Words from the Wise and Otherwise, Part Four
Dear Reader,
Today’s contribution to this series will be a single author and a single quote.
That author is widely respected as wise. And the work from which I’ll be quoting regarded as his best work. (It isn’t, but that’s another matter.) And I think, in this single instance, from a work whose overall thesis I think keen and pressing, that the consideration of reading comprehension is flat-out wrong.
Now, I am lifting this quote slightly from context, but I simply mean that I’m removing the repetitions and further sidebars. Perhaps on another occasion I’ll deal with those sidebars—in fact, one of them is central to my research project on critical thinking—but not for today’s exploration.
All of which is to say, this quote from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death is long enough by itself and the additional context would distract from the central line I wish to discuss, the other lines offering little for my examination of his assertion. I am, however, offering this quote in full so that you can let it roll around in your own mind for a bit, weighing it for yourself:
“To engage with the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusion, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.”
If we overlook the fact that to “weigh ideas” would account for everything written before those words—Postman’s inclusion of those extra words perhaps demonstrating how dumb he considers his readers—and if we acknowledge that the fourth sentence was written before the advent of Twitter and online friends, we are still left with those last two sentences. And those two sentences, with or without their surrounding context, are where Mr. Postman and I must part ways.
Let’s isolate them for closer inspection:
“[A] good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.”
Firstly, I think the idea of the remote and distanced reader to be an intellectual fiction, one believed by philosophers who think their moods are mere manifestations of their intellect, perfectly rational and all of that.
There is a less-obnoxious and more fertile version of this idea, however, than that of certain philosophers. In this version, the goal is to become a measured reader, one whose passions do not overcome one’s comprehension of a text. So there’s still a certain “distance” from the text, but there’s at least an acknowledgement that people are human and that passions can exist and should be ordered by one’s reason.
Of this more fertile version, I must admit that I sometimes find myself in deep agreement and at other times find myself in vigorous disagreement. It’s not merely that it’s potentially a defeasible truism, subject to exceptions. It’s that I’m unconvinced that it’s a good default mode of reading, which is often what advocates suggest.
This brings me to my second disagreement: To read that way is straight-up boring.
It’s simply a hard pass. I can be reading something closely, analytically, and find myself momentarily overwhelmed, inspired, overjoyed by a line. I can be annoyed and be analytical. Admittedly, I can be annoyed and not be analytical. But my careful analysis does not depend on my detachment. (It doesn’t depend on my attachment, either.)
Some of Postman’s point is that to be a mere cheerleader or fanboy as one reads is a servile position—as the thinking has already been outsourced to another person. There is a difference, though, between being a mere intellectual cheerleader and someone who can enjoy writing that reflects good thinking (or a good ear).
And to be clear, that isn’t Postman’s main point: he’s writing within a long tradition of “rational” thinkers. So he isn’t so much responding to potential abuses of outsourced thinking and emotional attachment; rather, he’s echoing a tradition in which he’s found himself and finds worthy of continuation.
And that tradition is what I consider the intellectual fiction, at least when taken in its fullest form. And as someone who’s quite concerned with people engaging in the habit of reading—and the habit of reflection on that reading—I think that to introduce unnecessary tedium, a sort of gray-faced sobriety, into reading is likely to produce fewer careful and habitual readers, not more of them.
There was a large twentieth-century academic movement towards skepticism. Postman was within that tradition, and the quote that inspired today’s piece is representative of both that and an older tradition of imagining a detached, rational, essentially disembodied mind.
I am unconvinced by both traditions. I think the perma-skeptic an untenable intellectual position—it’s literally impossible for me to rediscover all of human knowledge on my own, even were I Rousseau’s nature babe. And given that impossibility, to be a perma-skeptic does more than impoverish my thinking. It endangers the very social trust necessary for knowledge to be communicated.
(It should be clear to anyone who’s read even five essays from this newsletter that I am quite comfortable with skepticism and questioning. This very piece couldn’t exist otherwise. Unlimited skepticism, however, I find both imprudent and untenable.)
The older tradition, this idea of a pure intellect, is attractive. Even without contemporary insights from psychology and neuroscience, though, I’m just not certain how we humans are supposed to disembody our minds. And since we’d be getting deep into philosophy of mind for further inspection of that idea, I’ll leave examination of the older tradition alone aside from mentioning that I find it unpersuasive in its strictest form.
But the two traditions that informed Postman’s thoughts on reading are still to be reckoned with. The so-called crisis of trust in science today is the offspring of the twentieth-century skepticism project. (It isn’t solely that, but that particular don't-get-duped movement is a notable ancestor.) As for the idea of a disembodied mind, well, I remain unpersuaded, and its greatest enthusiasts tend to be the worst interlocutors. That isn’t evidence in its favor for pragmatic purposes, anyway.
My concern with Postman’s quote specifically is more that it can create disagreeable readers and disagreeable conversation, occasions where readers confuse their individual reading of a text as definitively detached and singularly accurate. And, frankly, it makes the reading life that of the sourpuss. I’ve chuckled at some of my favorite authors. I’ve chuckled with some of my favorite authors. And I think that makes for precisely the reading the author intended and the text demands. If that isn’t good reading, I don’t know what is.
Happy reading to you,
Kreigh
P.S. I’d had today’s essay already written when I stumbled across this insightful essay from philosopher Agnes Callard. I find that I disagree with Callard's writing at least as often as I agree with it, but this piece makes a parallel argument to the one I’ve made in today's essay. Her piece does a whole lot more than echo mine, including some commentary on leadership that is one of the best I have seen. Here, though, I’ll simply quote her conclusion, as it complements my own argument:
Rationality cannot be purified of its affective tincture, or “apolitically” detached from our shared project of pursuing the common good. After all, for us humans, rationality is an emotional and political achievement.
P.P.S. It might be argued that I’ve been uncharitable in my analysis of Postman’s writing. That is, couldn’t we view him as pushing back against the extreme position of being led purely by one’s emotions? Couldn’t we put in him that context? Well, we could. But to do so would be anachronistic. It would be to ignore the context in which Postman is writing, and it would be to ignore Postman’s very words. While there is a school of thought that thinks that charitable reading is to always make more rational what you’re reading, even if it’s not what the author wrote, that school finds itself in pretzels once that approach is taken to its logical conclusion. I may write on the principle of charity later in this series—or in a different venue—but for now I’ll simply note that to take Postman’s words as other than what they say would be the greatest offense I could do to a cultural critic like Postman. His arguments were written with care, and my job as a charitable reader is to extend equal care to them, which I have. It’s simply that I find this specific argument within Amusing Ourselves to Death to be dubious.
Put another way, by reading Postman closely and finding disagreement after that close inspection, I’ve extended precisely the care he’d have requested of a reader. And for intellectual pursuits, that is the highest form of charity.