English professor Anthony Esolen says he used to be an academic Leftist, that he was as much a victim of ideology as any of his students or colleagues.  But he “had long fallen in love with Plato, Chaucer, Pascal, and the rest,” which put him in a Catch-22 when students and professors at his college staged a panel discussion questioning the use and value of teaching the Classics. 

 A group of students, led by a newly arrived sociologist, had been roused to indignation at having to study Dante and Homer and Thomas Aquinas. They called themselves Students Organized Against Racism. What they wanted to study instead they never specified. It wasn’t math.

He attended the panel discussion and decided to float a question.  “Why do you study Virgil?” he asked a pretty young ideologue who had the floor.  He expected some pat political reply.  But she said this:

“I don’t know why we study Virgil.”

I then remarked that Rome had exercised a profound influence upon the men who had founded the United States, and that the influence was not always benign; that John Adams, for one, looked to Livy for his political inspiration; that there were legends in Livy — Horatius slaying his sister when he found her weeping, because he had triumphed in battle over her Alban fiancee — that could expose Roman and Western ideas of virtue to searching criticism.

“If you’re reading Virgil and Livy and you’re not subversive,” I said, “you’re not trying.”

Then she shocked me again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. And the audience erupted into laughter and applause.

Great Literature is Great Literature because it’s full of all the genius and art and contradiction and mystery and curiosity of lived life.  That’s why there’s nothing more subversive than studying the Classics.  They subvert Dull Thought and Thoughtlessness.  They expose the cracks in the virtues of the West, while shining a light on their brilliance and durability.  That’s subversion.