Have You Done the Reading?
Dear Reader,
A not-so-fun little tick that comes up in public discourse is the accusatory “Have you done the reading?” The rhetorical implication is always that one has not. It’s typically phrased as a comment about someone who “hasn’t done the reading.”
Where does this come from? As it is most commonly invoked by academics and other public intellectuals, I believe it’s intended as a reference to the idea that there’s a syllabus and these readings are part of it. Indeed, I’ve seen it from professors and high school teachers who express frustration with students who haven’t attempted the readings, often not even of the syllabus itself! Such students obviously struggle in discussion, either poorly faking it or belligerently offering non sequiturs. (Those that have managed to escape notice by better faking are somehow exempted from this critique, I should note.)
So there’s an analogy in play when people inquire “Have you done the reading?” of us, at least if it’s outside an actual classroom. And the analogy is to connect us back to the classroom and to assert that there’s a sort of syllabus surrounding any given topic—and thus a set reading list that one needs to have attended to prior to conversing about said topic.
I’ll return to this essay in at least one future piece—I know you’re owed a piece on “Actual Nonreaders”—but Oliver Traldi’s entertaining “Nobody Reads” provides a good hook for today’s exploration of whether one “has done the reading”:
In my experience, the fact that nobody reads has become one of the mainstays of intellectual life. People get angry about an article, try to denigrate or even “cancel” its author, but it turns out they haven’t read past the headline, and sometimes not even that. People talk up some writer (or worse, some “thinker”), say they prove or disprove some thesis, but it turns out they can’t reconstruct the argument, and they just tell you to go read the whole body of work yourself.
When I read this quote from Traldi, I had an immediate reaction. And it’s one I’ve had for a lifetime, really, but one I’ve fashioned more sharply over the year. And it’s this: I’m not convinced that reconstructed or summarized arguments are adequate. That is, sometimes it’s a fair request to “go read the whole body of work.”
Not every time. Perhaps not even most times. But sometimes people do need to go experience the whole read: you’d be giving them something else were you to offer your own summary, even if it were the most charitable, accurate summary possible. Even if it were an accurate paraphrase.
And this leads me to today’s reconsideration: I have a working hypothesis that there are works that can be summarized easily (and those don’t require the full attendance of “having done the reading”) and that there are works that cannot be summarized capably (and these require the actual experience of the read).
Works That Can be Summarized Easily
Perhaps the poster child for a work that can be so easily faked that it’s (almost) not even funny is Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. It’s a good book with a keen, singular insight, but no one needs to read it. The title alone captures the substance.
This isn’t to say that one shouldn’t read Amusing Ourselves to Death. It’s to say that you really don’t miss anything by the summary of its central argument—the particular bits and bobs of Postman’s case aren’t essential for the comprehension of the work’s thrust. The idea that media is about entertainment and Americans care more for entertainment than thinking is pretty well accepted (of others at least, if not ourselves).
(I should emphasize here that I’ve taught Amusing Ourselves to Death, not least because it’s, again, a good work. It’s just not a great work, and it’s absurdly easy to fake the reading of.)
I must admit I find it hilarious that Amusing Ourselves to Death is among the most-fake-read books out there. I have friends who confessed to me only quite begrudgingly that they never read the book, even though they regularly invoke it in conversation and writing. And these are the sort who consider themselves serious intellectuals, the kind who live in the realm of the intellectually honest read. Yet somehow, Amusing Ourselves to Death—a book premised on the idea that people prefer entertainment to actual reading and thinking—is among the books invoked positively, and quite frequently, by those who’ve never read them.
The thing is, I don’t really wish to call these people hypocrites. I think Amusing Ourselves to Death possesses a keen insight. I also think this insight can be adequately summarized without diminishing one’s appreciation of the phenomenon described. This isn’t to belittle Postman’s accomplishment or insight; it’s to say something about the nature of the book itself.
Now, my Postman example doesn’t disagree with Traldi’s point in any deep sense. Amusing Ourselves to Death can be summarized and readily put to use in discourse with anyone else. With or without having read it.
As someone who’s traded a steady stream of snarky book summaries with at least one friend of mine, I can very much appreciate the art of summary, with or without the snark. I’m not personally worried about whether people get hammered over the head with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s brand of symbolism. Less ungenerously—I am obviously not on team scarlet letter—certain works just lend themselves to easy summary. Most such works are nonfiction as opposed to fiction, which is also because many nonfiction works would work better at essay length anyway (the same is not true of novels working better as short stories).
