The Biggest Chautauqua Ever

Abstract

chautauqua, as Robert Pirsig reminds us his recently published chautauqua Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is an old-time series of popular talks intended to entertain and edify, to improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ear and mind of the hearer. And way, Britannica 3, the new Encyclopaedia Britannica, is chautauqua intended to do the same for the reader. Below I will suggest another contribution Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance makes to our understanding of the new encyclopedia, but here it is sufficient to note that everyone would have been better off if our friends from the Encyclopaedia Britannica (which drew heavily on the intellectual resources of the University of Chicago), instead of sending out an elaborate press kit whose cover Proudly Announces Britannica 3: A New 3-Part Encyclopaedia 30 Volumes, had contented themselves with humbly announcing Another Chautauqua or The Latest Chautauqua or The University of Chicago's Chautauqua or perhaps after Ziegfield's Follies, Mortimer Adler's Chautauqua. You wouldn't know it was chautauqua to read all the high-sounding propaganda put out by the Encyclopaedia's public relations division, which goes on and on at encyclopedic length about how the new Britannica includes not only Micropaedia (10 volumes) for ready reference with 102,214 short entries covering every field of knowledge; Macropaedia (19 volumes) for knowledge in depth with 4,207 treatises by more than 4,000 scholars and authorities 2,093 on general subjects, 2,114 on biographical and geographical subjects; and Propaedia (1 volume), an outline of knowledge that charts the whole of human knowledge by means of 10-part of learning, and also includes guide to the Britannica with more than 5,000 references. It is, we are told, a university without walls. En cyclo paedia Greek means circle of learning. But strip away the Greek labels and what is left is stationary chautauquastationary because 30 volumes are too cumbersome to move around like the original, traveling institution of the nineteenth century used to dowith all of the biases, limitations, arbitrariness, and randomness, although not all that much of the entertainment, one might expect from such an enterprise. And this latter omission is shame since given the Mortimer Adler-Robert Hutchins role as joint intellectual godfathers of this edition (Adler was director of planning and Hutchins chairman of the board of editors), it would have been no less appropriate if, addition to (or instead of) the Micropaedia, Macropaedia, and Propaedia, the editors had included Centipaedia, summarizing the 100 Great Books of Western Civilization. That's what chautauquas are all about. In his introductory essay to Part Ten of the Propaedia, Mr. Adler refers to Aristotle's notion that the highest form of intellectual activity is thinking about thinking itself. And lot of that has gone into Britannica 3, make no mistake about it. As an abstraction it is beautiful to be-