Oh I quite enjoyed this! I do read, but sparingly. In the past, I got most of my reading done at work via audiobooks. And in my last job, I would read physical books when it was slow. I think I need a distraction to help me focus on reading.
I make great use of the library but rarely read the books I borrow. I'm trying to change that and read more consistently.
I don't know if reading has made me a "better person" and I have in the past questioned my own desire to read (as in I should stop reading books but felt bad about wanting that). It used to burn me up! But most people don't read, either because of time or preference.
My only concern is around literary and also the relevance of college in a potential future where very few read. What is the point of college if not to read? And it's not like people are learning rhetoric, debate or critical thinking either.
The question of how we can get the culture as a whole to read more is really difficult, especially as we're always told to respect people's personal preferences. Universities should really be holding the line here, but they don't seem able to. I think reading groups are great, and I'm hopefully joining one soon... maybe that could become fashionable? Otherwise yes, it's down to us as individuals to be committed readers.
Worthwhile reflections as always, thank you. "My life's circumstances limit what I may spend money on, but not what I may read or what music I may listen to, and certainly not what I may think." This is wonderfully put. Truly there is a freedom of the mind.
Really interesting piece. Not wholly convinced that Great Literature necessarily provides an "enriched perspective", the deepening of the moral imagination (M. Nussbaum) or "intellectual resources for a meaningful life." Maybe like art it did, for a while, act as a substitute for the loss of religious 'inwardness'. But I do wonder how far it actually changes how people lead their lives? Gotta say, I'm suffering from what G. Dyer calls 'the Mir syndrome' (at least when it comes to fiction).
Unrelated, but I greatly enjoyed your Unherd piece. However, I also thought it was slightly naive (sorry!). The Enlightenment view of the education? Didn't Nietzsche leave academia because he saw it was already too connected to the state (even then)? As N says somewhere (according to MacIntyre): "Don't look for anything spiritual in the university." Also thought the point about "frenzied activism" with respect to Gaza was a cop out. In fact, universities haven't responded well to the financial crisis, Covid, AI and now the genocide in Gaza (Pankaj Mishra has a nice piece in Harper's on this). Increasingly think the great C.W. Mills was right: better to be a "wobbly professor," in and out of the whale.
Thanks, your points are all well taken. Where I've come down on the enriching potential of literature: probably a small number ever experienced it, but it made a difference to culture/society nonetheless. (I still experience it). For a long time film/TV did something similar, but what's the substitute for religious inwardness now? I'm not sure. Maybe subjectivity has been extinguished by conformity, as Arendt feared. As for the "Free University," I'm aware this was just an ideal, but ideals do matter for institutions, even if only sometimes and partially. Still, you're right that I should have made clear the earlier university served certain functions for the state.
Agreed, Wessie. I still love books and the odd book will still move me (Malina being the last). Films and music still pull at the heart’s strings. Perhaps they always will given the type of creatures we are. But, but…in terms of a way of life? That I'm not sure about.
Yes, religion has probably gone as well since it seems that all that remains is an outward shell. Whence the insufferable self-righteousness and fake piety; worse than that: fundamentalism and extremism.
Not sure if it's conformity so much as a hollowing out. A futility of endless process (her brilliant Adam Smith quote in HC spells it out). I think she would have said that without 'the world' the self also disappears.
That reminds me of another memorable moment in the Human Condition, where she talks about labour as human participation in the joy that all creatures share in simply existing.
One can argue that the "why" was privatised, atomised. But I think that is the condition we're navigating yes.
Don't recall that, tbh (read a long time ago). But it was a book that deeply moved me. Essential reading.
Sounds surprising bc I thought labour was related to suffering and a kind of ‘worldlessness’ for her?
It's interesting, bc I think Muslims would say that what we share is the ability to praise God (even the stones do, apparently). Perhaps not too dissimilar to what you're saying?
I’ve read your essays What’s the Point of the University? and I think this one, "The Future of Reading", can be related to its subject matter.
In What’s the Point of the University? you rightly note that the post WW2 University was not a natural culmination of the liberal tradition but a Cold War construct. At least in the case of the USA, it was born out of national security needs, federal funding streams, and later bureaucratic expansion. That system was consolidated by powerful interests through carrots (research money, prestige) and sticks (legal compulsion, procurement rules, professional licensing). What we had before, a plural and diversified Academe with municipal colleges, normal schools, variable high shcools, independent professional institutes, industrial labs, denominational colleges, and more was vibrant, effective, adaptable, and generated by genuine civic society. The post war centralization was not inevitable; it was engineered. That context alone should make us skeptical of claims that the system is indispensable.
