Reading Advice for Great Books

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R.M.Shurmer@2017

READING WELL IS A DISCIPLINE.

Though our prime directive this year is to establish a familiarity with the praxis of history, my greater goal is to help you graduate with a desire to cultivate what Jacques Barzun calls an ‘educated mind’. The educated person engages in certain activities that prioritize the Word: conversing, writing, and READING. Being well-read is the single most important aspect of your intellectual development and it’s a shame (and a sham) that this is not said more often, or undertaken more seriously by schools. Reading, quite simply, expands your universe and increases your mental/intellectual/emotional acuity. Reading gives you access to thoughts and experiences you would otherwise never encounter in your own life. (The is why reading novels — serious novels — is important for both emotional and intellectual development.) We read, argues Harold Bloom, ultimately to strengthen the self. “We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.” (Bloom, 29) The decline in serious reading in this country since World War II has contributed to a similar decline in verbal ability and likewise in the ability of many to engage in protracted analytical arguments. Analysis of the SAT, adjusting for the scoring changes made to cover up the appalling drop in real scores, shows that the mean verbal ability of college-bound students has dropped a full 70pts since 1962 (the year television reached 90% of American households!).

Serious learning takes discipline and commitment. Shortcuts may get you through a semester course, but they do little to help you become ‘educated’ and will catch up with you at some point (Example: I once watched incredulously on the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico as an AP Spanish student failed to make himself understood while trying to get simple directions. He had advanced to the top language course, but had no functional ability on the street. This is what I mean when I point out the difference between simply receiving a badge/diploma and actually being educated.) Unfortunately, unlike your work in athletics, the adrenaline rush or payoff for reading well may not be experienced until years later. It is clear when you go 12-0 in a football season that you played well and dominated your opposition. Not so when it comes to being truly educated. When it comes to serious education, quick answers and fast action are no substitutes for deep thought and reflection. This is why Cliff Stoll, astronomer and early internet guru, today eschews computer-based learning and instead advocates reading books and discussing tough topics face-to-face. “Scholarship isn’t about browsing the Internet,” writes Stoll in his book High-Tech Heretic, “it’s about understanding events, appreciating history, and interpreting our world.” We do all three of these things by reading widely and deeply.

The journalist/essayist/critic Adam Gopnik, arguing that journalists have a professional responsibility to be serious readers,  writes that “books contain essentially all the information in the world on every imaginable subject. They’re the world’s most efficient technology.” And it is technology that is not fungible, that is the benefits you receive from reading will not necessarily accrue from an audiobook or a film. Gopnik continues: “I’ve discovered that reading is actually one of those skills that increases exponentially the more of it you do, and it doesn’t stop improving the older you get, which is an encouraging fact.” Following the news can give you ideas, but you’ve got to go to books to get the depth. You have reached a level of intellectual competence where it is assumed that you read reasonably effectively — in fact your skill level probably already exceeds at least 90% of the American population — but our aim should be for mastery, something for which I still work daily to achieve. It may surprise you to learn that under 20% of all Americans can read above a 10th grade level (before WWII that number was 54%) and only about 50% of adult Americans can read beyond a 6th-grade level! Think about that as ‘progress’: More Americans could read at a 10th-grade level in 1949 than can read at a 6th grade level today. And this is despite the fact that in 1949, the average American only had 8.5 years of formal education, whereas today that number is 12.5 years. Something has gone horribly wrong! Again, Barzun on the subject:

What is required for mastery is a lively and insatiable interest. This is the thing that cannot be faked. And this is also what makes it impossible to ‘climb’ into an educated society under false pretenses as people do into snobbish, moneyed, or artistic circles. The brotherhood of educated men (and women) is the one social group which our century cannot open to all by legislative fiat. The irony is that those within have no desire to keep it exclusive — the more the merrier, provided they are the genuine article.

It is no secret that the key element to education — and I mean ‘education’ not learning; they are different — is reading for enlightenment rather than reading for information alone. In the environment of an advanced history course, you are expected to do both, but you will need to step up your reading skills overall to achieve mastery. So a few suggestions are in order.

