An Interlude
Dear Reader,
A few people expressed concern about, well, the absence of reading material. So perhaps I might point you to some possibilities.
Here we have “Apart of a Community—Or a Part of It” that includes this reflection on reading: ‘As nineteenth-century writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “One must be an inventor to read well . . . There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.”’
And here we have “Reading Wealth of Nations and Meeting Adam Smith,” which contains such tantalizing bits on reading as this:
One of the pleasures of reading a very long book is working out the terms of its construction, and as I read, I learned Smith’s principles but I also encountered Smith in a variety of guises: Smith the reader foraging through his books, Smith the conversationalist trading anecdotes, and even Smith the man on the street overhearing some useful tidbit of news from abroad.
There is “Falling,” an essay that struck me the first time I read it and one that continues to sit with me. Perhaps as stock markets skyrocket and yet underpaid gig labor increases in direct parallel, we might consider what it’s like for those from the middle class who haven’t found their rocketship.
A somewhat strange pairing with the above, but perhaps useful in combination, could be this from The Hedgehog Review:
The commodification of self would seem to be a misnomer. If a commodity is a product, something that can be bought and sold, then in what sense can the self be commodified?
That one, I should mention, pairs near perfectly with Sam Buntz’s piece on “people who adhere to the notion of atomistic individualism, the idea that we are free-range consumers, by nature detached and independent from any greater communal, familial, intellectual, or spiritual whole.” It’s not not related.
If you’d like some more pain in your life, The New Atlantis has a piece on “How feckless Covid leadership turned us against each other.” It’s a well-written piece, if you can manage reading more on the subject matter.
Here’s a reflection that is quite sobering yet perhaps worth the grappling:
An individual’s or a society’s character cannot be willed into or out of existence. Lost virtues and solidarities cannot be regained overnight, or even, perhaps, in a generation. Even our ideologies of liberation may have to be rethought. A transvaluation of values may be in order: faster, easier, and more may have to give way to slower, harder, and less—not only for ecological reasons but also for reasons of mental and moral hygiene. And even if we decide, as a society, to spit out the poisoned apple of consumerism and technological addiction, is there a path back—or forward, for that matter? If individual self-sufficiency and local self-government are prerequisites for human flourishing, then maybe it is too late.
And finally, there’s “Reader in a Lost World” which is an essay on essays that took a re-read from me to fully appreciate:
… Not so for the essay. The genre lacks something of the splendor we grant other literary forms. It is all too often a humble drudge bearing ignoble loads. The essay is tasked with articles, book reviews, and other ephemera; forced to play the messenger and carry the news; to recount even our gossip, and to do so everywhere. The form is ubiquitous—perhaps the most widespread literary genre. It stuffs the pages of any paper, any journal, with bad prose and insipid observations. But its indignities do not end there.
The essay is also the most widely taught genre. Whole semesters are devoted to it; entire courses take this form as their matter. Yet despite these efforts most students struggle to muster five awkward paragraphs—each a misshapen bead—strung together by no inner logic or subtle transition but the red margin that travels down each wide-ruled page. These assignments pass for essays as would trinkets for fine jewelry: every attempt an evident failure. Few are the students who encounter the multifaceted brilliance the form is capable of, fewer still who contribute to it. Too often they write not essays, but papers. This poor attempt at a taxonomy hints at something of the genre’s problem.
What we unthinkingly call essays are often mere assignments or tests, and our lack of clarity further confuses our students. We spend years instructing them in a genre they can barely deploy with competence, a genre they certainly don’t understand, and a genre they develop a loathing for: it is but schoolwork to them. The examples they’ll encounter in later life are not even likely to be recognized as such. The problem isn’t in their classification. The essay, after all, is the most versatile of forms. But we lack useful distinctions for it.
So many good pieces. So many good opportunities for reflection upon either the reading life itself or pieces worthy of your reading efforts.
To the question of whether I myself might write more, for those eager for more than my intended once-a-month appearance, the answer is “Perhaps.” I’m a rather slow thinker and an even slower writer. This series has been somewhat swifter to write (at times) simply because I’ve had years of pondering the subject matter and thousands of subjects upon whom to employ my myriad experiments. Still, I’ve needed to slow this newsletter’s pace for myself, as the noise of my everyday life has made the more careful reflection time I need for writing a little harder to carve out. (I also have a monster set of reading groups before me that start in June, including one that would be better fitted as a graduate-level seminar in philosophy—or at the least a summer’s colloquium for such minds.)