And its central defense, that modern society requires mandarins trained to manage complex organizations, is quite questionable. Management of organizations is simpler today, not harder. Computers, networks, and telecommunications have drastically lowered coordination costs, while consolidation has simplified landscapes that were once far more plural and adaptive. What we actually need is judgment under plural constraints, not a professionalized clerisy trained in homogenized categories. The mandarinate is a product of the system, not a solution to its failures.
And Future of Reading relates to this problem. You describe declining literacy among students, libraries discarding books for PDFs, an endless glut of low status publications, and a shrinking “reading class.” If the University is failing at the most basic civilizational task, stewarding deep literacy, then the case for propping up its current form is extraordinarily weak. In fact, the very logic of post war higher ed (credential pipelines, grantsmanship, prestige journals) directly undercuts the reading culture you defend here. What you’ve described is not an institution rescuing culture, but one actively participating in its erosion.
More broadly, the post WW2 University should be understood as part of a nexus of central planning that fuses the economic and cultural spheres. Its structures mirror those of the Cold War state and corporate consolidation standardized credentialing, centralized funding monopolies, and bureaucratic infantilization. When extended down into primary and secondary schooling, consolidated districts, scripted curricula, algorithmic assessment, we see the same consolidation, the same loss of local control, and the same flattening of intellectual life. The broader nexus explains much of our cultural degradation.
Thanks for this detailed and persuasive response! I agree with more or less everything here. I suppose the unstated conclusion of my piece on the University it that, considering the failures of the current model alongside the wider crisis of intellectual life, we still need *a University*, but very much a reformed one. The question I cannot answer is what sort of configuration can supply both the requisite forms of expertise and the "civilisational task" (as you call it) of sustaining an intellectual culture.
Hi, thanks for the reply! Well, I would say that this current model wasn’t and isn't inevitable, it was contrived, and because it was contrived, it can be disassembled, and indeed its existence continues to be contrived through funding monopolies, credentialing cartels, bureaucratic inertia, centralized and concentrated economic and political authorities, and more. The question isn’t how to “reform” the University, but whether the real task is to re-pluralize the Academe; polytechnics, civic colleges, independent professional schools, guilds, seminaries, and other forms of diverse institutions embedded in local civic life. Those forms once supplied both expertise and civilizational depth; they were eclipsed by the centralized model not because they failed; and I would suspect that their very success may have been a key motivation for the powerful interests who set out to dismantle and replace them
Interesting response, Mike. I think you would like the book. There’s an extended discussion of data, and some asides about finance, quantitative and not, and of Vietnam and managerialist dreams. But QDP is far less simply normative than du Toit wrote (for Unherd) and that the typically combative Unherd responses assume. Indeed, one of the preoccupations of the book is how to get beyond this genre of thinking/writing, which, as a law professor, seems to me very well ploughed ground, and as a writer, not a very interesting mode of expression. Hence the turn to a polyphonic meta memoir, which may/may not work . . . anyway, the e-book is open access (free!) so check it out!
I too am optimistic about the future of effective reading, as you rightly call it. How many more there will be like old Professor Rosenthal in Vasily Grossman's story, we don't know. It is not easy to be like the man who loved and understood people by reading historians and philosophers, who did not leave his books even in his spare moments, when he sat with his eyes half-closed in the bright sunlight and the indispensable book on his knees, his fingers resting on the rough cover or on the rustling pages... Perhaps the overwhelming enthusiasm and eager anticipation with which the great Garcia Marquez's memoirs were received will not be repeated either: the sale made under the protection of armored personnel carriers and heavily armed military men with the complicated task of deterring the unruly mob at the sight of prey or, in another Latin American state, the assault of the truckload of volumes by readers driven mad by the thought that they might go home without the long-awaited "Vivir para contarla"...
In any case, when governments add taxes that reduce access to valuable books, booksellers in physical stores, online sellers, and especially antiquarians, maintain their ingenuity and perseverance in finding solutions and offers that become truly irresistible ....
