Latest / Christians Reading Classics / Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with Shilo Brooks | America 250

Transcript

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with Shilo Brooks | America 250 · Christians Reading Classics

0:19
SPEAKER_00: I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsboro, and about twelve miles from Easton in Talbot County, Maryland.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing me, containing it.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: And it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: They seldom come nearer to it than planting time, harvest time, cherry time, springtime, or fall time.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: A want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me, even during childhood.
1:07
SPEAKER_00: The white children could tell the ages.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: So wrote Frederick Douglass in opening his narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, published in 1845.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to season two of Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Mirror Orthodoxy.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: The theme for this second season is Classics American Christians Should Read in Honor of America's 250th.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: I am Nadia Williams, book's editor for Mere Orthodoxy, and the author of the book, Christians Reading Classics, Out This Past Fall with Sonderman Academic.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: Today, it is an absolute delight to talk about Frederick Douglass and his narrative with Dr.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: Shiloh Brooks.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for being here.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: So he is, among many other things that he has done, currently the president and CEO of the George W.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: Bush Presidential Center and professor of practice in the Department of Political Science at Southern Methodist University.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: He was previously executive director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, where he also taught in the Department of Politics and was the winner of Princeton University's Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: And considering that he has frequently taught Frederick Douglass's narrative, I am extra excited to have him effectively teach it to us today.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: Last but not least, he is the author of Nietzsche's Culture War, The Unity of the Untimely Meditations.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: And he has a new book coming on Noble Ambition from Penguin Random House.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: So when is that coming?
2:52
SPEAKER_01: Probably 2027.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: Well, if you are up for it, I'd love to hear some details towards the end today as well.
3:00
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: So let's start with a general question that we always open with.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: Since this podcast is about reading classic books, how would you define a classic?
3:11
SPEAKER_01: You know, to me, a classic is a book that poses an enduring question, a question that doesn't ever die, a question that's not easily answerable.
3:21
SPEAKER_01: It's a book that's perennially relevant, meaning uh it speaks to each generation by posing that question anew.
3:28
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, I went to an interesting school called St.
3:31
SPEAKER_01: John's College as an undergraduate, which bills itself as the place in America where you come to read classics.
3:36
SPEAKER_01: And there, you know, there was this view that there's this enduring conversation among certain authors who um are engaged over millennia, even from Plato all the way up to modern times, with foundational questions about justice and love and God.
3:51
SPEAKER_01: And I view a classic as a book that it makes a relevant contribution to that conversation and is written in a way that it is beautiful or compelling or you know, some it has some other feature that allows it to endure in that great conversation.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: So, how does Frederick Douglass's narrative fit into that definition?
4:14
SPEAKER_00: And especially why is it worth reading for Christians in America in the year of America's 250th?
4:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, Frederick Douglass's narrative is an extraordinary, extraordinary book.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, let me say a little bit about Frederick Douglass, which I think will then show why this book is a classic.
4:32
SPEAKER_01: So Frederick Douglass lives from 1818 to 1895, and as you read in the passage that you opened with, he was born a slave.
4:41
SPEAKER_01: Um there there are few people who can say that they traveled the distance of life that Frederick Douglass did.
4:48
SPEAKER_01: So he was born a slave.
4:50
SPEAKER_01: By the end of his life, he was the greatest orator in America, rivaled only by Abraham Lincoln.
4:56
SPEAKER_01: They were uh alive at the same time, they did meet.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: But the greatest orator in America uh who had lived a life of sort of extraordinary advocacy for freedom.
5:08
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, Douglas um escapes slavery.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: And he writes, uh, and I can talk about that escape and what it consisted if you're interested, but he writes the narrative at about 27 years old.
5:20
SPEAKER_01: So we're dealing with a book by a fairly young man.
5:23
SPEAKER_01: It he wrote three autobiographies over the course of his life the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, My Bondage, My Freedom, and the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.
5:32
SPEAKER_01: He writes the narrative at 27 because he's taken up with an American uh preacher named William Lloyd Garrison.
5:42
SPEAKER_01: And Garrison and the Garrisonians are of the view that the Constitution, insofar as it sanctions slavery, in Garrison's view, is a document that must go.
5:54
SPEAKER_01: It must be torn up.
5:55
SPEAKER_01: It's a document written in blood.
5:57
SPEAKER_01: Um they get Douglas in their circle, and there's these rumors that there's this black man who's going around and giving extraordinary speeches, who's totally self-educated.
6:09
SPEAKER_01: It almost seems unreal.
6:11
SPEAKER_01: And so what ends up happening is that Douglass writes this book in large part to tell the story of who he is, because so many people either don't believe he's who he is, don't believe he's very articulate, he can read and these sorts of things.
6:24
SPEAKER_01: And so he's going around on these garrisonian tours, um, and people, you know, want to hear his story.
6:30
SPEAKER_01: So the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass is written by a young man of 27 who's just escaped slavery in an effort to say who he is so that he can begin making the case for the abolition of slavery first and foremost, and for at least a little while, a kind of criticism and critic of the Constitution, although he changes his mind on that later in his life.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: He escapes slavery in a way on something that looked like the Underground Railroad.
6:56
SPEAKER_01: Um in the narrative, the book that we're discussing today, he says at the end, I'm not going to put in here how I escaped slavery because I want that method of escape to be available to others.
7:07
SPEAKER_01: And if I talk in detail too much about it, I fear I'll compromise it.
7:11
SPEAKER_01: We know now that Douglas was uh escaping slavery to go marry a free woman who had set him up with something that looked like the Underground Railroad.
7:23
SPEAKER_01: Um dressed up in sailor whites, he had some forged papers.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: He gets on a train in Baltimore and goes all the way to New York, sort of in disguise as a sailor.
7:34
SPEAKER_01: Gets to New York, there are people there who uh hide him, um who support him.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: He eventually leaves the United States and goes to Ireland because it becomes known that he's an escaped slave, and there's fear, both him and his friends think that authorities could come and arrest him and take him back to the plantation from which he escaped.
7:55
SPEAKER_01: So he spends a lot of his life in Europe.
7:58
SPEAKER_01: But this book is perhaps his best uh autobiography.
8:02
SPEAKER_01: Some people say his second, called My Bondage and My My Freedom is his best.
8:06
SPEAKER_01: But this book is an enduring classic because it contains in compressed form, it's only 60 to 80 pages long, depending on the edition, a statement about human freedom, which is unrivaled, in my view, in the history of American politics.