That said, I have been thinking about another series, one that would still be infrequent but on an equally important matter: reasoning. My research there has flicked into a few of my pieces for this newsletter—reading and reasoning have a deep intimacy—but I’ve largely left it alone. Reading works on reasoning is slow work; teaching works on reasoning is slow work; writing about reasoning is painstakingly slow work, especially if you want your writing to be readable by a general audience.
In the not-so-distant past, the premier works of reasoning were not only best sellers for general audiences, but they were also the fundamental university texts. I’m specifically thinking of Isaac Watts’ treatise on logic, but there are examples aplenty. Today, our great works of reasoning come from either public intellectuals and academics who’ve decided to go slumming for a bit—and it shows in the quality of thinking they demonstrate in their books—or an assembly of pseudo-intellectuals peddling themselves and their lifestyle, with actual reasoning mostly an afterthought. (Yes, those are harsh judgments, but aside from my mountain of receipts, I imagine you can do a quick glance around for yourself and see whether I write too boldly.)
My heart is admittedly heavy on this subject. I’d like to never write on it. Reasoning is even more contested ground than reading comprehension—except where the two intersect. “Kreigh contra mundum” is not a moniker I desire. But. And this is the part that’s hard. There’s a gap. And it’s not a tiny one.
I’d already planned to share this possible (and it remains merely a possibility) new series—I’ve been thinking about this realm almost as long as I have reading comprehension, and I’ve actually read more on reasoning than reading comprehension—but two events in just two days (now there’s a back-to-back) have left me more vexed than usual.
The first was the discovery of a fundamental reasoning error in a book intended to strengthen medical reasoning. It’s more than an infelicity—I expected those and one can read past them. It’s an error. That is, if you were to model your reasoning on a key example from that text, you’d have made not merely a logical error but an error of probabilistic reasoning. (And it’s not just because the authors tried to shoehorn a defeasible scenario into the territory of inductive probabilities, though that made a minor contribution to the bungling.)
The second was in discussion with a school that has had some of the best curriculum advisors and used the best available materials for its formal and informal logic courses. As we got deeper into our discussion, a thing unsurprising to me but surprising to most who read and teach those subjects came out: the students weren’t responding well to the texts. (Actually, it was surprising to me that the school’s leadership recognized this. Most institutions just keep repeating words like “logic” as if the repetition might instill the ideas that their instruction never managed.) They were trying the best materials, ones their teachers had intimate familiarity with. But the students weren’t, in fact, receiving whatever lessons they were supposed to from their formal and informal logic courses.
There are a few reasons for this. The best informal logic texts for younger students are puerile in their presentation of the material, for example.
Those reasons aside—sorry, I’m not writing that whole essay today—the reality persists. In back-to-back days, in two totally different contexts, I was forced to reckon with that gap. A gap I already knew existed. Yet even so, the immediacy of those two events was startling.
And so against my better judgment—reasoning, right?—I am considering the prospect of a newsletter specifically on reasoning. While I might release a few pieces for public consumption, it would be a paid newsletter, because I am neither an aristocrat with an abundance of leisure nor an academic needing to pay-it-forward. I’m from America where hard work supposedly demands hard pay. And were I to delve into the realm of reasoning, well, find me harder work without placing a shovel in my hand.
The newsletter wouldn’t launch until August. If there are ten people who’d so desire to buy me a cup of coffee once a month to hear my thoughts, well, I’ll probably give it a whirl. (That’s my way of saying an individual subscription would be $5 a month.) No reader of this always-free newsletter need concern themselves with that, though you’re welcome to pass along the information to others if they’d be interested. But if it’s material you’d welcome reading—and yes, there would be reviews of books and so forth, and argument analysis of essays, including “The Case Against Shakespeare”, to which I might return and write about for this newsletter—then let me know. I’ll mention this possible newsletter again in August, but I wanted readers to have time to consider whether they’d be interested in learning alongside such a project.
Do I have a name for that newsletter? Of course:
“Hobgoblins of Little Minds”
Happy reading to you,
Kreigh