Firstly, you get better at reading by reading! And reading challenging works not the latest installment of Harry Potter. None of you would expect a person at the age of 25 to pick up a tennis racquet for the first time and win the US Open or sit down at a piano for the first time and win the Van Cliburn competition. Why should it be any different with regard to reading? Those who read (and write and think) well, read lots! And they reading challenging literature. Challenging literature makes your head hurt! It forces you to learn new words and reread sections.  Ability and comprehension increases when you read books that are ABOVE your level. The books that you ‘enjoy’ are not necessarily the ones that are best for you. This is one of the reasons you have Gay&Webb for this course rather than a ‘modern’ textbook. Gay&Webb will challenge you, make you reread, prompt you to comprehend several lines of argument on a single topic, and direct you to even more reading. If you give up on the required reading because ‘it’s too hard’ or ‘it takes too long’ then you are effectively saying that you just don’t want to make much of an effort to become an educated person. (Which is good news for the authoritarians and snake-oil sellers who thrive on an uneducated populace.)

Secondly, ‘multitasking’ is a myth. Develop the sound habit NOW of banishing cell phones and computers from your work-space when you read serious literature. If you care about thinking seriously, YOU MUST get away from your phones and computers!

It is now proven that intellectual work production degrades for every new mental task added to the thinking enviroment. It is easy now to live in a state of permanent distraction – and most people who live attached to a cell phone do. You simply MUST wean yourself away from the cell phone and computer screen if you wish to read with any degree of focus necessary to engage with great literature. Here is what Daniel Levitin, distinguished professor of Behavioral Neuroscience, has to say on the topic:

“[There is a] metabolic costs [for] multitasking, such as reading e-mail and talking on the phone at the same time, or social networking while reading a book. It takes more energy to shift your attention from task to task. It takes less energy to focus. That means that people who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they’ll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it.

Daydreaming also takes less energy than multitasking. And the natural intuitive see-saw between focusing and daydreaming helps to recalibrate and restore the brain. Multitasking does not. Perhaps most important, multitasking by definition disrupts the kind of sustained thought usually necessary for problem solving and for creativity. (The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, pp. 169-171.)

The idea that you can read or write effectively while carrying on with social media, watching videos, or even listening to music is unsound and wrong-headed. Serious thought, and by extension analytical reading and writing, demand that you turn off your phone and laptop and music device. (I know that may sound rather funny if you are reading this on your computer or phonr, but your readings will generally not be online.) This approach will not only benefit your concentration, understanding, and retention (i.e serious education), but will also make you a more efficient reader: 30 minutes of focused reading far out-weighs an hour and a half of distracted play-acting. YOU NEED FOCUSED ATTENTION TO READ GAY&WEBB.

Cultivate an environment that is conducive to serious intellectual work. While this is really just a subset of the point I made above, its importance demands explication. Find a relatively secluded and quite space to do your reading. (There’s a reason libraries used to be quiet spaces — I say used to because most libraries now have been polluted by electronic devices, computers, videos, cell phones, etc, that fundamentally disrupt scholarly activity. Use a desk and a good light. DO NOT read in your bed – or even in your bedroom if you can manage that! Your body reacts to its environment; laying in a bed tells it that it is time to sleep – and that is exactly what most people who try to read in bed end up doing. [This is why most people read less serious books in bed. It doesn’t really matter much if you fall asleep reading ‘What Ho, Jeeves!’]

Reading documents and serious literature is different from reading a textbook.

You should read documents, especially those such as ‘The Prince’ that have achieved special status in the Western canon, differently from the way you approach other works. Active reading MUST be cultivated. That means stay awake, ask questions, and write while reading  – on the text and in a reading journal optimally. Here are a few questions that serious readers always consider as they work through texts:

  • What is the writing about? Can you summarize it in your own words (if yes, WRITE that summary in your notes or in the margins)?
  • What problem/issue is the author addressing or trying to solve?
  • What are the author’s propositions (theses)?
  • What of it? Are they true?
  • Should the author be believed?
  • How does the text relate to the period in which it was written?
  • How does the text relate to others writings on the same topic?
  • How does the text challenge your own notions of the topic?
  • What questions come to mind as I read this document?

To paraphrase Mortimer Adler, one of the founders of the Great Books Program, great ideas seek truth and must be discussed seriously. They demand more than idle chit-chat. Reading for enlightenment demands your full attention and engagement. Good readers carry on a dialogue with their books and will have a collection of written notes (reactions, ideas, and questions) afterward. This is why I encourage you all to begin reading journals of your own, something that is separate, and entirely different, from informational class notes. Effective reading requires work and skill. Our work with Thucydides provides a great opportunity to start developing the proper habits of maintaining a useful reading journal. (We shall talk more about this through the year.) Spark Notes or a Wiki article WILL NOT lead to an enlightened understanding of a text.

