Old Books, New Books

As I mentioned before, my interest in history and sociology was piqued around 2013 when I first read a couple now obscure books by Carroll Quigley from the 1960s. It was astonishing to me how different the tone was from anything that could have been published by a respected academic in 2013. (Partly, that he appreciated the societal importance of religious beliefs, appreciated The West, and wasn't afraid to talk about the positive influence of both.) I feel the same when I read, for example, John Locke, or Arnold Toynbee, or Eric Voegelin (who I only recently heard of and just started reading) - a glowing feeling like the Renaissance scholars must have felt as they unearthed the long-lost wisdom of the ancients. Only this time, oddly, it is wisdom possessed by scholars still alive in the 1970s and 1980s. It is wisdom long-lost only because this wisdom became unfashionable. A generation of academics deliberately buried this knowledge (what I called the History Coup) and placed a curse upon it (the curse of marginalization) to warn away any future scholars who might be tempted to dig it up again.  And now it is forgotten.

One of my favorite books when I was little. I was looking for pictures online when my daughter reminded me that we still own my old copy. 

I started to look at any book published after 1970 with extreme skepticism. In a very real way the best social sciences books of high postmodernism (lets say 1970-2010) are less true and useful than the best books from before, though fortunately the postmodern stranglehold on academia has been loosening in recent years. Of course, there are unhealthy and false views in old books as well - most especially the racial theories that disguised themselves as "science" prior to World War 2. I look for works that reject the old racial theories and have not yet accepted the new materialist postmodernist worldview. 

CS Lewis wrote on this topic in his introduction to a translation of Athanasius' On the Incarnation published in 1944. This introduction is also found in the CS Lewis essay collection God in the Dock. It's funny to me that this discussion of old books has long since joined that category:

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. ...

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, ... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.

The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.