8:23
SPEAKER_01: So that's why it's a classic.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: As for why Christians should read it, there's a beautiful appendix to the book.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: Douglas was criticized in the book for having said some fairly critical things of American Christianity because he believed, based on his experience in the South with slaveholding Christian masters, that American Christianity was aiding slavery, that slaveholders were using certain passages of the Bible to keep their slaves in bondage, to justify slavery.
8:56
SPEAKER_01: And so when the book was published, there was some criticism of Douglas as a kind of unchristian man.
9:00
SPEAKER_01: After all, you say that Christianity is a slave-holding religion, and you're very critical of the Christianity because it seems to make these slaveholders justified in their uh holding of slaves.
9:11
SPEAKER_01: In the appendix, Douglas says, I'm not attacking Christianity in this book.
9:15
SPEAKER_01: I'm attacking a fake Christianity, a false Christianity.
9:18
SPEAKER_01: That's not the Christianity of Jesus, the Christianity that you see these slaveholders engaging in.
9:23
SPEAKER_01: And so what I'm doing in the book is exposing Christianity of the South as a fraud.
9:28
SPEAKER_01: So I'll stop there, but I think you can see both why this is a classic and why I think Christians should take an interest in it.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you.
9:36
SPEAKER_00: And I think this kind of uh allows us for several directions to go from here.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: I'd love to hear more about several of these points that you brought up.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: So um, first of all, who was his target audience?
9:47
SPEAKER_00: So it sounds like he wrote it for particular people he was engaging in dialogue with.
9:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think so so I think there's two ways to look at that question.
9:55
SPEAKER_01: The first way to look at that question is who is his immediate audience?
9:59
SPEAKER_01: But of course, if it's a classic, then there's some enduring audience that's long after that audience.
10:04
SPEAKER_01: So let's take his immediate audience for a moment.
10:06
SPEAKER_01: So you have to think that the men and women of his own race, by and large, could not read at the time when this was written.
10:13
SPEAKER_01: So you can say, well, then this must have been written in a certain sense for white people.
10:17
SPEAKER_01: After all, they were the ones who could read.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: Douglas does write the book for white people.
10:22
SPEAKER_01: He does write the book for those people who have uh some sympathy with the abolitionist cause.
10:28
SPEAKER_01: Um the book, interestingly, uh, is quite successful.
10:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, but one of the more interesting things about this book is that black people in slavery begin to hear about Douglas because the book becomes so successful that even though they can't read, rumors of his ascent kind of circulate.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: There's a beautiful line by Booker T.
10:50
SPEAKER_01: Washington, another great American black man, who um says that when he was a slave, uh he can remember hearing rumor of a man named Frederick Douglass on the plantation, and that there was a black man who could read, and that there was a black man who was having an effect politically.
11:09
SPEAKER_01: And Washington says, I didn't know much about him, and of course I couldn't have read the book, but hearing, just hearing rumors about him inspired me.
11:16
SPEAKER_01: And of course, Washington goes on to become the sort of the next Frederick Douglass, or at least the great uh you know, sequel to Frederick Douglass as a civil rights leader.
11:25
SPEAKER_01: So most immediately the book was was for whites to acquaint them with the horrors of Southern slavery, people who had never heard of it, who hadn't seen it, uh, to help make the case for abolition by way of the garrisonian movement.
11:39
SPEAKER_01: That's the immediate audience.
11:40
SPEAKER_01: But as a classic, I always tell my students this book is really for two enduring audiences.
11:47
SPEAKER_01: Um for white people today, and even perhaps back then, what the book seems to teach is that slavery degrades black people, there's no question.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: They're beaten.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: The white slave masters beat them to blood, they kill them, they abuse them, they don't feed them, they starve them.
12:07
SPEAKER_01: There is no question that slavery is a degrading institution on black people.
12:12
SPEAKER_01: But what Douglass shows in the book is that as slavery is degrading of black people, so it is degrading of southern whites.
12:20
SPEAKER_01: Some of these slave masters are sleeping with the slaves, the female slaves in their charge, under the house of their own wife.
12:28
SPEAKER_01: Um, they are birthing sons who they then trade.
12:32
SPEAKER_01: Frederick Douglass suspects that he himself is half white and that his father is a white man.
12:37
SPEAKER_01: And so you get the degradation of white people as a major but quiet theme of the book.
12:45
SPEAKER_01: So I tell my students the book is as much about the degradation of slavery as an institution of blacks as it is of whites.
12:50
SPEAKER_01: But the second audience is, I think, his own people.
12:54
SPEAKER_01: There's a beautiful biography of Douglas called Frederick Douglass Prophet of Freedom.
12:58
SPEAKER_01: And I see Douglas as a prophet of freedom for his own race, almost like a contemporary Moses.
13:04
SPEAKER_01: In the book, he teaches lessons about what freedom should consist in, how one should go about living a free life, what freedom means and what it doesn't mean.
13:14
SPEAKER_01: Those are lessons for a people, his own people, who have never been free.
13:19
SPEAKER_01: How do you become free once that day comes?
13:22
SPEAKER_01: This is, in a way, an instruction manual for black people who are enslaved to the institution of slavery who are about to become free, and white people who are enslaved to their appetites, like their lust, and are themselves not free.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: And so it's a book of freedom for both races, and I think those are kind of the target audiences.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: That's really powerful.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: So what do we know of Frederick Douglass's kind of adjustment to life of freedom?
13:47
SPEAKER_01: Um, I I think it took some time.
13:50
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, the book doesn't this particular autobiography, like I said, he's got three, sort of ends when he when he gets free.
13:58
SPEAKER_01: If you go read My Bondage, My Freedom, if you go read Um The Life and Times, you will see more about Douglass' free life than you get here.
14:08
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, what what the narrative is about is largely his preparation for a life of freedom.
14:15
SPEAKER_01: He begins, for instance, at one point in the book to do what he calls hiring out his time, meaning that he's an enslaved man working for a white man, but he persuades that white man to let him keep a percentage of the wages that he might earn when he goes to become a caulker for ships.
14:34
SPEAKER_01: You know, he's sealing the seams on ships with caulk.
14:38
SPEAKER_01: And so he begins to see, he calls what the duties and responsibilities of freedom require.
14:45
SPEAKER_01: And so he starts thinking about being able to earn his own money, pay for his own uh meals, support a family, and those kinds of things.
14:54
SPEAKER_01: Now, of course, when he gets free, he becomes an orator.
14:58
SPEAKER_01: Uh, he's always strapped for cash for most of his life.
15:01
SPEAKER_01: Um, he gets married, uh, he has children, um, he writes essentially for money and tours on the speaking circuit, which is a very difficult life.
