" ….human thought has made progress over time".

Has it really! You could have fooled me.

In the 21st. Century, it seems, few people read anything, let alone the 'Greats'; it's all Google and the latest twaddle on mobile phones.

I mostly agree. But it's only one opinion, not all old books are worth reading. But reading is an essential tool for life and self-education. And being fully informed.
Alan B.

Not only should we read the great works of the past, but we should make sure we buy and own them in hard copy before the wokocracy censors them into irrelevance.

"I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier." Thomas Jefferson.

The problem with people like Richard Hanania is that they have a massively overblown understanding of what the social sciences have discovered in the past 50 years. Lots of claims have been made and those claims are bought by the social scientists. But in fact very little has been revealed as unassailably true.

"In 2015, one group of scientists reported that they tried to replicate a hundred psychology studies – and found that they couldn’t reproduce the results of two-thirds of them. They also wrote that in the studies they could replicate, the results were not as stark as the originals’ authors had claimed them to be."

the problem is that the Hanania's of the world think the studies that couldn't be replicated are valid and, even worse, that they trump the works of the great scholars.

Social science believes it is the answer to the human condition. It isn't. Continue to read the great scholars.

Whenever I hear some 'review' of a book or a movie on ABC/SBS I won't bother looking them up.
I went to Vinnies last week & got a few books by authors I'd never heard of & I'm reading one now with without having it spoiled by some Pseudo-intellectual 'Preview' gits !

Thanks, Christian, for an interesting read. I'm mostly in agreement with you – the great classics address perennial questions about human nature that may never be conclusively answered. Movies like West Side Story and Bridget Jones’ Diary, which retell Shakespeare’ Romeo and Juliet and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in contemporary settings, show our enduring fascination with these stories and what they mean, including what they mean to us today.

Even bad books need to be remembered if they have been very influential. I would never advocate banning Mein Kampf, for example, and would encourage students of politics and history to read it.

If we have indeed made progress – and in some respects, I think we have – then it is often great works of literature that have guided us. It was the war poets as much as military historians that showed us the true horrors of WW1. Many white, Anglo people of my generation had their eyes opened to the evils of racism by To Kill a Mockingbird. It can seem a little over-earnest and stereotypical to modern eyes, and may even be guilty of white saviour syndrome, but it had a huge and positive impact for decades.

One of my many irritations at modern “woke” ideology is that it would cancel or denigrate the sources of what were once shared language, symbolism and culture. Even people who had never read Shakespeare would know phrases like “to be or not to be” or “pound of flesh”. And even non-Christians would know what “good Samaritan” and “prodigal son” refer to. Without these common points of reference, our discourse becomes more shallow and fragmented.

I love it when people worry about our dead culture,; as if it lives on!