The Battle Between Ideas and Identity

Early in Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, Roosevelt Montas describes an intellectual origin story that I found strikingly familiar. Montas, a fatherless teenager who had recently immigrated to the Bronx from the sticks of the Dominican Republic and was still learning to read in English, found himself on a winter evening faced with a pile of discarded books, some ornately decorated with gold-edged pages, waiting for the garbage collectors. “I wanted to take them all, but there were too many, and we had no bookshelves,” he writes. “In the end, I grabbed only two hardbacks. One of them was a volume of Plato’s dialogues.” That fortuitous selection—and his dogged efforts to learn what was between those covers—would fundamentally change him.

Half a century earlier, in a provincial and segregated Texas community, my own fatherless Black father had a chance encounter with the very same text. And as it freed Montas, it liberated him. It allowed him to build his sense of himself as a reader and thinker, and to forge a connection to a tradition that could not be severed by the accident of his skin or the deprivations his immediate ancestors had suffered.

I suppose, then,as much to gain as their more advantaged peers from entry into the larger intellectual culture that has molded the Western societies we must navigate.