15:11
SPEAKER_01: But in the narrative, you know, one of the things that you start to see is that he feels like he's been sold a false bill of goods about what freedom is, that white people act like freedom is doing whatever you want.
15:24
SPEAKER_01: He sees these masters um sleeping with uh their slaves, he sees them beating people whenever they want, he sees them shooting people whenever they want, he sees them drinking all the time.
15:34
SPEAKER_01: So he thinks that the slaves in himself are getting this impression that freedom means doing whatever you want.
15:39
SPEAKER_01: What he comes to learn is that freedom requires restraint.
15:43
SPEAKER_01: Freedom requires doing what is good.
15:46
SPEAKER_01: That's not doing whatever you want.
15:48
SPEAKER_01: That lesson is very powerful, and that is the lesson that animates him in his own freedom later in life.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: That is powerful.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: And it seems like he just had a very um disciplined approach to everything he did from childhood.
16:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean he was, you know, uh the most famous example, I I think the one of the most famous parts of this book that really captures what you're talking about with respect to the way Frederick Douglass lives and thinks and the discipline, is he he very famously teaches himself to read and write in slavery.
16:23
SPEAKER_01: That's arguably, I mean, for me, when I teach the book, that's the part that I focus a lot on.
16:29
SPEAKER_01: Because he's Wasn't it illegal?
16:31
SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, so so I mean, the way the story goes is that he says so he starts off on a plantation um in in more rural Maryland, uh Tucco.
16:43
SPEAKER_01: And he eventually, by way of family trading property and these kinds of things, gets sent to Baltimore.
16:49
SPEAKER_01: When he arrives at Baltimore, he is staying with um the brother and wife of the family that he was on the plantation for, but it's his first time in a city.
17:00
SPEAKER_01: And so he becomes what he calls a city slave.
17:02
SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that he says is the the white woman, Sophia Auld, who I went to see because I was going to live with her and help her around her home, I could tell the moment I met her that she had never had a slave before.
17:15
SPEAKER_01: And I could tell that being a city slave was going to be very different than being a plantation slave.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: And so he says, Sophia, having never had a slave before, commenced teaching me the ABC.
17:26
SPEAKER_01: That's what he calls it, the ABC.
17:27
SPEAKER_01: And she begins to teach him to read because she doesn't know that you're not supposed to teach a slave to read, and she thinks he's ignorant, and so she begins to teach him.
17:36
SPEAKER_01: Her husband catches her teaching Frederick Douglass, young at this time, uh, very young, probably 12, 13, 14 years old, to read.
17:47
SPEAKER_01: And he says, You cannot teach a slave to read.
17:49
SPEAKER_01: And she says, Why?
17:50
SPEAKER_01: And he says, Because education is incompatible with slavery.
17:55
SPEAKER_01: Education disprepares him for slavery.
17:58
SPEAKER_01: A slave can't be educated.
18:00
SPEAKER_01: Douglas hears this conversation.
18:03
SPEAKER_01: And he said at the time, I didn't really understand it.
18:06
SPEAKER_01: But what I understood was what he wanted to deprive me of, I wanted the most.
18:11
SPEAKER_01: I needed an education because he said that education and slavery are incompatible with each other.
18:17
SPEAKER_01: So she stopped teaching him to read.
18:21
SPEAKER_01: When she does so, she be starts to become cruel to him and begins actually being as cruel as others to him once she stops teaching him to read.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: But he says, I resolve to learn to read.
18:31
SPEAKER_01: And so what he did was he went when the mistress and the master were out of the house, he would go and take their young son's spelling books.
18:39
SPEAKER_01: And he would begin to trace the letters in the spelling books, because they had a young son who was himself learning to read and spell.
18:46
SPEAKER_01: And he would sound them out.
18:47
SPEAKER_01: And when he would go out into the streets of Baltimore, he would go up to little children in the street with bread in his pockets, and he would say, I'm gonna write a word.
18:56
SPEAKER_01: I bet you can't read it.
18:58
SPEAKER_01: And he would write the word and they would tell him what the word is, and then he would say, I'm gonna write some letters.
19:04
SPEAKER_01: I bet I know more letters than you, and then he'd write some letters and they'd write some letters, and if he didn't know the letters that they had written, he'd say, What is that letter?
19:10
SPEAKER_01: And they'd say, That's an E.
19:11
SPEAKER_01: And then he would learn E.
19:13
SPEAKER_01: And so he, by way of just this, you know, giving himself over to this over time, he teaches himself to read.
19:20
SPEAKER_01: He ends up getting a hold of some newspapers from some abolitionists which are talking about abolition, and then it's off to the races.
19:27
SPEAKER_01: But yes, you it is bad form to teach a slave to read.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: And the reason is because education and slavery are incompatible with each other.
19:34
SPEAKER_01: And why that is, we we might discuss.
19:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
19:37
SPEAKER_00: Well, talk more about this because this is something that perhaps is even more apt in a strange way right now with AI and kind of all of the um the apocalypse of reading in American education at all levels.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: This is one of the enduring classic lessons of Douglas.
19:54
SPEAKER_01: You know, why are education and slavery incompatible with each other?
19:58
SPEAKER_01: The reason I think to just cut to the chase that Douglas is sort of saying this is when the master says you can't teach a slave to read, that education unfits him for slavery, he has in mind that in order to be a slave, you must be, and Douglas says this later in the book, you must be kept in darkness.
20:17
SPEAKER_01: Why must you be kept in darkness?
20:19
SPEAKER_01: Because you must be made to believe things about yourself and your situation which may be untrue, but which are necessary for slavery to persist, such as uh black people are naturally less than white people.
20:33
SPEAKER_01: They are akin to animals, they're not humans.
20:36
SPEAKER_01: These fake things, right?
20:37
SPEAKER_01: These false things, must be believed by you to be true.
20:40
SPEAKER_01: If you had an education which might challenge those convictions that you've just been given by birth, you might begin to think all men are created equal.
20:49
SPEAKER_01: You might begin to think that human dignity is universal.
20:52
SPEAKER_01: You might begin to think other things.
20:54
SPEAKER_01: And once you begin to have those thoughts in your head, or at least the possibility of those thoughts in your head, slavery is out of bounds for you.
21:01
SPEAKER_01: You become a questioner.
21:04
SPEAKER_01: And so I talk to my students about the term, which is a lost term, but it's still a relevant term, liberal education.
21:11
SPEAKER_01: What does liberal education mean?
21:13
SPEAKER_01: It means an education for liberty, for a free woman or man.
