interest. is not of an age but for all time. they said he metered major. that there was something real about what shakespeare was able to put in his place that is more real than any other literature. again, then johnson, nature herself was proud of his design enjoyed where the dressing of his line. and then thirdly they said that he wrote beautiful poetry. well into the sond half of the 20 century, english professors were still teaching shakespeare for those reasons. because they want to put a student in touch with something that was universally interesti interesting, that taught things that human nature in the way you can't get anywhere else, and that was a fabulous example of a beautiful rk of art. but in the late 20th century,

college professors typically start to teach a shakespeare in a different way. shakespeare became an example of what oppressive about western society, and in some cases even professors make the case that shakespeare actually causes the evils of western civilization. i'm going to give you quotes from professors. somebody at penn university said the domestication of women appears in a major product of th play. that is about mcbeth. and here is a umass professor ranting about the way he teaches his students in midsummer nights dream. here's what he says. so i asked my students, what if shespeare is partly to blame for the danger that women have faced and continue to face in premarital sex? it is an compellingly argued i explained, that shakespeare has played and they continue to play a significant rolen the establishment and maintenance of gender roles that subordinate

women. if you read shakespeare with professors like these, you han't been introduced to shakespeare but you can learn from. you have been essentially given an anti-shakespeare and occupation. you have been trained not to take shakespre seriously as a source of anything of value. this drastic change in the college curriculum means that if you are getting typical college education and circa 2009 a.d., your education is a dramatically different from the kind of education that america's cup for the previous 200 years. it sdifferent thathink we need to worry about wheer people being educated in american colleges today are going to end up being americans and citizens of the west any thing much like themericans that we had before. i don't think, though i hope in the question period you will

share former observations which you think about this, but my impression is that leftt professors are not really succeeding in converting a lot of students to be radical feminist are diehard marcos. and that they are not succeeding in sort of turning a majority of the folks they teach to see things the way they see them. but what i am afraid of a sort of the real danger in the sort of education is that students are being effectively cut off from our cultural roots. culture is not something that you get in your dna. you do not inherit it. is learned, and of course you learn coul and your family and a lot of oth ways that aren't in formal education. but formal education has been one crucial part of cultural transmission in any civilization that we know about. college teachers today are not

typically great enthusiast or transmitting western civilization to the next generation. some of them actively want to cut it off, stop it from being transmitted. which is why it's not enough for you guys as conservative students to be up in as sort of against political correctness on campus. although that may be quite necessary but it is not sufficient. thousands of young people committed to defending america or preserving western culture are going do build if there are no young people still getting the kind of educaon that used to turn students into educated americans. so at least some of you need to figure out how to grasp yourself back onto the cultural roots of the west by your own reading. if you read mostly political and contemporary books, your conservativism is going to be too shallow. even the classics of the conservative movement, can teach us that there are permanent things worth defending but they

don't really establish us and those permanent things. if you are alway looking to defend western culture, then there's a way in which you are always othe edge of your civilization, where it touches what is outside. if that is where we are, then our relaonship to our own culture gets to be too much like what grant green said was his relationship with the catholic church. will end up with, he talks about being a member of the foreign legion who fights for a city of which he is no longer a citizen. to be full citizens of our civilization, we need to ad deeply into its a great literature. the kind of education that i think you need, and i wish your professors would help you with a more but i'm afraid they are not going to, is not a purely factual or merely intellectual education. it is both of those things. it is true if you read the classi you are going to come across a fascinating information, ideas that you

might not hear in school. this can be a dramatic, the intellectual outlook of the typical english professor, for example, and i correspond with some of these books and read their writings. i recharacterize their intellectual outlook as one of extreme poverty. i mean, there interested in essentially one kind of intellectual ideas that they are interested in justice but they're not even interested in every kind of injustice. but they are interested in the kind of injustice that happens between powerful groups in wheat groups, between members of one group to another. and their particular subset of injustice comes in a lot of different flavors. there's the race, racism flavor and the classism paper and ethnicity of people and the pick on people. but still a tiny, narrow range of things be interested in.

the shame is, ifomebody was only interested in teaching shakespeare than everything that shaker was interested in, human imagination, love and marriage, death and jealousy, sin and salvation, all the things that people were interested in before about 1980 seen from this very outlook of intellectual property to be just sort of like mass or covers for what is always really going on, which is that people in a group of some kind of power are oppressive people in the group without power. so if you read these things without those race class of gender glasses on, then you're going encounter all kinds of ideas that are fascinating and have been a permanent interest to the human race. but the kind of education i'm talking about, the old fashion kind, is not just about spending are you collecting interesting things to think about. though that is a good idea, storing up things to think about for the rest of her life.

it's also about committing to principles, making judgments and adopting attitudes. now i know from experian, when i argue along these lines i get gadget e-mails from english professors. who thinks they have caught me in a soap opera gadget that students should be learning to love some things and reject others as an essential part of their literary education. but for millennia this was considered to be the purpose of education. aristotle argued that young men ought to learn ptry because of virtue is about the lighting and loving and hating aright nhing is more necessary to make a habit than to judge rightly and to delight in good characters and noble asked. philip sidney said no philosophers precepts can make you an honest man than the reading of virtual. sydney's point is that real education, the kind that civilid doesn't just teach honesty in the abstract.

