Leon Kass is chair of The President's Council on Bioethics. His Council published a report of, what must
be a bureaucratic first, readings from literature on the subject of being
human.
The publication is not so surprising when you hear that Professor Kass is from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. Kass is doing what comes naturally --- thinking ahead. He knows that a clear, original and powerful syllabus of important readings is what shapes the future of intellectual thought.
Kass knows this because modern intellectual thought, so called neo-conservatism, is a direct out growth of the material in the curriculum of the Committee on Social Though.
Not all my readers know that I created and produced a public
radio program for nine years called Social Thought. Nearly two dozen transcripts of my half hour interviews are
online. Someday hundreds of the Social
Thought audio interviews themselves will be online. (The cost of putting them online and having a server with high
enough bandwidth is not justified by any projected revenue at this time.)
The difference between the University of Chicago’s Committee
on Social Thought and my radio program is nearly forty years. When the Chicago Committee was created by
Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler in the late 1940’s the understanding was
that the ideas and structure of Western Civilization were built on the
foundations of Plato and Aristotle. The
Committee was a graduate curriculum that focused on understanding these Greek
philosophers.
By the late 1980s, when I started my public radio program, Social Thought had broadened to the recognition that all institutions, not just Western Civilization, but markets, language, education, media and history were all based on ideas, metaphors and concepts.
Extrapolating from the length of time it took for the Committee on Social Thought to shape the intellectual world (30 or more years) I can only hope I live until the 2020s when my work on the subject will begin to shape intellectual thought.