21:18
SPEAKER_01: It's a woman or man who has taken those convictions which they hold, and they're not sure why they hold them, and submitted them to scrutiny and found out whether they're mere prejudices or whether they're enduring truths.
21:30
SPEAKER_01: And if they're prejudices, you gotta let them go.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: You gotta liberate yourself from those prejudices.
21:35
SPEAKER_01: And you gotta free yourself, liberating education.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: And if they're true, then you double down on them.
21:41
SPEAKER_01: And so I think Douglas sees the true meaning of liberal education insofar as his message in the book is through learning to read, I liberated myself from those falsehoods and prejudices which made slavery possible for me.
21:55
SPEAKER_01: And I knew in slavery, once I learned to read, that although my body was still Bound, my mind was now free.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: And so you get this beautiful moment of what true freedom consists in by way of the story of Douglas's learning to read.
22:10
SPEAKER_01: And he goes on, of course, to become a great thinker, a great advocate in the cause of freedom and abolition.
22:16
SPEAKER_01: And even when his body isn't chained, long after he learns to read and before he's escaped, he still considers himself and his soul to be a free man because he's a thoughtful and educated man.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: So many echoes here of like Plato's cave.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: It is beautiful.
22:34
SPEAKER_00: And I was thinking about this just the idea of learning to read for the first time as someone who is never supposed to, and it changed his life.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: So that is the moment.
22:44
SPEAKER_00: It really changed his life.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: How do we convince our students that reading is something that can change their lives too?
22:52
SPEAKER_01: I think this book is really helpful in doing that.
22:54
SPEAKER_01: It's a book that I think should be taught, and I would I teach it a lot in introductory courses.
22:59
SPEAKER_01: You know, one of the things that students don't have, and they can't have, it's not their fault, is the experience of being either not able to read and wanting to read.
23:10
SPEAKER_01: Most of them have been in primary schools and these sorts of things.
23:14
SPEAKER_01: Or not uh the and more than that, the experience of not being free.
23:18
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we, you know, most students, if they were born in this country or even if they're naturalized, have just they've taken for granted since they were one month old.
23:25
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, they've been raised this way.
23:27
SPEAKER_01: What Douglass gives us, and therefore I think what Douglass can give our students, is access through his writing to a way of life to which we can't have access because we've already got freedom and we've already got literacy.
23:41
SPEAKER_01: What is the life, mind, and soul of a man who does not have freedom and who does not have literacy and who self-initiates those processes?
23:50
SPEAKER_01: We didn't self-initiate, I didn't choose to be free.
23:52
SPEAKER_01: There was no moment in my life where I said, all right, I'm now gonna go pursue my freedom.
23:56
SPEAKER_01: I was born in the United States.
23:57
SPEAKER_01: I didn't self-initiate that process.
23:59
SPEAKER_01: There also wasn't really a time when I self-initiated reading.
24:02
SPEAKER_01: I was sort of went through kindergarten and first grade and second grade, and I was just going on the rails that are designed.
24:07
SPEAKER_01: Douglas makes the decisions for both of those.
24:09
SPEAKER_01: He says, I'm gonna learn to read and I'm gonna be free.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: So he can take students back to a pre-literate, pre-free life.
24:17
SPEAKER_01: By way of his writing, they can begin to live his life and they can experience his longings, which they don't have, and it's not their fault, because they've been thrown into a world where they're already free and you know there are mostly uh structures in place to make them literate.
24:32
SPEAKER_01: So I think the way for students to begin to see what a liberal education is, is to go and read the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, 60 pages, it doesn't take long, and allow the transformation that he undergoes to become a part of their own souls, to really feel it.
24:48
SPEAKER_01: And that, uh with that, one can begin to see what it means to go from slavery and ignorance to freedom.
24:55
SPEAKER_01: And then what I often do is I point to my students and I say, once we discuss the slavery theme, I say, now what are you enslaved to?
25:02
SPEAKER_01: And they look at me like, what do you mean I'm a slave?
25:04
SPEAKER_01: And I say, No, no.
25:06
SPEAKER_01: What are you enslaved to?
25:07
SPEAKER_01: In other words, there's something going on inside you.
25:10
SPEAKER_01: I know you can go out right now and you can buy a hamburger and you can drive your car and you can go see a movie and you think you're free.
25:16
SPEAKER_01: But there's something in there that you would like to be liberated from for all of us.
25:20
SPEAKER_01: I don't know what it is.
25:21
SPEAKER_01: You can reenact the transformation of Frederick Douglass.
25:25
SPEAKER_01: You just need to be honest with yourself and find out what is the thing that you're enslaved to.
25:29
SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's your ignorance, maybe it's a thought, maybe it's your passion, maybe it's drink, maybe it's, I don't know what it is.
25:34
SPEAKER_01: And you can keep that private.
25:36
SPEAKER_01: But there's something in there that you too can go and learn what it means to be liberated from.
25:42
SPEAKER_01: So I think just showing them Douglass and encouraging them to engage in um some kind of transformation in their own life is a starting point.
25:50
SPEAKER_00: I love that.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: And just this relentless pursuit of truth.
25:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
25:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
25:56
SPEAKER_01: That that you know, that's um a hallmark of Douglas' life, especially as a writer.
26:02
SPEAKER_01: You know, Douglas goes on to be um an extraordinary, a well-read, um, very literary man.
26:11
SPEAKER_01: Um, and and, you know, he he just can't, I mean, you know, in the in the narrative of the of the life of Frederick Douglass, he gets a hold of this newspaper called the Columbian Orator.
26:21
SPEAKER_01: And in the Columbian Orator, you talk about the pursuit of truth, there are printed these almost platonic-style dialogues between a slave master and a slave, in which the slave, through dialogue, through reason, begins to refute the slave master on the grounds of the goodness of slavery.
26:40
SPEAKER_01: And so, Douglas, you got a picture of him.
26:41
SPEAKER_01: He's, you know, 17, 18 years old.
26:45
SPEAKER_01: He's got this Columbian order newspaper, he's reading this slave, who's engaging in almost Socratic dialogue with the slave master and showing him and proving to him at every point that slavery is unjust.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: And you can imagine the kind of search for or thirst and passion for truth that this ignites in Douglas's soul.
27:03
SPEAKER_01: Um, so he becomes a great reader and a great um, you know, pursuer of wisdom.
27:08
SPEAKER_00: And of course, truth, goodness, and beauty, as we think of like the trifecta animating liberal education.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: It's striking to see them kind of work together in this text.
27:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
27:21
SPEAKER_00: This episode of Christians Reading Classics is brought to you by Beson Divinity School.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: Beson Divinity School, an evangelical seminary in Sanford University in Birmingham, Alabama, offers a robust Master of Divinity, forming students in person in a community-oriented model of theological education.
27:41
SPEAKER_00: Thanks to a generous gift, Beeson continues to offer full tuition scholarships for students beginning their studies in fall 2026, making its flagship degree more affordable than ever before.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: These scholarships cover the costs of tuition and fees for three years, the average time it takes to finish the MDiv.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: Apply today at peaceanddivinity.com.
28:08
SPEAKER_00: So let's talk more about the people of the South because he talks a lot about them.
28:13
SPEAKER_00: So those the slave owners, their um their Christianity, which they misuse, uh, the people he interacts with, fellow slaves.
28:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
28:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, it's a it's a beautiful book full of uh an extraordinary cast of characters.
28:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean, some of them you only meet briefly and you're saddened by.
28:30
SPEAKER_01: For instance, Douglas says at the beginning that he hardly knew his own mother.
28:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, that he was he was born on a plantation in which she was on, but shortly after his birth, she was whisked away somewhere else, and she's now some distance from him.
28:45
SPEAKER_01: He sees her every so often.
28:47
SPEAKER_01: It's pretty rare, and then he gets word that she's died, and he says, I felt about her when she died, much as I might feel about a stranger dying.
28:55
SPEAKER_01: This is not a cruelty of Douglas, it's just to show you that he never had a bond with his mother because she was a slave on a different plantation and the kind of cruelties that these people went through.
29:06
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, uh he uh one of the things that is most striking about the book is the succession of slave um masters or slave breakers that Douglas proceeds through.
29:18
SPEAKER_01: It's been pointed out a few times that these people have very appropriate names for slaveholders.
29:26
SPEAKER_01: So one of them is named Mr.
29:27
SPEAKER_01: Severe, uh, one of them is named Mr.
29:30
SPEAKER_01: Gore.
29:31
SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, there are these sort of and one wonders whether Douglass is putting it on as a writer or not.
29:38
SPEAKER_01: Uh I suspect he's not, but but that's just by the way.
29:41
SPEAKER_01: So he you get acquainted with some of these slaveholders.
29:45
SPEAKER_01: Um, oftentimes with the slaveholders uh and the slave breaker, there's one famous slave breaker character in the book named Mr.
29:52
SPEAKER_01: Covey, who Douglass is sent to because Douglas, after he learns to read, gets a reputation for being what was called then a particularly uppity slave, meaning he was pretty rebellious, he could think for himself.
30:05
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so his owner sends him to a slave breaker who is a very severe man and who would work Douglas to the bone.
30:12
SPEAKER_01: This is when Douglas begins to sort of start thinking seriously about escaping.
30:17
SPEAKER_01: Um he's beaten, he gets in a fight with this man, he ends up either beating this man up or preventing this man from beating him up.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: It's a very famous scene that I can talk about.
30:28
SPEAKER_01: But um, he he uh goes through this succession of firstly um slave owners, and of course I've talked about Sophia Auld.
30:36
SPEAKER_01: He always talks when he introduces each of them about their religion, and he'll say, This man was this kind of a believer, that man was that kind of a believer, with and here's where the criticism of the book came in after it was published, without exception, he seems to always say that the more pious the slaveholder, the more cruel the slaveholder.
30:59
SPEAKER_01: Meaning the more ardently they believed in Christianity, the more violent they were with their slaves.
31:06
SPEAKER_01: And um he uh the reasons for this seem to be something like they believed that the slavery was justified by a divine sanction that made them not feel guilty about it, that made them not feel bad about it.
31:24
SPEAKER_01: They were persuaded that it was a kind of commandment from God, whereas a man who didn't believe wasn't persuaded that it was a commandment from God, might have felt guilty because they didn't have this divine justification.
31:41
SPEAKER_01: And so Douglas talks about the the slaveholders in this way.
31:46
SPEAKER_01: He also says one of the most rewarding moments of his life, periods of his life, was when he gets his fellow slaves together for a Bible school, and he begins to teach them to read by way of teaching them the Bible.
32:00
SPEAKER_01: And he says, Wouldn't you know it?
32:03
SPEAKER_01: These pious slaveholders who apparently love Jesus get word that I'm sitting around with uh my brothers and sisters trying to teach them to read, and they come in and break up our Bible school with sticks and beat us uh because we're trying to learn the word of God.
32:21
SPEAKER_01: And so he says, What kind of Christianity is it that they're believing in that they're coming in to beat us up for just trying to learn to read the Bible?
32:29
SPEAKER_01: And so my point here is that, you know, Douglas always is more complex than he looks.
32:33
SPEAKER_01: He's not a simple critic of Christianity.
32:36
SPEAKER_01: Um he also talks a lot about some of his um friends in slavery, um, people who give him talismans who say something like, Keep this root in your pocket and you'll always be safe, these kind of old slave tales.
32:51
SPEAKER_01: Um slaves he meets on the plantation who do various kinds of work and advise him about various things.
32:58
SPEAKER_01: There's a group of slaves that try to escape from him uh with him and end up at one point confessing that he was the leader of a ring that was trying to escape.
33:08
SPEAKER_01: And so there are all kinds of characters and people and kinds of slaveholders and kinds of white people and slaves that you meet in this book.
33:15
SPEAKER_00: He really, he really is such a beautiful writer.
33:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just the way he puts this story together, there's um it's hard not to see some art to it, not to doubt his veracity, but but also there's a lot of art.
33:28
SPEAKER_00: So, why do you think he includes some of these details?
33:30
SPEAKER_00: Like you mentioned, the scene where he almost beats the uh slave breaker, or at least prevents him from beating him.
33:38
SPEAKER_00: Like, why include those particular details?
33:40
SPEAKER_00: Because that was shocking.
33:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Douglas is a beautiful writer.
33:43
SPEAKER_01: Of course, he goes on, as I said, to be an orator and a speaker rivaled only by Abraham Lincoln.
33:48
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're the two most beautiful, most talented 19th century orators in American history.
33:52
SPEAKER_01: So, yes, he's an extraordinary writer.
33:55
SPEAKER_01: With respect to some of the details he includes, the book is so short that I'm tempted to think everything Douglass includes is very significant and it has a meaning.
34:03
SPEAKER_01: You just have to find it.
34:04
SPEAKER_01: With Covey, Covey is the slave breaker who you who you've discussed.
