Humanism and Its Discontents

...The great contribution of Turner's book lies in its examination of the flipside of this development: the rise of the impractical, yet somehow edifying disciplines that have come to be grouped under the "humanities...

...Raised a Unitarian, Norton had few imposing dogmas to wrestle with as a youth, but he eventually came to consider even theism too confining: "Charles had heard from youth the saga of man's long ascent from papist superstition to Unitarian light...

...the Carlyle and Ruskin families turned to Norton when it came to editing their correspondence for publication...

...The conflict of interpretations requires adjudication by an authority clearly lacking in modern universities...

...In 1849 he oversaw a trade shipment for the company of Bullard & Lee—merely to explore the culture of India...

...Charles felt completely at home in this world, and remained loyal to it even after he had grown to question certain elements of it...

...Turner's book is particularly impressive in its portrait of the elite transatlantic social network that sustained Norton throughout these travels...

...In the richly textured opening chapters, Turner presents the ideal world of the "New England Clerisy," equally at ease with commerce and culture, capable of harmonizing all seeming oppositions through hard work, moderation in personal habits, and faith in the one, true, rational religion of Unitarian Boston—a small "world of black-frock-coated gentlemen and their silk-robed ladies" and "commodious homes" with mahogany spiral staircases and Palladian windows...

...launched some one hundred years ago by the leading "liberal" intellectual of late-Victorian America, Charles Eliot Norton...

...The book's views of education appear much like Norton's: The grammar-grinding Latin and Greek that constituted antebellum education had to go, but the modern university must be on guard against excessive specialization...

...Upon his return in 1851, Norton began to devote himself increasingly to cultural matters...

...Like most young men of his social class, Charles attended Harvard, and even apprenticed in a counting house following his graduation...

...Neither what passes for Western or non-Western culture these days can resuscitate the vapid humanism that structures even the most advanced curriculum of "humanities"—and once confidence in humanism had decayed, America's universities ought to have junked that Victorian structure as completely as they junked its Victorian content...

...his progression from Unitarian-ism to agnostic humanism appears as the natural evolution of thought in his class and time...

...Languages provide the next best thing to such authority: the agreed-upon standards of grammar...

...Throughout this period, he continued to write and lecture on the poetry of Dante and art of the Renaissance...

...He soon took over editorship of the North American, the leading American intellectual publication of its day...

...Turner's study of Norton's life raises broader intellectual questions that fall beyond the proper scope of a biographical study...

...The latest cranky, conservative entry into the culture wars...

...Charles Eliot Norton was born on November 16, 1827, into a wealthy Boston merchant family...

...Norton's rationale for the shift from language to literary criticism assumed a transparency of truth that his medieval predecessors would have thought absurd...

...Norton gained the friendship and respect of the leading figures of Anglo-American intellectual life, including James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Car-lyle, and John Ruskin...

...In The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton, James Turner, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, presents a comprehensive, authoritative account of a nearly forgotten figure who almost single-handed invented "Western Civilization" as an organizing principle for liberal arts education in the United States...

...The word itself did not exist in the English language until the late nineteenth century...

...Still, the book is likely to leave its readers with the opposite feeling: The modern university should be on guard against "the humanities," in either their Western or multicultural mode, and reevaluate the place of languages in the curriculum...

...In 1873, he accepted an offer of a professorship from his cousin, Harvard president Charles Eliot...

...Rather, the opening salvo of those wars, Christopher Shannon is research associate at the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism...

...On one level, Norton's achievements appear fairly modest in comparison with those of his better known friends and acquaintances...

...Why should enlightenment stop with Unitarian-ism...

...Historians of education have long acknowledged the significance of the shift from the classical curriculum of the antebellum college to the more practical, professional curriculum of the modern university...

...it represents not a residue of the old curriculum rescued from a rising tide of professionalism, but a new understanding of ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual truth invented as an alternative to vocational philistinism...

...With New England roots back to the seventeenth century, the early-nineteenth-century Nortons lived off investments and had the luxury to choose the degree of involvement they wished to have in the day-to-day world of business...

...James Turner's life of Charles Eliot Norton reminds us why it all seemed so necessary and important in the middle of the nineteenth century, and why it was doomed in the twentieth...

...Still, his efforts in art history and archaeology were at the heart of a major intellectual transformation that is in large part responsible for our seeing Carlyle, Ruskin, and Emerson as important figures...

...True to his historical subject, Turner tells Norton's story very much as the man himself would have...

...What appears in retrospect as a natural progression nonetheless struck "believing" Unitarians of the time as apostasy...

...For all its idealism, the New England Clerisy drew its cohesion "not so much from a shared worldview . . . as from a shared world...

...Not that it would have been different had Andrews been less scholarly...

...Charles's father, Andrews, lived the life of a gentleman scholar, assuring that Charles would grow up surrounded by books and instilled with a love of learning...

...recent history has sided with the medievals against the Victorians...

...But he realized that the times required a new format to reach a general intellectual reading public, and he found it in the Atlantic Monthly, contributing to its inaugural issue in 1857, and the Nation, which he founded, along with E. L. Godkin, in 1865...

...Even as Norton's heirs in academia have abandoned Western Civilization for multi-culturalism, they have remained true to his insistence on the centrality of education to the maintenance of a democratic polity, and the centrality of educators as arbiters of culture over the rival claims of politicians and religious leaders...

...At Harvard, he developed the first course in art history taught in the United States...

...the young man was able to sail the world and never really leave Boston...

...He followed this voyage with a tour of Europe, where he began a life-long love affair with Renaissance Italy...

...As is perhaps inevitable with biography, the individual serves as a microcosm for his times...

...As an extension of his art-historical concerns, he established the Archaeological Institute of America, which laid the foundation for archaeology as a professional discipline in the United States...

...Turner presents this world as a dense, almost incestuous network of near and distant cousins, the legacy of generations of carefully crafted commercial alliances sealed through marriage...

...But like his father and an increasing number of the scions of merchant wealth, Charles began to tip the delicate Unitarian balance in favor of culture...

...BY CHRISTOPHER SHANNON "It is hard to live in a landdeclining in civilization....I can understand the feeling of a Roman as he saw the Empire breaking down, & civilization dying out...

...A scholarly biography primarily concerned with placing Norton in relation to his own times, Turner's book nonetheless provides serious material for reflection on the tangled histories of the political and intellectual assumptions that underlie today's culture wars...

...Values" and "respect for diversity" would both be better served by the teaching of Greek and Sanskrit than by the teaching of either Plato in translation or autobiographies of Asian-American women...