“The only books worth reading this way are the books over your head. The Great Books are the books that are worth everybody’s reading because they are over everybody’s head all the time.” — M. Adler

Bloom, Harold. How to Read and Why (2000)

The totalitarianism of the open society There’s no escaping Utopia

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In his 1945 work The Open Society and its Enemies, Karl Popper offered one of the early articulations of “the open society” as an ideal, one which gathers up some of the West’s dearest principles: universalism, toleration, cosmopolitanism, individualism. As against the chauvinism that is native to political life, the ideal of the open society announces a higher allegiance — to all mankind. Expressing independence from the cramped mindset of parochial attachments, it provides the moral basis for the West’s embrace of mass migration. There are material interests at stake on the question of how much immigration we should have, and they diverge along class lines. But the adepts of the open society describe the divergence instead along the psychological axis of open-closed, with closedness understood as a failure of moral development.

To stay on the correct end of this axis requires a person to organize his moral energies around a boutique picture of reality. It is a picture that doesn’t even try to comprehend common experience — most pointedly, the experience of receiving millions of migrants from different societies (some of them quite alien to our own), with the attendant dislocations. These include the thinning of the social fabric and a retreat into further isolation — what the sociologist Robert Putnam called “hunkering down” in his study of the effects of diversity.

The ideal of the open society doesn’t simply ignore the downsides of immigration — including rising rates of sexual violence — it gains force precisely as a principled negation of experience. It serves to coordinate elites in the epistemic equivalent of a potlatch: an Olympian disregard for social realities expresses a certain magnificence in those who are able to maintain it. Yet while a traditional potlatch is made possible only by an underlying asceticism (a nobleman must be ready to do without the fine things he destroys), the renunciation demanded by our leaders falls most heavily on those they rule. Embracing the open society is the ultimate luxury belief.

As conveyed by the latter half of  Popper’s title, the idea of the “open society” is inherently polemical. It requires a foil of closedness. “In what follows,” he writes, “the magical or tribal or collectivist society will also be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society.” The alternative to the open society, then, is tribalism and magic, or some version of collectivist effacement of the individual. The paradigmatic activity of the open society is “personal decision”.

Popper’s original advocacy of the open society carries over to those who speak today in the idiom of universal “human rights”, as opposed to the civil or political rights that attach to citizens of a particular, bounded nation. Anything bounded is “closed”. If the mindset of human rights is given to moral militancy, Popper’s treatment helps us to see that the agenda of human rights carries with it a literal military corollary.

Given the date of publication, this military frame of mind is understandable. As Popper writes in the preface to the 1950 edition, his ideas for the book had been germinating for some time but “the final decision to write it was made in March 1938, on the day I received the news of the invasion of Austria”. Clearly, the proximate enemy of the open society that he had in mind was Naziism. That would be the “magical or tribal” enemy. But he also takes on communism, the collectivist enemy. Popper speaks for the third combatant in the conflict, which goes by the conventional title “liberal democracy”. Whatever we call it, it is the regime-type that ultimately prevailed over both adversaries in the longer conflict that began with the Anschluss in 1938 and stretched through the Cold War. Arguably it is neither democratic, in the literal sense of rule by the demos, nor liberal in the 18th-century sense of limited government. Rather, it is “open”.

What interests me is the disposition that animates the ideal of the open society. Those who share it invoke the Nazi threat ritualistically, so 1938 remains important as an emblematic moment. But the open society ideal slipped the bounds of any particular circumstance to become a permanent imperative, never satisfied so long as any concrete, circumscribed political community remains. The end of the war in no way relieved enthusiasts of the open society of their need for enemies.

Both points of polemical orientation for Popper — Nazi racialist tribalism and Marxist collectivism — are forms of human association. The remedy for both, then, is individualism. Popper seems historically obtuse, willfully so, in his failure to register the fact that there are non-malignant forms of association that can provide the basis for social order. He skips straight from the Nazi and communist threats to an equally radical counter-ideal of individualism that is meant to inoculate us against both hazards. In this, he comes across as reactive and simple-minded, unable to conceive of a social order mediating between individuals which would satisfy his ideal of openness.

I believe the problem for Popper is that any kind of order that is already established is external to individual will. (Recall that the open society is marked by “personal decision”.) The freedom of the will is compromised when it is impinged upon by binding associations, such as family or nation, that are not chosen. To be innocuous, any association must be provisional; it must be continually re-chosen on a case-by-case basis as circumstances shift. Accordingly, the open society will be one of disengaged monads who come together episodically for various forms of exchange but have no deep or abiding connection to one another.