it shows the student an admirable characts, and teaches him to one for himself the virtue that he embodies that this kind of education doesn't just inform. it motivates. this is how the classics will i forgive you western civilization. they symbolize you as americans and the citizens of the west by showing you things that have inspired americans in the past and offerg you the chance to aspire to those same things. plato shows you socrates, and from him that you learn a passion for free inquiry, to pursue the truth no matter what the cost. horus or the man who wrote the battle of molded or 100 other poems show you that it really is autiful to die for your country. despite the blunders that also make every soldier's death a heartbreaking waste. some of thprinciples you learn from our classic art specially western or especially american. in chaucer's canterbury tales we see the beginning of chivalry tat uniquely western arrangement between the sexes.

in huckleberry finn, mark twain's gives us a peculiarly american phenonon, uneducate boy who throws off the taboos of his upbringing and brings a new moral life on the basis of his own expense. but some of what we learn from the classics are lessons that no civilization can forget and survive. the universal truths about human nature that we find it so perfectly articulated in scheckter, the necessity that we have the courage to defend ourselves that we see in beowulf. we live in an age where our intellectual class is determinedetermined to unlearn not just the unique achievements of western civilization, but even the most basic insight into human nature. it's up to you to ensure that they are not forgotten. [applause] >> on the. >> so we are lining up there. fire away.

samuel sowa, penn ste. given that you'll seem to agree that there are books that simply teach bad ideas, the communist manifesto here what role do you think censorship has or should have a role in the suppression of el and books that simply teach bad things? >> well, it was a collection of perfeccrystal essays in which he makes a case for censorship. and he said something along the lines that if you'ra civilization to have that censorship. his case think he is thinking more about obscenity, if i'm correct or i do remember it all that well. i don't know. it's oiously a tough question because we see it employed against ourselves all the time. when i was your age and ias a college sort of journalist, we had plenty of censorship thrown at us.

you see it all the time in people who are saying or prickly unremarkable things. in europe especiall, the anti-hate speech laws are quite prohibitive. so i guess if i remember right, i think i would be of a similar note. i would be opposed to obscenity. i think it does degrade the soul and it is hard to avoid. but i think i am pretty libertarian on what is allowed. >> censorship is a slippery slope. we shouldn't engage in it, period. [applause] >> apart from anything else that you seems much more effective to ad machiavelli and point out at is wrong with what they say that you try to hush them up at this point. [applause] >> let me come out with both and make everyone that. censorship will happen no matter

what you do hear that question is will it be principled censorship, or unprincipled censorship you can't help center by having people read something rather than others. okay. so csorship is something that is always going on, you can't say you are or aren't going to have it. at having been said you can see what unprincipled censorship or censorship from the wrong principles would mean when i wrote "10 books that screwed up the world," three companies i think unite me the right to write quotes from books. i could not quote from kinsey's mail report. i did not do anything other than quote the worst thing i could do for alfred kinsey was quote him. okay? margaret mead's book, coming of age in samoa, denied. the goal is to lay.

it got in anyway. but the point of that is happens. it is always going to happen. just by the way, our intellect and our moral character must be formed. it wilker. you can't not have otherwise you say we should read everything. for the worst kind of foolish scribblings through shakespeare. so censorship is a function of judgment and it always has been and there is no way to get around it. so the question is how do we do it well. how is that for a perverse notion? >> thank you. next question. >> good morning. i'm a senior at norfolk, virginia. this question is for dr. wiker and doctor edward. i think one of my favorite authors that i used to quote, although several, was father benedict. is a franciscan friar.

he writes a lot of books and i was in a class of 30. i was the only one defending terri schiavo. my question was when i was in that class, i felt so outnumbered and i didn't know what to do. and my question is do you think we have a classic challenges us that it would be good to take out quotes may be and have like a list of talking points that would help us? because i'm a senior now, when we are and i didn't, but i felt if i had se advice to really help me in really bad and that it would have helped me. so if you could give advice, ank you. >> it's -- i went to vanderbilt, and it was awful. [laughter] >> what i learned about how it

is that you function in sort of the intellectual underground and under continuous persecution. and it's not easy. it takes a lot of mail logs, but that is essentially what you're doing. but the culture will do that to you as well. the best thing is to understand the other side better than it understands itself, set out their position with more profound floors and to demolish it and carefully set down. >> i think the point is well taken that ben has made and that is that we not only need to study our side but the other side as well. and i think that i putting down some talking points will help you i think it is a good idea as well. >> josh at the university of chicago. dr. wiker, i noticed you are under both your list and mr. crocker's list that you support machiavellian. is there a fundamental

difference in. and a quick second question, you had hobs as for the origin of the rights of discourse, but wasn't, arm more based on today than logs today, so the idea of rights, liberty of state? >> while i would disagree with my own editor here. that ihink that machiavelli discoursed is one of the medieval books of all time. and it fits perfectly with the prince. and what was the second? the rights. all, i believe to put it sustainably and these aren't my words, but leo strauss is, that locke wasn'tust hop sugarcoated. d yes,ou're right that he is the one that mediated hobs thoughto america and unfortunately most c