34:08
SPEAKER_01: I mentioned a moment ago, Douglas is sent to this very cruel by reputation slave breaker who has a reputation for taking unruly slaves and beating them, starving them, working them such that they go back to their masters much more docile.
34:24
SPEAKER_01: But there comes a point where Covey has met his match in Frederick Douglass, I'll tell you that.
34:30
SPEAKER_01: And I think at this time, Douglas is about 16, 17.
34:33
SPEAKER_01: He's not a full-grown man, although he is a very capable man physically.
34:40
SPEAKER_01: And so uh there's a moment where Douglas is sick, he feels bad, he collapses during his work.
34:47
SPEAKER_01: Covey comes over, kicks him in the chest in the stomach.
34:51
SPEAKER_01: You know, Douglas is just, you know, has had enough of it, um, runs away, comes back, Covey sees him, attacks him.
35:01
SPEAKER_01: Long story short, Douglas and Covey end up wrestling on the ground.
35:05
SPEAKER_01: And you're saying, why is that there?
35:07
SPEAKER_01: They end up wrestling on the ground.
35:09
SPEAKER_01: There's some other slaves present.
35:10
SPEAKER_01: Covey's calling the other slaves over, like, come help me beat this guy down, and the other slaves are like, I don't want any part of that.
35:17
SPEAKER_01: And they don't even they don't go help him.
35:19
SPEAKER_01: Douglas claims in the narrative that he never laid violent hands on Covey, that all he did was prevent Covey from punching him.
35:28
SPEAKER_01: So he didn't punch Covey, he just was a defensive maneuver.
35:31
SPEAKER_01: If you go and read My Bondage, My Freedom, this is what's so interesting about Douglas.
35:35
SPEAKER_01: The story changes a little bit.
35:37
SPEAKER_01: Douglas is a little bit, he handles Covey a bit more.
35:40
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, it looks like Douglas is both attacking and maybe doing a little attacking in that one.
35:45
SPEAKER_01: In this one, there are reasons for that.
35:47
SPEAKER_01: In this one, it was important, given Douglass' audience, to convey that he wasn't laying hands on a white man, that he was not himself attacking a white man, especially if he wanted this book to have an effect, right?
35:59
SPEAKER_01: What the truth of the matter is, I don't know, because as I said, the story seems to morph a little bit later in his life.
36:04
SPEAKER_01: But I think the significance of that passage lies in the following.
36:08
SPEAKER_01: That passage comes after Douglas has learned to read.
36:11
SPEAKER_01: It comes after he's liberated his mind.
36:13
SPEAKER_01: But there's no question in Douglas' heart that he must also have a free body.
36:19
SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that he says after the match with Covey, Covey says to him, Boy, I really gave it to you, or something like that.
36:26
SPEAKER_01: And Douglas is like, whatever, man, you didn't do anything to me.
36:29
SPEAKER_01: You're over there huffing and puffing.
36:31
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you got nothing on me.
36:33
SPEAKER_01: And he says, from that moment forward, a white man never laid hands on me again.
36:39
SPEAKER_01: Once I wrestle with Covey and show people I wasn't kidding around, Covey never laid hands on me, nobody ever laid hands on me again.
36:46
SPEAKER_01: And I made it very clear that if they did, there would be a price to pay if you lay if a white man lays hands on me.
36:54
SPEAKER_01: And so I think at that moment, what you see in the book is the intellectual freedom and the physical freedom both coming together.
37:00
SPEAKER_01: Namely, Douglas is beginning to, he sees that freedom of the mind is important, but you don't have freedom unless you have freedom of the body.
37:07
SPEAKER_01: And if somebody's going to come beat you whenever they want, you are not yet free.
37:10
SPEAKER_01: You are still a slave in an important respect.
37:13
SPEAKER_01: And so what you see is the transition of Douglas's freedom, the the freedom of the mind and the freedom of the body eventually joined together.
37:21
SPEAKER_00: And that's powerful.
37:22
SPEAKER_00: So, and again, um that structure where um reading, reading this and thinking of like the stages into which he uh organized this narrative, that is powerful.
37:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, very powerful.
37:35
SPEAKER_00: And the idea that he could never hide this message.
37:38
SPEAKER_00: So, like the scene you just uh talked about where he is teaching other slaves to read.
37:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean he, you know, what I love about that scene is that Douglas says, of all the days he's had, and he maintains this in his later autobiographies, those were the best days of my life.
37:55
SPEAKER_01: That's the best thing I ever did was teach my fellow slaves to learn to read by way of teaching them the Bible.
38:02
SPEAKER_01: I think that's a high point of the book.
38:03
SPEAKER_01: Uh it's very, very odd in the book for Douglas to speak that warmly.
38:08
SPEAKER_01: After all, he's a slave in the whole book.
38:10
SPEAKER_01: I mean, he's just not, it's not like, but there are these moments where you can see that he's trying to draw the reader's attention to something that's deeply important to him.
38:19
SPEAKER_01: And so that that moment always sticks out to me as you know, Douglas kind of finding um meaning, purpose, both in the literacy and in the message, you know, that he thinks the gospel has to bring.
38:34
SPEAKER_00: So there were a number of slave narratives published.
38:37
SPEAKER_00: Um, Harriet Jacobs, for instance.
38:39
SPEAKER_00: How does Frederick Douglass's writing stand out among those?
38:44
SPEAKER_01: It's a good question.
38:45
SPEAKER_01: You know, I would often teach in some classes, I've already mentioned him, um, what would be my favorite, you know, other favorite narrative of this kind, which is Booker T.
38:59
SPEAKER_01: Washington has a book called Up from Slavery.
39:02
SPEAKER_01: I recommend that to everybody just as much as I rem recommend the narrative.
39:06
SPEAKER_01: Um it's similar, although Washington is freed by basically by the Emancipation Proclamation, and he's a very young boy at that time.
39:16
SPEAKER_01: Douglas is much older, um, you know, bordering on old man when all of that happens.
39:23
SPEAKER_01: Um so I would say Douglass's narrative retains, I mean, you know, uh among the slave narratives, it's kind of the origin.
39:32
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of the first.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: And so it retains this enduring power largely because of its its writing.
39:42
SPEAKER_01: As you mentioned a moment ago, Douglas is a beautiful writer.
39:44
SPEAKER_01: He writes these short, guttural, punchy sentences.
39:50
SPEAKER_01: Um there, you know, he he describes things with a kind of elegant simplicity.
39:56
SPEAKER_01: That's I mean, I don't know how you write like that.
39:59
SPEAKER_01: It's really beautiful.
