Reading for Reading's Sake

I found this quote on Alan Jacobs' tumblr and found it prescient for me:

“Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paperbacks, first-rate color reproductions, and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused — and we do misuse it — can become a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind than yesterday’s newspaper,” – W.H. Auden, Secondary Worlds (1967)

I know that I often fall prey to this tendency Auden astutely points out. On the top of this page is a list of books that I have read during the current year. Frequently I consider deleting this page. Why is it there? I started it as a way to keep track and for people to have a link to things they might find interesting, but I wonder if it doesn't subtly influence both what I read and they way I read it. There is always a pressure to read a book more quickly than I ought to merely in order to mark it off the list. Now with the page up there that pressure is amplified.

I know most people could not care less how many books I read per year or what books I read, but everything in our culture points us toward a crafting of our identities. For a reader, part of how we craft that identity is by what we read. We keep lists, lists which are constantly updated and amended, of things we want to read. We sometimes feel bad if an unworthy book from off the list is suddenly read.

The solution, I think, is twofold. First, don't worry about any lists. This doesn't mean necessarily to not keep them, but to not be bound by them. As Mr. Jacobs recommended in his excellent book on the art of reading, don't so structure your reading to not be open to serendipity and whim, both excellent guiding principles in their own right. Second, slow down. St Augustine, a quite good reader himself, once wrote "I write as I learn and I learn as a write." Simply put, if you take the time to slow down and write as you read--take notes, ask questions--you gain far more than by simply plowing through tome after tome.

It might mean reading less, fewer notches on the bedpost, but the reading will almost certainly be better and what is learned in the books will last.

Guns

It was predictable that in the immediate aftermath of the horrifying event at Newtown people who have long wished for stricter gun control laws capitalized on the event to argue that now was the time to make that happen. And, I have to say that I agree with them.

Now, to anticipate some objections. First of all, I know that it was a severely deranged young man who killed all of those people and people just kill people. I get it. There were murders before guns, murders would still happen if guns were outlawed. But the fact is, a 20 year old kid had access to an AR15, which pretty much no one ever needs to have. I know, I know, zombie apocalypse, Red Dawn style Soviet invasion, nuclear war, governmental collapse and all of those extremely likely scenarios when individuals would benefit from assault weapons seem right around the corner, but let's be honest, when the founders wrote the second amendment, did they have an AR15 with quick reload in mind? Besides, my dystopian vision of the future, not to mention the real direction of our culture, is more Brave New World than 1984.

People are evil. I agree. I'm a Calvinist for goodness sakes. But shouldn't we work to mitigate evil where at all possible? Perhaps a short accounting style question: is there more net good from allowing individuals to buy assault weapons or net bad? Dudes having fun on a Saturday afternoon versus kids dying in a school. Let's put that on the moral scales. 

A second objection, the real issue here is with identifying mental disease and being able to get people the treatment that they need. I agree. Let's do that, too. This isn't a zero sum game, where we can only do one thing. Why can't we restrict guns and give teachers better training in dealing with depressed and otherwise troubled students? I read a blog post by a university professor who has attended mandatory faculty-wide training in disaster response but has never received any training in dealing with troubled students. What is more likely to happen: massive tragedy on campus or having depressed students in your class?

A third objection: tragedies are not good times to make far-reaching policy decisions. I totally agree again (as I cough under my breath, "Iraq"). But I'm not saying that we should ban guns altogether, but that we should make it a bit harder to buy them. One suggestion I have heard is to treat gun ownership like vehicle ownership and driver's licensing: have training, take a test, register with the state. Close the gun show loophole that allows guns to be purchased without background checks. I don't understand why restrictions would be a bad thing. I am generally in favor of the free market, but guess what, it sucks here. The free market cares about one thing only: making money. Moral calculations have to be made by human minds, not invisible hands.

I own a gun and plan on getting into hunting next year which will necessitate the purchase of another. Would I be offended if I had to register my new 308 with the state? Are you kidding me? I can't believe I don't have to. When my brother gave me a shotgun for my wedding (there is a joke there somewhere) I looked up the laws about registering and realized that I didn't have to register my gun. How crazy is that? If he had given me a scooter, you're damn right the government would know about it, but registering guns encroaches on freedom. I have yet to read the conservative case against license plates.