I could be persuaded that Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions can be adequately summarized; most of The Hedgehog Review’s essays in the recent “Questioning the Quantified Life” could be readily summarized without dramatic loss; likewise, Trudy Govier’s Social Trust and Human Communities can be capably summarized, however valuable its insights.
And if we were to look at business books, well, there we’d find a convoy of books one needn’t have read to converse convincingly on them.
Works That Cannot Be Easily Summarized
Where I find myself in slight discord with Traldi’s evidence for people not reading is, once again, on the subject of reconstruction of arguments that can’t be summarized adequately.
I recall a conversation about a philosopher who’d denigrated Aristotle his entire career. You see, this philosopher had never actually read Aristotle. Instead, he’d read the reconstructions of Aristotle’s points. Aristotle by academic listicle. Upon reading Aristotle when he retired, this philosopher took immediately to Aristotle’s writings. That is, when he actually read Aristotle, he liked him.
This is where the question of doing the reading comes into play. Certain works cannot be summarized well. Their argument is in the reading of them, not the philosopher or rhetorician’s flavorless reconstructions. Even a spicy reconstruction won’t do.
Here I should note that I’m departing from a steady philosophical tradition, a portion of which I even teach myself. That’s why this piece is very much a reconsideration. And yet it’s a point I will stand on. Summaries of Aristotle and Aquinas and Austen just won’t do. No Fear Shakespeare is inane.
Among the works that simply can’t be summarized adequately are Precious Nonsense, Technopoly, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, Crime and Punishment, and “Pay Attention!” Summarize or paraphrase them, and you lose something. (Well, it’s possible The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science might be paraphrased well, but I haven’t seen it.)
I should note that Technopoly is yet another work by Neil Postman. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a good book with a great insight; Technopoly is a great book with a great insight. Of some amusement to me, I got into a conversation several years ago with a prominent tech CEO (now venture capitalist) who declared that Technopoly was the lesser book in comparison with Amusing Ourselves to Death because the argument in Technopoly was, and I kid you not, obvious to everybody. Again, Amusing Ourselves to Death is among the most fake-read books you’ll find because its argument is so readily apparent. I’ve yet to meet someone who’s tried to pull off the “Yeah, I’ve read Technopoly” without having done so. Firstly, because it’s a far less flashy book. You don’t sound smarter for having read it. Secondly, because I’ve never seen a good summary of Technopoly from those who’ve actually read it. The few attempts always fall flat.
Indeed, the best engagement with Technopoly is when people work alongside it or out from it. A recent piece in The New Atlantis is one of these, with its subtitle of “Neil Postman was right. So what?”. (For what it’s worth, I found the “so what” far less annoying than I expected, given the subtitle.) For all the tech criticism out there, Technopoly has its own lens. It’s also the best of Postman.
Returning to the business context, Jeff Bezos is famous for forcing his managers to read memos in full at meetings, so these concerns aren’t merely academic.
Even if my separation of reads into these two separate buckets holds—the ones that can be adequately summarized and the ones that can’t—that doesn’t necessarily help in real life. At least not definitively.
For example, I’m at a loss for what to do with Trudy Govier’s seminal Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation, which itself focuses quite a bit on argument standardization and reconstruction. Aside from the fact that I think many philosophers are impoverished for not having read it, especially its opening chapters, I’m attempting a piece on the principle of charity and I have great difficulty not simply pointing to her three great chapters on the matter. Beyond my own tiny insight on the subject, which actually made it into that book’s recent “second” edition, everything I’m doing is essentially a rephrasing of an argument Govier’s already made and much better than I can. But for those who haven’t done the reading, well, my own approach to it might be necessary. (That a number of intellectuals confess they don’t even read quoted material in articles is yet another matter to consider when crafting such a piece…)
Thus, while the question of a syllabus may not be the most pressing thing in anyone’s life—nor should it be—the question of whether one has done the reading and whether that matters pops up even when one is writing. And here I don’t mean whether you as the writer have done the reading, but rather the sort of reading practices your own readers might employ.
Who does and doesn’t do the reading—and when someone has done enough of said reading—is one of those little concerns that has more unsteadiness to it than I’ve found full comfort with myself.
But to the question of whether one has done the reading—what do you think?
Are all cases of non-reading intellectually dishonest? Do some books truly escape summary and paraphrase, making them must-reads if one wants to intelligently consider or converse about them?
Happy pondering,
Kreigh
P.S. My December reading unearthed an example of reading in memoriam, and unlike my massive exploration of it, this one was a tight paragraph. I was thrilled by its discovery.