Popper recognizes that an open society therefore tends to become one of “abstract relations”. In this he is prescient. “We can conceive of a society in which… all business is conducted by individuals in isolation who communicate by typed letters or by telegrams, and who go about in closed motor-cars. Artificial insemination would allow even propagation without a personal element.” He offers this sketch “by way of an exaggeration” in 1943, but in 2026 it seems less so.

Given this thinned-out anthropology, Popper commends economics as the proper mode of doing social theory, because it treats human actors in their abstract relations of exchange. He condemns sociology — for example, that of Durkheim — for its “dogmatic belief that society must be analyzed in terms of real social groups”. It almost sounds like the fact that they are real counts against them. We are not to dwell on the concrete differences of habit and character among different social groups. Ideally we would not even notice them, as such noticing could compromise our allegiance to the ideal of the open society and its corollary: permissive immigration policy. The open society will be a society of individuals denuded of those qualities they acquire in association, as encultured beings. Openness seems to require positing sameness, so the variety of persons and of peoples can be treated as a mass of interchangeable human resources.

Somehow, Popper and his political descendants have succeeded in attaching the word “democracy”, used as a term of approbation, to this imperative of abstraction and replaceability. A better name for it would probably be “bureaucracy”. Bureaucracy takes as its object of rule what Popper’s contemporary Robert Musil called the “Man Without Qualities”.

Popper recognizes that achieving the open society will require a vigorous imperial project. What he had in mind, writing during the war, is not fully spelled out. But arguably, today’s interventions in the internal affairs of putatively sovereign nations by the trans-national organs of openness would seem to capture the spirit of what Popper had in mind. Such organs include the European Commission, USAID and indeed George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Whatever Popper envisioned, he was discreet enough to make his case for imperialism by historical proxy, treating the Peloponnesian War as a conflict between the open society of Athens and the closed society of Sparta.

For Popper, any criticism of Athenian imperialism can only be a cover for reaction. “Thucydides himself was an anti-democrat. This becomes clear when we consider his description of the Athenian empire, and the way it was hated by the various Greek states. Athens’ rule over its empire, he tells us, was felt to be no better than a tyranny, and all the Greek tribes were afraid of her.” But Popper, writing over two millennia after events, knows better. All people of goodwill loved being ruled by Athens. Note his pointed misapplication of the term “tribe” to any city that resisted Athens’ enlightened exactions of tribute, or its beneficent control of commerce throughout the Aegean, made possible by its naval superiority.

“[I]t is necessary, I believe, to see that tribalist exclusiveness and self-sufficiency could be superseded only by some form of imperialism. And it must be said that certain of the imperialist measures introduced by Athens were rather liberal.” One expression of Athens’ liberality that Popper points to, which anti-imperialists fail to appreciate, is Athens’ offer to the island of Samos. As reported by Thucydides, the offer was that “the Samians should be Athenians from now on; and that both cities should be one state; and that the Samians should order their internal affairs as they choose and retain their laws.” There is no contradiction here, if the Samians choose wisely — for openness.

What Thucydides says sardonically, bringing out the confluence of Athens’ high moral self-regard with her insatiable need for conquest, sounds very much like how Samantha Power or Ursula von der Leyen might scold the Hungarians today for their recalcitrant independence. But without Thucydides’ irony, of course.

Popper reads backward into the fifth century his own determination to defeat “tribalist exclusiveness”, which requires total hegemony of the enlightened. The word “tribalism” is frequently used by bien pensants to dismiss any insistence on political boundaries as provincialism; as a hangover from a less enlightened stage of human development. The political philosopher Pierre Manent pointed out that “in a deliberately provocative way, the most archaic political form, and traditionally the most despised, becomes the generic name for all political forms and human groupings”. That is, all groupings that fall short of the Universal and Homogeneous State that is to be administered by a post-political clerisy of the open-minded. The most efficient way to combat closed-mindedness is with open borders, global labor markets, and plenty of foreign interventions to keep up a steady flow of migrants and refugees. Invade the world, invite the world.

Popper argues against utopianism, because it leads to totalitarianism. Yet it does not seem to bother him that his hope for a post-political condition is itself utopian and requires a total program; an empire of openness from which no exit is to be countenanced.

Matthew B Crawford is a Future of Freedom Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, as well as a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He writes the Substack Archedelia.