40:00
SPEAKER_01: Um, so I think among the kind of slave narratives, this is the one that I think people should begin with.
40:06
SPEAKER_01: And of Douglas's three autobiographies, I think it's the one that people should begin with.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: But then what you should do is go and compare it to some of the other narratives you're talking about, in particular, in my view, um, Washington's book, which is equally short, in which you can see Washington's kind of doing a sequel or sort of doing the same thing again.
40:25
SPEAKER_01: And this thing becomes a genre in a way.
40:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:29
SPEAKER_00: No, thinking about writing, um, directing an MFA program, it's I think a lot, like, how do you make people into better writers?
40:36
SPEAKER_00: And then I read someone like Frederick Douglass and I think, well, I don't know how much I can do.
40:41
SPEAKER_01: He didn't have an MFA program, I'll tell you that.
40:43
SPEAKER_00: No.
40:44
SPEAKER_00: That's I mean, that's what's so incredible that here's although I think this is a case, as you were saying, for liberal education that he read so much.
40:53
SPEAKER_01: So much.
40:53
SPEAKER_01: And he he read and he wrote and he just thought, and he was just a free thinker, and he he understood the importance of education.
40:59
SPEAKER_01: And again, as I said earlier, this message is not just uh his story.
41:04
SPEAKER_01: This is a message for his race.
41:06
SPEAKER_01: To be free citizens, when the day comes that you become citizens of the United States, you need an education to be a citizen.
41:16
SPEAKER_01: You will need to make informed choices.
41:18
SPEAKER_01: Those choices will require you to be able to think for yourself.
41:22
SPEAKER_01: Those choices will require you to be able to analyze information, whether you're white or whether you're black.
41:27
SPEAKER_01: This is an enduring message for anybody who wants to call themselves the citizen of a free republic.
41:32
SPEAKER_01: And that's again why I think this book is a classic.
41:36
SPEAKER_01: I always tell my students this book is not just an account of the horrors of slavery.
41:41
SPEAKER_01: That's what it is.
41:42
SPEAKER_01: And I think too many people only read it as that.
41:45
SPEAKER_01: Douglas is more, that's important.
41:47
SPEAKER_01: Douglas is more profound than that.
41:49
SPEAKER_01: This is a book which is showing what's required to sustain liberal democracy.
41:55
SPEAKER_01: Um, educated, educated citizenry.
41:58
SPEAKER_01: The whites of the South, in his view, were not doing that.
42:02
SPEAKER_01: This was a stain on the regime.
42:04
SPEAKER_01: Um, his race had not been prepared to do that because they had been under the tutelage, quote unquote, of a white race, which itself was not free.
42:14
SPEAKER_01: And so this is a book of liberal education in the sense that it's a book that shows what the citizen of a liber uh a liberal country, a free country, um, a country of liberty, must do.
42:27
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and that's why it's so beautiful.
42:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
42:30
SPEAKER_00: And on a related note, um, even as we were talking, I was thinking more, he's really interested in theology too.
42:38
SPEAKER_00: Not a primary interest, but there's definitely an interest in theology, and the idea of good theology doesn't look like what he experienced in the South.
42:47
SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell That's right.
42:48
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's so interesting.
42:49
SPEAKER_01: I I've read this book so many times, and one of the things that I've tried to do is track the places in the book where he talks about God.
42:56
SPEAKER_01: And some of the time he'll use the word providence.
43:01
SPEAKER_01: Um, for instance, he'll say that providence was shown to him when the choice was made to take him off the plantation uh as a boy and send him to Baltimore.
43:15
SPEAKER_01: This is the turning point in his life because it's only from Baltimore that he learns to read.
43:19
SPEAKER_01: Or it's because Sophia Ald was, if he had stayed on the plantation, he would have been a plantation slave.
43:23
SPEAKER_01: Everything happens for him in Baltimore.
43:25
SPEAKER_01: It's in Baltimore that he learns to read, it's in Baltimore that he gets acquainted with cities, it's in Baltimore that he meets the people who are eventually going to help him escape.
43:32
SPEAKER_01: He gets involved with some of the free blacks.
43:34
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a whole thing.
43:36
SPEAKER_01: At that moment, when that happens, he uses the word providence.
43:41
SPEAKER_01: And this comes in the context of what is mostly a critique of the falsification of Christianity by Southern whites, where he's like, These people, they don't believe in the true Christianity.
43:50
SPEAKER_01: And so it's a very interesting um book because you get these moments, especially when he's tormented, when uh he's He's watching this black woman, Aunt Hester, at the very beginning, be whipped in front of him with a bloody cow skin.
44:06
SPEAKER_01: He sees a man who, a black man who's running from a slave owner, runs into a lake, and the guy takes out a gun and blows the black man's head off.
44:16
SPEAKER_01: He sees some of the most gruesome and horrible things you can see.
44:20
SPEAKER_01: He himself is thrust into slavery with no account from the divine of why.
44:27
SPEAKER_01: So you get these this sense that there are moments in the narrative when his belief in God wavers, when he's really, you know, and you know, I mean legitimately so.
44:39
SPEAKER_01: He does not see how these things can be just.
44:42
SPEAKER_01: How can how is this a good world?
44:44
SPEAKER_01: How how did God make this world good for me when this woman is getting raped and that guy's getting his head blown off and I'm getting whipped and all this stuff?
44:51
SPEAKER_01: So you get these moments when he really seems to to almost be in a kind of existential crisis.
44:58
SPEAKER_01: There's another moment when he's with Covey and he's beaten so much, and he says, I I reverted back to being a brute.
45:04
SPEAKER_01: I stopped reading, I just laid there, and I just, and you get, but then there are these moments when you see Providence come, and like Providence helps him, or these moments when he's teaching a Bible school, or in this appendix when he says, I this book is an attack on the false Christianity and the hypocrisy of the whites.
45:26
SPEAKER_01: When he says they they used Christianity to make us meek so that we wouldn't rebel.
45:32
SPEAKER_01: Um Christianity is a morality of courage, is a religion of courage.
45:36
SPEAKER_01: And so I think you're right that he's interested in theology, and it's not just an academic interest, he's struggling in his own heart because he lives in an exceedingly complex and harsh world.
45:47
SPEAKER_00: And that's powerful.
45:49
SPEAKER_00: He's a very um just admirable person as it comes through this book.
45:55
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
45:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
45:56
SPEAKER_00: Let's switch gears now as we near um the end of our time and branch a little bit beyond Frederick Douglass.
46:02
SPEAKER_00: Tell us about Noble Ambition.
