Episode 130 – The Cult of Experience and the Tyranny of Relevance

Virtual Memories Show #130:
Elizabeth Samet –
The Cult of Experience and the Tyranny of Relevance

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“How do you learn things? How do you acquire the patience to admit when you don’t know things? I think those are really important things for an Army officer to know.”

Elizabeth D. Samet has been a professor of English at West Point since 1997. We talk about the tension between education and training at the military academy, the importance of books to soldiers and officers serving overseas, learning West Point’s unique argot, preparing her students to be unprepared, trying (and failing) to convince Robert Fagles that Hector is the moral center of the Iliad, why she doesn’t teach Henry V to plebes, how not to get caught up in the tyranny of relevance, why she balked at learning the fine art of parachuting, and more! Give it a listen!

“The question I’m endlessly fascinated with is, what do we call war and what do we call peace and can we draw these nice distinctions? It seems to me right now that we can’t.”

NOTE: The opinions Elizabeth Samet expresses in this interview are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of West Point, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense.

We also talk about teaching students who are both future Army officers and 18-year-old kids, how West Point and the student body changed after 9/11, her new anthology (Leadership) and her first two books (Soldier’s Heart and No Man’s Land), her house-on-fire list of books to save, her quarrel with Plato, and her adoration of Simeon’s Maigret novels. Bonus: I tell a long, awful and emotional story from last weekend (it starts around the 75:00 mark, so feel free to stop long before that).

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“I have this idea about Plato: no one loves Plato who does not already think himself a guardian.”

We talk about a lot of of books in this episode. Here’s a list of ’em (Note: if I ever go to a Patreon crowdfunding model for the show, this is the first thing that goes subscriber-only):

• Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point – Elizabeth Samet
• No Man’s Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America – Elizabeth Samet
• Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers – Elizabeth Samet
• An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, Vol. One of the Liberation Trilogy – Rick Atkinson
• The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, Vol. Two of the Liberation Trilogy – Rick Atkinson
• The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945, Vol. Three of the Liberation Trilogy – Rick Atkinson
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon
• Bleak House – Charles Dickens
• Middlemarch – George Eliot
• Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant / Selected Letters, 1839-1865 – Ulysses S. Grant
• Everything Flows – Vassily Grossman
• Life and Fate – Vassily Grossman
• Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
• The Iliad – Homer (tr. Fagles)
• The Odyssey – Homer (tr. Fagles)
• Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery – Henry Marsh
• Black Swan Green – David Mitchell
• The Complete Works – Montaigne
• Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, Vol. 1 – Plutarch
• Hamlet – Shakespeare
• King Richard II – Shakespeare
• War and Peace – Tolstoy
• Anna Karenina – Tolstoy
• Hadji Murat – Tolstoy
• The Aeneid – Virgil (tr. Fagles)
• Sword of Honor – Evelyn Waugh

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:

• Eva Brann / Ian Kelley
• Zach Martin
• Jonathan Rose
• Fred Kaplan
• Willard Spiegelman

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About our Guest

Elizabeth D. Samet is the author of No Man’s Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America (FSG). Her first book, Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point (Picador), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest and was named one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. Samet’s work has appeared in various publications, including the The New York Times, The New Republic, and Bloomberg View. She is also the editor of Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers, which is out this month from Norton. Samet won the 2012 Hiett Prize in the Humanities and is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a professor of English at West Point.

Credits: This episode’s music is On, Brave Old Army Team by West Point Marching Band. The conversation was recorded at Prof. Samet’s apartment on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Formal photo of Prof. Samet by Bachrach; bookshelf photo of Prof. Samet by me.