I think your musings point to part of the answer. A practice like reading needs to be associated with recognisable characters, roles, social archetypes, that impart to it some sort of charisma and inspire imitation. This is one way that other media can begin to make up for their erosion of reading. Give us heroes who read books!
Very interesting piece. I read in the introduction to the Penguin edition of The Idiot the Dostoevsky estimated that only one in 500 Russians had the level of literacy required to read one of his books. I am intrigued by the apparent success of Dallas publisher Deep Vellum which puts out vast complex tomes in translation and seems to have discovered a niche. First they did a book by the Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu called Solenoid, now they are about to publish a monumental work called Schattenfroh by the German author Michael Lentz. There is a small but energetic subculture dedicated to these maximalist works of prose that require equally muscular feats of reading. I also wonder if AI will not push authors further in the direction of deeply subjective and ornate prose styles; I feel that pull myself.
Yes I remember your post about Solenoid. It would interesting to know if Deep Vellum is a commercial as well as a subcultural (countercultural?) success. I think the next question this opens up is: what does a *healthy* subculture of reading look like? My experience of the art world and the poetry world suggests that such communities can become exclusive in the wrong ways: cliquey, insular, more concerned with social standing within the group than with the practice itself. I'm not sure how we avoid this.
It's run as a non-profit, but in the last couple of years they took over the venerable Dalkey Archive, which makes it a mega publisher with an unbeatable backlist among US independents. When they lost their NEA money they ran a fundraiser but were able to recover relatively quickly. That said, I doubt very much that the publisher turns up to work in a Porsche.
Agree completely re: the cliqueyness. I think by being located in Dallas — not even "weird" Austin — Deep Vellum manage to evade this to some extent. If they were based in Brooklyn the vibe would be very different, and not for the better.
Oh I quite enjoyed this! I do read, but sparingly. In the past, I got most of my reading done at work via audiobooks. And in my last job, I would read physical books when it was slow. I think I need a distraction to help me focus on reading.
I make great use of the library but rarely read the books I borrow. I'm trying to change that and read more consistently.
I don't know if reading has made me a "better person" and I have in the past questioned my own desire to read (as in I should stop reading books but felt bad about wanting that). It used to burn me up! But most people don't read, either because of time or preference.
My only concern is around literary and also the relevance of college in a potential future where very few read. What is the point of college if not to read? And it's not like people are learning rhetoric, debate or critical thinking either.
Anyway. Great piece!
The question of how we can get the culture as a whole to read more is really difficult, especially as we're always told to respect people's personal preferences. Universities should really be holding the line here, but they don't seem able to. I think reading groups are great, and I'm hopefully joining one soon... maybe that could become fashionable? Otherwise yes, it's down to us as individuals to be committed readers.
What a fine piece of writing this is; I learn things, I think new thoughts, I follow interesting leads ...
Worthwhile reflections as always, thank you. "My life's circumstances limit what I may spend money on, but not what I may read or what music I may listen to, and certainly not what I may think." This is wonderfully put. Truly there is a freedom of the mind.
Really interesting piece. Not wholly convinced that Great Literature necessarily provides an "enriched perspective", the deepening of the moral imagination (M. Nussbaum) or "intellectual resources for a meaningful life." Maybe like art it did, for a while, act as a substitute for the loss of religious 'inwardness'. But I do wonder how far it actually changes how people lead their lives? Gotta say, I'm suffering from what G. Dyer calls 'the Mir syndrome' (at least when it comes to fiction).
Unrelated, but I greatly enjoyed your Unherd piece. However, I also thought it was slightly naive (sorry!). The Enlightenment view of the education? Didn't Nietzsche leave academia because he saw it was already too connected to the state (even then)? As N says somewhere (according to MacIntyre): "Don't look for anything spiritual in the university." Also thought the point about "frenzied activism" with respect to Gaza was a cop out. In fact, universities haven't responded well to the financial crisis, Covid, AI and now the genocide in Gaza (Pankaj Mishra has a nice piece in Harper's on this). Increasingly think the great C.W. Mills was right: better to be a "wobbly professor," in and out of the whale.