When people used to complain about the Patriot Act and the wide use of surveillance it granted the government I joked that that's only a bad thing if you have something to hide. The government can listen in on all of my phone conversations if they want to, but they would be mostly bored. I don't care if they know I think turning The Hobbit into three movies is an abomination and that I drive back to Colorado for Christmas on Friday. My point is, the Patriot Act was a problem if you already had something to hide. I didn't, so it didn't make me nervous. On the contrary, it made me feel quite sorry at the idea of some poor governmental operative tasked with sorting through my text messages. Gun restriction works in the same way: the good gunowners have nothing to fear and the bad ones will be stopped at the door. (Note: It is a tad ironic that the same party who pushed through the Patriot Act and defends it as a necessary policy, finds it completely within the pale for the government to have extreme liberty in surveillance of communication but no liberty at all in telling us how many high powered guns we can own. We are all selective in our big government beliefs.) (Another note: yes, I have heard of the black market and know that bad people can buy guns through illegal means. However, none of the people who have carried out the recent mass killings procured these weapons through the black market. Secondly, so what? What is the point here? You would rather the blood money for the gun sales to maniacal killers go through a legitimate dealer with a booth at a gun show than a black market dealer with the trunk of a Chrysler?)

At some point we have to ask ourselves what we are trading in exchange for our freedom. And is it worth it. Is a world with ever more guns the world we want our kids to grow up in? (Read Alan Jacobs's excellent post on the idea of arming teachers, which, like most everything he says, I agree with wholeheartedly.) I am not a gun guy, but I have no aversion to them. I own one and will probably own a few others here in the next few years. But I don't and won't own them because I am afraid. In any crazy post-apocalyptic scenario, I just hope I am already dead. I don't want to fight other people for oil or troop across the South killing zombies. If someone breaks into my house to steal they can have it. If they break in to hurt my family I will be glad to have a gun, but the chances of that happening are infinitesimally small.

I believe in the Second Amendment (I also think we are likelier to see the First overturned before we are the Second). But a right to bear arms is not an absolute right. It is not a first principle right, like the right to life and liberty. And when it starts to infringe on those first principle rights, it needs to be reconsidered.

Commonplacing: Alan Jacobs on the Task of the Christian Cultural Critic

One of my favorite living Christian scholars is Alan Jacobs, whom I have mentioned in this space before. Nearly everything he says rings true to me, and even when I disagree with him I learn something from hearing him out. He just started blogging for The American Conservative, perhaps the only website out there that espouses consistently the type of conservatism I feel most drawn to (and one that has very little place in today's GOP). I recommend it as must read material. In his first post at TAC he links to an old essay of his, written for Books and Culture, another great magazine I wish I had the time to read more consistently. I had read it before, but after two years of graduate school its words seemed fresher than ever (of course he hooks me in with some good discussion of Milton at the beginning). Enjoy (read the whole thing):

It seems to me that the careful dance, the difficult balance, of Christian cultural criticism is to be endlessly attentive to the form and the details of the world around us, while simultaneously practicing the "politics of long joy"—and in this way avoiding an unhealthy obsession with "trophies," and avoiding also being conformed to the ways of this world. It's a tough walk to walk, because one of the peculiarities of fallen human nature is that we find it difficult, over the long haul anyway, to remember that there is a world of difference between "I have no control over this" and "this isn't very important." We tend, against all reason, to diminish the importance of everything we cannot shape or direct. But our joy will be short if it is grounded in circumstances and events, because circumstances and events always change: if they please us now, they will displease us later. And then what will we do?

Central to this discipline, for me anyway, is a constant striving to remember who human beings are and what we are made for. . . The truth of who we are, given the extremes of divine image and savage depravity, is hard to discern; perhaps we can only achieve it in brief moments; perhaps we only catch rumors of the glory that is, and is to be. But even those rumors can sustain us as we walk the pilgrim path.

Alan Jacobs,  "The Politics of Long Joy"

Jonah Lehrer, Malcolm Gladwell, and the Simplistic Explanation

For those of you who don't follow the navel-gazing world of internet journalism, Jonah Lehrer, staff writer for the New Yorker, was released from his duties when it became apparent that he had fabricated a quote from the quotable Bob Dylan in his recent bestselling book, Imagine. Lehrer had previously been reprimanded by the folks at the snooty periodical I can't help but love for essentially reposting his old material from his Wired days on his New Yorker blog without indicating the duplication. But misquoting and misrepresenting the voice of a generation was a bridge too far. And now Mr. Lehrer is out of work.

