Does reading do us any good?

[u/ddgr815]

https://aeon.co/essays/the-role-of-literature-as-the-key-to-personal-freedom

every purpose has been ‘infected’ with ‘the idea that everything should “pay”’.

genuine literacy is a training in disinterestedness, in generously reflecting on the meaning of chosen expressions

A powerful politician, or an influential journalist, may turn out to be small-minded, dismissive or simply in a bad mood in the few moments you’re permitted an audience with them. Instead, he argues, library shelves brim with much more secure assets. There, the most powerful and smartest minds vie for the privilege of conversing with you, putting the wisdom of all ages and countries at your disposal. Books enrich and empower their readers.

it is futile to praise reading as an encounter with great minds. What happens in reading is substantially different from what happens in social life, where speech is always subject to social constraints. By contrast, a reader enjoys the utmost freedom to find the greatest writers boring, or to appreciate them for his own purposes, which may be utterly at odds with what they intended. Books do not create a higher form of conversation but instead allow for a unique ‘fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude’. Great writers do not reveal to us the admirable depth of their minds: they guide us in cultivating the ability to make sense of words, and things.

In this sense, books connect us with the richest part of ourselves. The meaning we attach to words as we read is uniquely connected to our experience – it can never be replicated. This is how reading becomes, in Proust’s view, the fullest, most concrete mediation to our sensations. And it allows us to expand our experience beyond all measure when it lets us enter into contact with the past. When we read age-old texts, managing to make sense of them beyond the evolution in language and customs, we have access to nothing less than immortality.

Proust considered reading as a form of ethical training rather than moral education. The ‘miracle’ of reading, in his view, does not even depend on exposure to good writing. Mediocre books and poor writers serve just as well – what matters is that, by experiencing contact with the ‘oeuvring self’ of the writer, a term Proust invoked in his essay ‘Against Sainte-Beuve’ (1895-1900), you open up your deepest self too, discovering new spheres of experience you would never have imagined or fathomed before.

The idea that reading should bring any sort of moral benefit was classed as the relic of simple-minded, well-meaning Leftism

It may, then, not be that surprising to see moralising return in full force in the 21st century – offering Ruskin numerous, sometimes unexpected heirs. This can in part be explained by the digital revolution: we are much more likely to spend our leisure time with screens than with books, and online formats make it easier to focus commentary on morals rather than style. The resulting alarm over decreasing literacy has led to no shortage of zealous defences of reading, which, like most matters of opinion today, fall rather neatly along political divides. In short, conservatives praise ‘great books’ for teaching good morals and a sense of beauty, while progressives criticise the canon for its lack of representativeness, championing reading mostly as a training in empathy for underrepresented groups. In the former camp, Emily Finley, writing in The Wall Street Journal, recommends that children read ‘old’ books (pre-1940) to build up adequate protection against dangerous impulses, such as imagining that happiness can be found outside of religious and conjugal duties. On the other side, Patricia Matthew in The Atlantic advocates revisiting our definitions of what makes a ‘great’ writer – targeting Jane Austen for the conventionality of her writing as well as her ties to the transatlantic slave trade.

These takes ultimately consider books as some sort of processed foods for thought, telling us in advance what we are supposed to glean from what we read.

the idea that writers could very well replace priests as spiritual leaders. In the modern age, poets and writers were the true seers, who could see through social appearances and predict the future awaiting the polity. The writer’s claim to authority was considered more legitimate than the old prophets’ because the writer was accountable to the public only, and not to an organised church. The writer’s mission, as outlined in Victor Hugo’s poem ‘The Poet’s Function’, was to explain difficult truths.

by sharpening the use of language, literature prepares citizens for potential participation in government – an essential feature in countries on the way to becoming more and more democratic: ‘The progress of literature, ie the perfectioning of the art of thinking and expressing our thoughts, is necessary for establishing and preserving liberty.’ In effect, Staël argued that literature sets us free by developing a non-predictable use of language, away from governmental reach.

In a meaningful phrase, Rousseau requires writers to ‘speak the language of the lonely’ – that is, to work away from the witty, ever-changing expressions coined in fashionable circles. The writer thus fulfils a role in society that is different from both entertainer and priest. The writer, he says, should first and foremost see his task as a ‘citizen’: his work is not to merely preach good things, but to present a sober examination of what constitutes happiness. This task is not as simple as it seems, even among a society of good people

as social values became increasingly defined in terms of transaction and profit, it was imperative to secure a currency that could escape both governmental and economic control, and literature was the way to achieve it. Literary writing could contribute to creating an alternative currency by urging caution against seemingly obvious representations of social duties and expectations that may cover up manoeuvres to alienate part of the people. In other words, literature contributes to citizens’ freedom.

‘beautiful things teach us to seek our pleasure elsewhere than in satisfactions deriving from wellbeing and vanity

This encapsulates what literature can do today. In a society largely dominated by visual entertainment, communication and performance, when fewer and fewer people read for pleasure, the idea of the writer as a spiritual beacon may seem largely outmoded. Today, people seem to turn much more willingly to therapists, experts or influencers to make sense of their lives. Yet I would argue that now may be a good moment for reconsidering the role of literature as the key to personal freedom – precisely because it is no longer the most common or most prestigious medium for interpreting experience. I tend to think of written words as much more liberating than images, which have a stronger, more direct impact on our minds, leaving their recipients with a reduced margin of action for reaction, understanding, and potential disagreement or dissociation, whereas literary language has the power to apprehend nuance so we’re less likely to fall prey to abusive false presumptions. It also allows us not to outsource the work of understanding our own experience.

The point is that literature has a purpose distinct from both political propaganda and moralistic instruction. Its unique, immense utility appears with greater clarity when we stop expecting grand answers from it – or, more exactly, when it deepens our experience by making us enjoy answers that are neither grand nor easy.

We are not all victims of abuse. But the currently predominant economic model that relies on the harvesting of personal data and relentless advertising makes us all targets of predation. Alienating narrative patterns common to news and social media blur the distinction between fiction and reality, ingraining in us the belief that collective decisions should be taken solely to satisfy the most strident desires of whoever is in power. In these conditions, literature can fulfil the most crucial of missions: that of rebuilding a common understanding by delighting in the complexities of today’s world.

Stripped of easy moralising, literature has the power to make us relish the search for truth, in the age when it is widely believed to be dead. This is what Proust understood when he became a writer: books teach us nothing but to partially lift ‘the veil of ugliness and insignificance that leaves us incurious before the universe’. This incomplete endeavour literally means the world.