ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank the following, all of whom contributed their energies, insights, and expertise (even if only three of them know the meaning of the word “deadline”) to the sections that bear their names:
Owen Edwards, Helen Epstein, Karen Houppert, Douglas Jones, David Martin, Stephen Nunns, Jon Pareles, Karen Pennar, Henry Popkin, Michael Sorkin, Judith Stone, James Trefil, Ronald Varney, Barbara Waxenberg, Alan Webber, and Mark Zussman.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction to the First Revised Edition, July 1994
Introduction to the Original Edition, March 1986
CHAPTER ONE - American Studies
CHAPTER TWO - Art History
CHAPTER THREE - Economics
CHAPTER FOUR - Film
CHAPTER FIVE - Literature
CHAPTER SIX - Music
CHAPTER SEVEN - Philosophy
CHAPTER EIGHT - Political Science
CHAPTER NINE - Psychology
CHAPTER TEN - Religion
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Science
CHAPTER TWELVE - World History
Lexicon
INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST REVISED EDITION, JULY 1994
When this book was first published in the spring of 1987, literacy was in the air. Well, not literacy itself—almost everyone we knew was still misusing lie and lay and seemed resigned to never getting beyond the first hundred pages of Remembrance of Things Past. Rather, literacy as a concept, a cover story, an idea to rant, fret, and, of course, Do Something about. Allan Bloom’s snarling denunciation of Americans’ decadent philistinism in The Closing of the American Mind, followed closely by E. D. Hirsch’s laundry list, in Cultural Literacy, of names, dates, and concepts—famous if often annoying touchstones, five thousand of them in the first volume alone—fueled discussion groups and call-in talk shows and spawned a whole mini-industry of varyingly comprehensive, competent, and clever guides to American history, say, or geography, or science, which most people not only hadn’t retained but also didn’t feel they’d understood to begin with. At the same time, there was that rancorous debate over expanding the academic “canon,” or core curriculum, to include more than the standard works by Dead White European Males, plus Jane Austen and W. E. B. Du Bois, a worthy but humorless brouhaha characterized—and this was the high point—by mobs of Stanford students chanting, “Hey hey ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Emerging from our rooms, where we’d been holed up with our portable typewriters and the working manuscript of An Incomplete Education for most of the decade, we blinked, looked around, and remarked thoughtfully, “Boy, this ought to sell a few books.”
Now, back to revise the book for a second edition, we’re astonished at how much the old ’hood has changed in just a few years. We thought life was moving at warp speed in the 1980s, yet we never had to worry, in those days, that what we wrote on Friday might be outdated by the following Monday (although we did stop to consider whether “Sean and Madonna” would still be a recognizable reference on the Monday after that). When we wrote the original edition, psychology was, if not exactly a comer, at least a legitimate topic of conversation— this was, remember, in the days before Freud’s reputation had been trashed beyond repair and when plenty of people apparently still felt they could afford to spend eleven years and several hundred thousand dollars lying on a couch, free-associating their way from hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness. Film, as distinct from movies, likewise still had intellectual appeal (and it made money, too), until that appeal dissolved somewhere between the demise of the European auteur theory and the rise of the video-rental store. We can actually remember a time—and so can you, if you’re old enough to be reading this book—when a new film by Truffaut or Bergman or Fellini was considered as much of an event as the release of another Disney animation is today. And political science, while always more of a paranoiac’s game than a bona fide academic discipline, at least had well-defined opposing teams (the Free World vs. the Communist one), familiar playing pieces (all those countries that were perpetually being manipulated by one side or the other), and a global game board whose markings weren’t constantly being redrawn.
One thing hasn’t changed, however, to judge by the couples standing in line behind us at the multiplex or the kids in the next booth at the diner: Nobody’s gotten so much as a hair more literate. In fact, we seem to have actually become dopier, with someone like Norman Mailer superseded as our national interpreter of current events by someone like Larry King.
But then, why would it have turned out differently? If literacy was ever really—as all those literacy-anxiety books implied and as we, too, believed, for about five minutes back in 1979, when we first conceived of writing this one— about amassing information for the purpose of passing some imaginary standardized test, whether administered by a cranky professor, a snob at a dinner party, or your own conscience, it isn’t anymore. Most of us have more databases, cable stations, CDs, telephone messages, e-mail, books, newspapers, and Post-its than we can possibly sort through in one lifetime; we don’t need any additional information we don’t know what to do with, thanks.
What we do need, more than ever, in our opinion, is the opportunity to have up-close-and-personal relationships, to be intimately if temporarily connected, with the right stuff, past and present. As nation-states devolve into family feuds and every crackpot with an urge to vent is awarded fifteen minutes of airtime, it seems less like bourgeois indulgence and more like preventive medicine to spend quality time with the books, music, art, philosophy, and discoveries that have, for one reason or another, managed to endure. What lasts? What works? What’s the difference between good and evil? What, if anything, can we trust? It’s not that we can’t, in some roundabout way, extract clues from the testimony of the pregnant twelve-year-olds, the mothers of serial killers, and the couples who have sex with their rottweilers, who’ve become standard fare on Oprah and Maury and Sally Jessy, it’s just that it’s nice, when vertigo sets in, to be able to turn for a second opinion to Tolstoy or Melville or even Susan Sontag. And it helps restore one’s equilibrium to revisit history and see for oneself whether, in fact, life was always this weird.
Consequently, what we’ve set out to provide in An Incomplete Education is not so much data as access; not a Cliffs Notes substitute or a cribsheet for cultural-literacy slackers but an invitation to the ball, a way in to material that has thrilled, inspired, and comforted, sure, but also embarrassed, upset, and/or confused us over the years, and which, we’ve assumed with our customary arrogance, may have stumped you too on occasion. In this edition, as in the first, we’ve endeavored—at times with more goodwill than good grace—to make introductions, uncover connections, facilitate communication, and generally lubricate the relationship between the reader (insofar as the reader thinks more or less along the same lines we do) and various aspects of Western Civ’s “core curriculum,” since the latter, whatever its shortfalls, still provides a frame of reference we can share without having to regret it in the morning, one that doesn’t depend for its existence on market forces or for its appeal on mere prurient interest, and one that reminds us that we’re capable of grappling with questions of more enduring—even, if you think about it, more immediate—import than whether or not O.J. really did it.
Finally, a note to those (mercifully few) readers who wrote to us complaining that the first edition of An Incomplete Education failed, despite their high hopes and urgent needs, to complete their educations: Don’t hold your breath this time around, either. We’ll refrain from referring you, snidely, to the book’s title (but for goodness’ sake, don’t you even look before you march off to the cash register?), but we will permit ourselves to wonder what a “complete” education might consist of, and why, if such a thing existed, you would want it anyway. What, know it all? No gaps to fill, no new territory to explore, nothing left to learn, education over? (And no need for third and fourth revised editions of this book?) Please, write to us again and tell us you were just kidding.