

How books help us to be better human beings - Petiver
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/08/how-books-help-us-be-better-human-beings

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danblick
I thought I'd throw in a mention of a book on a similar topic, "The Shallows:
What the Internet is Doing to our Brains", a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2011:

[http://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=16](http://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=16)

If I had to summarize a few takeaways:

* Books are read in a linear fashion. Following a simple linear path helps us focus our attention on the content in a book and digest it. Reading cultivates habits of focusing and thinking deeply about a single topic.

* The internet is full of rich sources of information but is also full of distractions. People browsing the web simultaneously _digest content_ and _make decisions_ about how to navigate through that content, which distracts from the ability to absorb the content and form associations with it. Compared to book reading, web browsing also encourages quick-pleasure-seeking rather than focused, intentional, sustained attention that books help cultivate.

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romaniv
_> In the late 20th century, however, there was a sustained assault from
within the profession of literary studies on the very idea of common humanity_

I'm surprised someone at New Statesman admits this. Very often I feel that the
very purpose of modern literary studies is to establish "credentials" that
allow the holder to shut down discussion of books by using jargon and appeal
to authority. In those disciplines, there is very little effort applied to
improve the actual understanding of literature. Constructs, constructs,
constructs. In the end, you end up spending most of your time dealing with
linguistic constructs of the field itself and very little time thinking about
the ideas of whatever author you study.

Noam Chomsky commented on this when speaking about post-structuralism. He
noted that it's mostly an attempt to present "scientific" front for something
that is inherently not a scientific field.

Of course, the response from the field was that he just doesn't understand
what they're doing. Just like everyone else outside of the field.

~~~
zenogais
I devoted a several years to studying continental / post-structuralist
philosophy (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Irigary, et al), and while I
can't claim any authoritative knowledge I'd say I've at least done my
homework, and I have to agree with Chomsky.

Post-structuralism essentially begins from the feeling that the rigor of
modernism/structuralism is stuffy and oppressive. Post-structuralism's main
project, then, is to deny the kind of stuffy rigor typical of the sciences any
privileged position - that is, to deny that it is more correct than any other
type of analysis. This is done through a variety of means, but you can find a
good summary in [1]. The works in this area employ a dauntingly huge set of
concepts that often serve as a barrier to entry and mystifier for outsiders.
Science/mathematics is typically only donned to give a philosophers work an
intimidating edifice to the non-mathematically inclined - see Badiou for a
great example of this with set/category theory. Overall, it's a questionable
project that seems to contribute little - see [2] for a good summary of this.

Overall, skip it if you can.

[1]:
[http://philpapers.org/archive/SHATVO-2.pdf](http://philpapers.org/archive/SHATVO-2.pdf)
[2]:
[https://debate.uvm.edu/NFL/rostrumlib/SchwartzmanMar'00.pdf](https://debate.uvm.edu/NFL/rostrumlib/SchwartzmanMar'00.pdf)

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noir_lord
I'm a better person for reading the books of Terry Pratchett, it was many
years after I started reading them that I realised they have an implicit
morality running through the whole series.

Honestly I don't know if I want to read his last as that has an air of
finality to it.

~~~
henry_vonfire
I couldn't agree more with your statement. Pratchett was the best for me.

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Gladdyu
Reading a good book allows you to experience years of someone's life in just a
few hours.

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hinkley
> Conversation is the key: the problem with “academic” literary analysis is
> that too often it sounds like talking at the reader or, worse, talking down
> to him or her. And the style is all too frequently that of the monologue.

You don't say...

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cryoshon
Um, this article is bad. It takes a very long time to say not very much. I'm
still not sure what the point is. I think that this article falls into the
morass of 20th century literary/critical intellectualism whose primary
occupation is navel gazing and recursive commentary based off of the original
navel gazing. It's endless writing for the sake of name dropping.

Here is a good summary of this article: "Montaigne himself wrote a wonderful
essay suggesting that the three best things in life are friendship, sex and
reading, and the best of the three is reading. Your friend may die, your
sexual partner may betray you, but literature is always there."

I fancy a good book quite frequently, myself-- books can allow themselves to
be complicated or un-understandable and have niche appeal. That being said,
this article seems to be contributing a bit to the "cult of books" which has
become a bit more prominent in the recent years. Books aren't magical, and
they don't always contain better information than other media. The main
strength of books is their ability to go into depth and exist a long time.

Am I a better human being for reading a bunch of books? Probably, but the real
self improvement comes from information transfer independent of source, not
"books" intrinsically. Reading books just happens to be the fastest and
densest information transfer from external world to brain, for me.

~~~
muddyrivers
I think you miss the major points of the article. It is long if it is judged
by the "standard" length of an article in a blogging era, and thus shorter
attention spans of readers. It is not that long if one considers that the
author was trying a topic that is hard to illuminate.

That doesn't mean it is a well-written article. Although he made his points
clear, the writing could be better. I have read better articles on similar
topics.

I think writing is a universal skill in terms that good writing can be applied
to both literatures and technical books. The ways to convey one's points are
usually quite different based on the topics. An imaginary example, an extreme
one, is to write a novel in a way like writing a book on a programming
language. Similarly, as readers, we can't expect the same reading experiences
on Madame Bovary and Gang of Four.

~~~
cbd1984
> thus shorter attention spans of readers

Is there any actual evidence of this, or is it another _O Tempora, O Mores_
rant?

~~~
swsieber
There is [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-
news/1160731...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-
news/11607315/Humans-have-shorter-attention-span-than-goldfish-thanks-to-
smartphones.html)

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dominotw
What exactly is a "better human being" ?

~~~
Jun8
Good question! Using "better" for complex things without explicitly labeling
the measurement axes is fluff
([https://xkcd.com/833/](https://xkcd.com/833/)).

~~~
RaSoJo
Humanities is pretty much the embodiment of something that we could term
subjective, no?

But having said that "better human being" was a term that came out of the age
of enlightenment - intellectual, moral and physical growth were considered
key. [1]

Hence books - with their ability to contribute on the moral and intellectual
fronts - were always considered paramount.

Though with the fracturing of medial channels, books are just part of an ever
larger mix.
[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitas#Revival_in_18th_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitas#Revival_in_18th_and_19th_century_Germany)