46:04
SPEAKER_00: Where where are you going with this new book that you're finishing up right now?
46:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Douglas may feature in it.
46:10
SPEAKER_01: Let me say one more thing about Douglas.
46:12
SPEAKER_01: People should read Douglas and read his speeches.
46:14
SPEAKER_01: He's got some good ones.
46:15
SPEAKER_01: David Blight has written a great biography of Douglas, um, which won a prize.
46:19
SPEAKER_01: You know, Douglas is a hero in everything, in every way, but what you should read Douglas for and read Blight's biography for is Douglas is a complex man.
46:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean, he had some demons, just like we all do.
46:30
SPEAKER_01: So I don't want to oversell Douglas.
46:32
SPEAKER_01: I want you to see that what it is is a human story, a story of failure and a story of redemption and a story of struggle through his whole life.
46:40
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, look at all the sources on him.
46:43
SPEAKER_01: He's a he's a man who, you know, is is worthy of a lot of of um veneration, and he's a man who's also a human being like the rest of us.
46:52
SPEAKER_01: As for noble ambition, I have taught this course for many years on um ambition and uh how to think about ambition.
47:06
SPEAKER_01: Because ambition is one of these interesting human impulses which can both lead into all kinds of vice, but which when properly pursued can lead to a lot of virtue.
47:16
SPEAKER_01: And so you get this notion, on the one hand, ambition is a sin, but on the other hand, you don't want to be unambitious.
47:21
SPEAKER_01: After all, an unambitious person just lays there and is sloth or something of this kind.
47:27
SPEAKER_01: So, how should you think about ambition?
47:29
SPEAKER_01: One of the books that I teach that really resonates with students is a book by an ancient Greek who was a student of Socrates, the only other one besides Plato who wrote anything down.
47:38
SPEAKER_01: There may have been hundreds of students of Socrates, I don't know.
47:42
SPEAKER_01: But only two of them wrote anything down.
47:44
SPEAKER_01: His name is Xenophon, and he wrote a book called The Education of Cyrus, the Cyropideia in Greek.
47:50
SPEAKER_01: That's a beautiful book about a man, Cyrus the Great, who wants to take over, has the ambition to take over the entire world, and has the ambition to make the world better.
48:00
SPEAKER_01: He does it not just because he wants to be the ruler of the world, he thinks he can make the world more just and better.
48:05
SPEAKER_01: But over the course of his doing so, he becomes something bizarre.
48:12
SPEAKER_01: He becomes intoxicated with ambition.
48:14
SPEAKER_01: He becomes, he begins to long to be God himself.
48:18
SPEAKER_01: He begins to see himself as the ruler of the entire world and a person who the people who follow him should worship, and he begins to sort of think of himself as immortal.
48:27
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, his ambition leads him to some pretty dark places and into a lot of self-contradiction, such that the great promise that his ambition held out for him when he was a boy turns out to lead to a life which I think none of us would want to live.
48:41
SPEAKER_01: That book is a beautiful book for moderating and sobering up one's ambition, for showing by the negative a kind of healthy version of ambition, a moderated version of ambition, a version of ambition which makes good on its hopes, but is moderated with respect to what's possible, which won't lead you to want to become a god, won't lead you into the kind of excesses that Cyrus was led into.
49:08
SPEAKER_01: And so my work on that is largely trying to get people, especially young people, to be ambitious, but to think about ambition as something which is both limited in the kind of satisfaction it's going to provide you.
49:23
SPEAKER_01: You'll be happy, but you shouldn't put all your bet your eggs in the ambition basket.
49:27
SPEAKER_01: And second, when you do pursue it, you should pursue it for reasons that will be ennobling to you.
49:33
SPEAKER_01: If you seek honor, you should seek honor from people who are themselves honorable people, not just from the masses.
49:40
SPEAKER_01: Don't just get all the clicks and all the likes from all the people and all the world and a million followers and all this.
49:44
SPEAKER_01: What if there were ten wise men who thought that what you did was good?
49:49
SPEAKER_01: Would you rather have that than a million unwise people give you a like?
49:54
SPEAKER_01: Which is it that you would choose?
49:55
SPEAKER_01: I would choose the ten wise men.
49:57
SPEAKER_01: So just trying to provide people with some framework for thinking about how to think about success and ambition using Xenophon as our teacher, who himself was a very successful political man and a philosopher.
50:11
SPEAKER_00: I love that.
50:12
SPEAKER_00: Well, I look forward to getting my hands on it in 2027.
50:15
SPEAKER_01: I hope it's 27.
50:17
SPEAKER_00: Or yeah, well, hopefully.
50:18
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
50:18
SPEAKER_00: Whenever it is.
50:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
50:20
SPEAKER_00: Whenever it is, absolutely.
50:21
SPEAKER_00: I want to conclude with our usual closing question.
50:24
SPEAKER_00: What is a classic book, whether American or any other, that you wish you had written and why?
50:31
SPEAKER_01: Oh man, that's so good.
50:34
SPEAKER_01: I could name like two or three.
50:36
SPEAKER_01: If we're just talking like what it would mean about me, Plato's Republic.
50:42
SPEAKER_01: Like, if I was the author of Plato's Republic, I would get up every day and be like, I did that.
50:46
SPEAKER_01: Like, I that's amazing.
50:48
SPEAKER_01: I wrote essentially the most enduring text alongside the Bible of any other of any book that's ever been written.
50:54
SPEAKER_01: So I think Plato's Republic is a can is a contender.
50:57
SPEAKER_01: Um but when you add, you know, my first thought was I'm a student of writing.
51:01
SPEAKER_01: I know you do an MFA program, a beautiful prose, a beautiful, you know, and and when I read a book um like The Great Gatsby, I just sometimes think, how could that come out of a human hand?
51:15
SPEAKER_01: I wish that I could write just poetic prose the way F.
51:18
SPEAKER_01: Scott Fitzgerald can.
51:20
SPEAKER_01: Or I have a favorite author, more contemporary, named Cormac McCarthy.
51:24
SPEAKER_01: And when I read some of his books, and the paragraphs just take my breath away.
51:29
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's like I'm gonna be sick after reading this paragraph.
51:31
SPEAKER_01: It's like getting punched and getting the wind knocked out of you.
51:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, so I think if we're talking just pure intellectual heft, the Republic is a good one.
51:39
SPEAKER_01: If we're talking just the talent and beauty and the mastery of the English language, you know, Fitzgerald and McCarthy, I would give anything to be able to write like those guys.
51:48
SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much.
51:50
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.