Thanks, your points are all well taken. Where I've come down on the enriching potential of literature: probably a small number ever experienced it, but it made a difference to culture/society nonetheless. (I still experience it). For a long time film/TV did something similar, but what's the substitute for religious inwardness now? I'm not sure. Maybe subjectivity has been extinguished by conformity, as Arendt feared. As for the "Free University," I'm aware this was just an ideal, but ideals do matter for institutions, even if only sometimes and partially. Still, you're right that I should have made clear the earlier university served certain functions for the state.
Agreed, Wessie. I still love books and the odd book will still move me (Malina being the last). Films and music still pull at the heart’s strings. Perhaps they always will given the type of creatures we are. But, but…in terms of a way of life? That I'm not sure about.
Yes, religion has probably gone as well since it seems that all that remains is an outward shell. Whence the insufferable self-righteousness and fake piety; worse than that: fundamentalism and extremism.
Not sure if it's conformity so much as a hollowing out. A futility of endless process (her brilliant Adam Smith quote in HC spells it out). I think she would have said that without 'the world' the self also disappears.
"The ‘in order to’ has become the content of the ‘for the sake of’; utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness." A brilliant book.
I think we're now in that post-utilitarian (meaningless) 'world'. [In economic theory this shift happens in the early 20th c]
As a guard says to Primo Levi: "There is no why here". We're in the rule of nothing (M. Hanby).
Yes, a brilliant book and thinker!
My favourite line- from another book (she's quoting someone else, I think):
"Pleasure is the fundamental awareness of reality."
That reminds me of another memorable moment in the Human Condition, where she talks about labour as human participation in the joy that all creatures share in simply existing.
One can argue that the "why" was privatised, atomised. But I think that is the condition we're navigating yes.
Don't recall that, tbh (read a long time ago). But it was a book that deeply moved me. Essential reading.
Sounds surprising bc I thought labour was related to suffering and a kind of ‘worldlessness’ for her?
It's interesting, bc I think Muslims would say that what we share is the ability to praise God (even the stones do, apparently). Perhaps not too dissimilar to what you're saying?
I’ve read your essays What’s the Point of the University? and I think this one, "The Future of Reading", can be related to its subject matter.
In What’s the Point of the University? you rightly note that the post WW2 University was not a natural culmination of the liberal tradition but a Cold War construct. At least in the case of the USA, it was born out of national security needs, federal funding streams, and later bureaucratic expansion. That system was consolidated by powerful interests through carrots (research money, prestige) and sticks (legal compulsion, procurement rules, professional licensing). What we had before, a plural and diversified Academe with municipal colleges, normal schools, variable high shcools, independent professional institutes, industrial labs, denominational colleges, and more was vibrant, effective, adaptable, and generated by genuine civic society. The post war centralization was not inevitable; it was engineered. That context alone should make us skeptical of claims that the system is indispensable.
And its central defense, that modern society requires mandarins trained to manage complex organizations, is quite questionable. Management of organizations is simpler today, not harder. Computers, networks, and telecommunications have drastically lowered coordination costs, while consolidation has simplified landscapes that were once far more plural and adaptive. What we actually need is judgment under plural constraints, not a professionalized clerisy trained in homogenized categories. The mandarinate is a product of the system, not a solution to its failures.
And Future of Reading relates to this problem. You describe declining literacy among students, libraries discarding books for PDFs, an endless glut of low status publications, and a shrinking “reading class.” If the University is failing at the most basic civilizational task, stewarding deep literacy, then the case for propping up its current form is extraordinarily weak. In fact, the very logic of post war higher ed (credential pipelines, grantsmanship, prestige journals) directly undercuts the reading culture you defend here. What you’ve described is not an institution rescuing culture, but one actively participating in its erosion.
More broadly, the post WW2 University should be understood as part of a nexus of central planning that fuses the economic and cultural spheres. Its structures mirror those of the Cold War state and corporate consolidation standardized credentialing, centralized funding monopolies, and bureaucratic infantilization. When extended down into primary and secondary schooling, consolidated districts, scripted curricula, algorithmic assessment, we see the same consolidation, the same loss of local control, and the same flattening of intellectual life. The broader nexus explains much of our cultural degradation.
Thanks for this detailed and persuasive response! I agree with more or less everything here. I suppose the unstated conclusion of my piece on the University it that, considering the failures of the current model alongside the wider crisis of intellectual life, we still need *a University*, but very much a reformed one. The question I cannot answer is what sort of configuration can supply both the requisite forms of expertise and the "civilisational task" (as you call it) of sustaining an intellectual culture.
