[Membroj] Mort-al Foot in Mouth

[Ralph Dumain]

I finally got around to looking up this book. The complete reference is:

Beam, Alex. A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious 
Afterlife of the Great Books. New York: PublicAffairs, 2008.

The weird quote on Esperanto appears on page 31.

I'm guessing Adler was trying to be a wise guy.  He also registered 
his cable address as "Analerotic, Chicago." This may have been a way 
of dissociating himself from his roots and declaring his 
cosmopolitanism (as Jim suggests). On page 32-33 we learn that Adler 
rejected Judaism, and there was no Jewish tradition in the family. 
Adler had a life-long obsession with Catholic theology, attended 
Episcopalian and later Catholic Churches, converting to 
Episcopalianism at the age of 81 and Catholicism at the age of 97, dying at 99.

It seems that Adler, like so many immigrant-spawn, worshipped at the 
shrine of the WASP ideal as well as Western Civ, which made Robert 
Hutchins the perfect idol for him. I must say I find all this 
profoundly nauseating, but in any case, this book is a quite 
entertaining romp through one of the greatest enterprises of 
educational hucksterism of the 20th century.  We shall see if the 
book delves more deeply into Adler's ideology beyond his curious 
selection principles for the Great Books.

I have no idea what Adler really thought of Esperanto.

Once again, some background sources of interest:

Cotkin, George. "Middle-Ground Pragmatists: The Popularization of 
Philosophy in American Culture," Journal of the History of Ideas, 
vol. 55, no. 2, April 1994, 283-302.

Macdonald, Dwight. "The Book-of-the-Millennium Club," in Against the 
American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (New York: 
Vintage Books, 1965), pp. 243-261.

Reisch, George. How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science. 
Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill: 
University of North Carolina Press, 1992.


At 08:48 PM 10/29/2008, Jim Ryan wrote:
>Another entry in the long, strange saga of the (mis-)(ab-)use of 
>"Esperanto" by non-Esperantists to mean heaven knows what.
>
>This one is from a book I'm reading, A Great Idea at the Time: The 
>Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books.  Great Books 
>scholar and booster Mortimer Adler is describing his own background 
>and temperament employing various contrasts, including:
>
>"Jewish and German by ancestry but anti-Semitic and Esperanto by nature."
>
>Huh?  In context, and knowing Adler, I think he means "not bound by 
>Jewish or German (or presumably any other) culture or traditions, 
>but rather international and cosmpolitan."
>
>But what a way to put it!  "Anti-Semitic and Esperanto"!  What an 
>ironic turn of phrase, especially given how Zamenhof was 
>intellectually nurtured by Jewish traditions, how he was a Yiddish 
>scholar as well as a general polyglot and linguist, and how 
>Homaranismo began as Hilelismo.  And how the Nazis persecuted 
>Esperanto as being a tool of the Jews, and how Zamenhof's children 
>died in concentration camps, etc. etc.  Esperanto was one of the 
>many gifts of Jewry to the world.
>
>"Anti-Semitic and Esperanto" is the most ridiculous pairing since 
>... well, I'll let you all supply better examples of rhetorical "odd 
>couples."
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