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I finally got around to looking up this book. The complete reference
is:<br><br>
Beam, Alex. <i>A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious
Afterlife of the Great Books</i>. New York: PublicAffairs, 2008.
<br><br>
The weird quote on Esperanto appears on page 31.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
I have no idea what Adler really thought of Esperanto.<br><br>
Once again, some background sources of interest:<br><br>
Cotkin, George. "Middle-Ground Pragmatists: The Popularization of
Philosophy in American Culture," <i>Journal of the History of
Ideas</i>, vol. 55, no. 2, April 1994, 283-302. <br><br>
Macdonald, Dwight. "The Book-of-the-Millennium Club," in
<i>Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture</i>
(New York: Vintage Books, 1965), pp. 243-261.<br><br>
Reisch, George. <i>How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of
Science</i>. Cambridge University Press, 2005. <br><br>
Rubin, Joan Shelley. <i>The Making of Middlebrow Culture</i>. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. <br><br>
<br>
At 08:48 PM 10/29/2008, Jim Ryan wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Another entry in the long,
strange saga of the (mis-)(ab-)use of "Esperanto" by
non-Esperantists to mean heaven knows what. <br><br>
This one is from a book I'm reading, <i>A Great Idea at the Time: The
Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books</i>. Great
Books scholar and booster Mortimer Adler is describing his own background
and temperament employing various contrasts, including:<br><br>
"Jewish and German by ancestry but anti-Semitic and Esperanto by
nature." <br><br>
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."<br><br>
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. <br><br>
"Anti-Semitic and Esperanto" is the most ridiculous pairing
since ... well, I'll let you all supply better examples of rhetorical
"odd couples." </blockquote></body>
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