Hi, thanks for the reply! Well, I would say that this current model wasn’t and isn't inevitable, it was contrived, and because it was contrived, it can be disassembled, and indeed its existence continues to be contrived through funding monopolies, credentialing cartels, bureaucratic inertia, centralized and concentrated economic and political authorities, and more. The question isn’t how to “reform” the University, but whether the real task is to re-pluralize the Academe; polytechnics, civic colleges, independent professional schools, guilds, seminaries, and other forms of diverse institutions embedded in local civic life. Those forms once supplied both expertise and civilizational depth; they were eclipsed by the centralized model not because they failed; and I would suspect that their very success may have been a key motivation for the powerful interests who set out to dismantle and replace them
Interesting response, Mike. I think you would like the book. There’s an extended discussion of data, and some asides about finance, quantitative and not, and of Vietnam and managerialist dreams. But QDP is far less simply normative than du Toit wrote (for Unherd) and that the typically combative Unherd responses assume. Indeed, one of the preoccupations of the book is how to get beyond this genre of thinking/writing, which, as a law professor, seems to me very well ploughed ground, and as a writer, not a very interesting mode of expression. Hence the turn to a polyphonic meta memoir, which may/may not work . . . anyway, the e-book is open access (free!) so check it out!
Hi David, thanks for the reply! Looks interesting, I'll check it out. I hope your having a good start to the semester. ---Mike
I too am optimistic about the future of effective reading, as you rightly call it. How many more there will be like old Professor Rosenthal in Vasily Grossman's story, we don't know. It is not easy to be like the man who loved and understood people by reading historians and philosophers, who did not leave his books even in his spare moments, when he sat with his eyes half-closed in the bright sunlight and the indispensable book on his knees, his fingers resting on the rough cover or on the rustling pages... Perhaps the overwhelming enthusiasm and eager anticipation with which the great Garcia Marquez's memoirs were received will not be repeated either: the sale made under the protection of armored personnel carriers and heavily armed military men with the complicated task of deterring the unruly mob at the sight of prey or, in another Latin American state, the assault of the truckload of volumes by readers driven mad by the thought that they might go home without the long-awaited "Vivir para contarla"...
In any case, when governments add taxes that reduce access to valuable books, booksellers in physical stores, online sellers, and especially antiquarians, maintain their ingenuity and perseverance in finding solutions and offers that become truly irresistible ....
I think your musings point to part of the answer. A practice like reading needs to be associated with recognisable characters, roles, social archetypes, that impart to it some sort of charisma and inspire imitation. This is one way that other media can begin to make up for their erosion of reading. Give us heroes who read books!
Very interesting piece. I read in the introduction to the Penguin edition of The Idiot the Dostoevsky estimated that only one in 500 Russians had the level of literacy required to read one of his books. I am intrigued by the apparent success of Dallas publisher Deep Vellum which puts out vast complex tomes in translation and seems to have discovered a niche. First they did a book by the Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu called Solenoid, now they are about to publish a monumental work called Schattenfroh by the German author Michael Lentz. There is a small but energetic subculture dedicated to these maximalist works of prose that require equally muscular feats of reading. I also wonder if AI will not push authors further in the direction of deeply subjective and ornate prose styles; I feel that pull myself.
Yes I remember your post about Solenoid. It would interesting to know if Deep Vellum is a commercial as well as a subcultural (countercultural?) success. I think the next question this opens up is: what does a *healthy* subculture of reading look like? My experience of the art world and the poetry world suggests that such communities can become exclusive in the wrong ways: cliquey, insular, more concerned with social standing within the group than with the practice itself. I'm not sure how we avoid this.
It's run as a non-profit, but in the last couple of years they took over the venerable Dalkey Archive, which makes it a mega publisher with an unbeatable backlist among US independents. When they lost their NEA money they ran a fundraiser but were able to recover relatively quickly. That said, I doubt very much that the publisher turns up to work in a Porsche.
Agree completely re: the cliqueyness. I think by being located in Dallas — not even "weird" Austin — Deep Vellum manage to evade this to some extent. If they were based in Brooklyn the vibe would be very different, and not for the better.
Don't locate yourself in an ultra-trendy area: this could be crucial advice for any cultural enterprise that wants to survive long term.