Unsurprisingly, I find Alan Jacobs's reflections on this issue illuminating and well-reasoned. This is unsurprising because Mr. Jacobs is responsible for the best biography I have ever read (The Narnian, a bio of C.S. Lewis) as well as the best book on reading and books I have ever read (The Pleasure of Reading In an Age of Distraction). He writes:

If things go a certain way, this fall from grace could be the best thing that ever happened to Jonah Lehrer. In spending the past decade striving to be The Next Malcolm Gladwell, he has fallen victim to Gladwell’s besetting sin, which is glibness. In the Gladwellian intellectual cosmos, immensely complex ideas and experiences get boiled down to simplistic binary oppositions or are run through a single interpretative filter (here’s the tipping point, there’s the blink of instantaneous judgment).
. . .
But maybe, just maybe, it’s not worth it: maybe the neat little points you make that way aren’t intellectually substantive enough to justify the risks you take on their behalf. There could be a better way to go about this business of trying to understand human behavior and explain it to others. That other way will require more patience, more research, possibly more education (Lehrer has two bachelor’s degrees); and it will probably result in books that don’t sell as well, so the lifestyle will take a hit. But if you can make a real and lasting contribution to the human understanding of ourselves, the tradeoffs are more than worth it. I hope Jonah Lehrer finds that better path.

Jacobs cuts to the heart of my problem with so much of Gladwell's writing (someone I find immensely entertaining) and Lehrer's standard practice and so much of what counts for intelligent discourse: how simple it all becomes. The Marxist screams "economics!", the feminist "patriarchy!", Gladwell shouts "blink!". And they are all hammers with every bit of sociological date looking like a nail.

I remember listening to Gladwell's breakout hit, The Tipping Point, on audiobook driving out to Phoenix and being blown away by what I was hearing. It all sounded so incredible. The intense crime of late 80s New York was ceased by fixing broken windows and painting subway cars! How simple! Think of how easy it would be to fix other problems: you only need to find some simple cure. And I bought it, and others that I know bought it. A good pastor friend of mine was trying to figure out what the tipping point was for the Church and how, through one simple thing, we could experience revolution, go viral.

But it is not that simple, of course. There were multitudinous factors at play in New York in the late 80s that helped curb crime: the waning of the crack epidemic, the high profile prosecutions by Rudy Guliani of Gotham crimelords, a mounting frustration on the part of New Yorker's towards crime, and a dozen dozen other things. To attribute it to something simple glosses over everything else at play.

And Gladwell knows this and Lehrer knows this (I don't mean to entirely conflate the two, I find Gladwell far more trustworthy of an author, especially now), but there is something so sexy about having a really clever and surprising thesis statement that it causes writers to see One Uniting Theme linking everything. And so these writers perform intellectual gymnastics to get specific cases to fit the Master Thesis. Lehrer wanted a Bob Dylan quote to say something that he wanted it to say. But he couldn't find one that fit perfectly. And, as The Atlantic points out in a recent article on quoting, sometimes the appeal of inventing a quote to say something a bit better than what was said, a bit more in line with the point you are trying to drive home, is irresistible.

The Atlantic ran another article recently by a history professor from the University of Iowa, named Marshall Poe. Poe writes of his struggle to squeeze a book he was under contract to write about Wikipedia into this One Big Explanation mold of the sociological bestseller mold. But he couldn't do it. There was no easy pattern there. And Poe, mercifully, had the intellectual honesty to accept that the rise of Wikipedia, or the rise of any one thing really, was not simple and to resist the temptation to manufacture an easy (and pithy, entertaining, and possibly bestselling) explanation. It cost him materially, no doubt, maybe even a TED Talk (the reigning king of pithy, simplified explanations) and the social clout of being the Explainer. But at least he told the truth. And maybe Poe's type of writing, and Jacobs's type, and every other honest academic who doesn't conceive of a thesis and do research to prove it, but lets the material speak for itself, will be how Lehrer recovers and finds a way back from his exile.