Does Reading Make You Stupider?

Today I read an article, "How To Think For Yourself," by David Bather Woods, that discussed the belief of some philosophers that reading could make you stupider. (There are of course several layers of irony involved in such a proposition.) But this is an alternative to the view I suggested in my discussion about Sensitivity Readers, in which I suggested that reading creates bridge between minds, expanding our mental horizons rather than shortening them. 

Still, let's see what the argument is, and see if it has any nugget of truth.

Schopenhauer was very clear: ‘Reading is a mere surrogate for one’s own thinking’ and, for this reason, ‘erudition makes most people even more stupid and simple than they already are by nature’....Reading, he thinks, inserts ‘foreign and heterogeneous’ thoughts into our own, which never truly belong to us. Characteristically, Schopenhauer draws on a range of images to illustrate this point: reading is like ‘the seal to the wax on which it presses its imprint’; it ‘sticks to us like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a wax nose or at best one formed by rhinoplasty from another’s flesh’; the book-learner ‘resembles an automaton put together from foreign materials,’ while the independent thinker ‘resembles a living, begotten human being’, because ‘what is acquired through one’s own thinking resembles the natural limb’.

I think this is a typical error of the Romantics, who seem to worship the beastial state of humanity as more "natural" than our rational side (theme which I play with in The Moon Bunny & the Sun Lion, which is coming out in September). Why on Earth would written words that we absorb mentally be any more "foreign" than the the oxygen we breathe in or the food we eat?

As air and food is converted into our "self" through natural processes, so the ideas we learn from others become incorporated into our self-hood. The difference is that what part of the atmosphere we find useful is controlled by instinct, while what we accept or reject from literature is (or should be) controlled by reason and reflection.

Woods goes on to give a more balanced and positive view of reading, including good advice on how to apply reason and reflection to the material one absorbs.

However, let's stay with Schopenhauer's point just for a moment and ask if it is a danger that we simply absorb, like unthinking sponges, the themes and messages from the media we consume. Not only books, but television, social media, cinema, music and so forth... Obviously, the combined weight of all the media around us informs our values, opinions, and long term culture.

Some people react against this by trying to simply think or do the "opposite" of whatever they perceive the majority opinion is. If a movie is popular, they hate it; if a book is praised, they call it trash; if a value is widely held, they flaunt its violation. 

This is not really independent thinking, though, is it? It's closer to a toddler's tantrum.

I think that the best way to think about what you read is to write out what you think. 

I never could understand why teachers had us write book reports in school. I felt very silly regurgitating the plot of a book, and beyond that, I often felt flummoxed to add any intelligent opinion about it beyond, "I liked it," or "I didn't like it." Of course, I missed the point that being able to intelligently summarize a story is the first step to being able to gather together more sophisticated thoughts about it.

This is also why Reaction Videos have become so popular. A Reaction Video turns passive viewing into a conversation, as writing about a book turns a novel into a discussion.

(Even today, I don't find book reviews easy, although not necessarily for the same reasons. Now I'm more likely to overidentify with the author's hurt feelings if I say anything critical, which leads me to only want to review books that excited or inspired me. But this is a different issue. However, it is why I'll sometimes review movies I don't like instead of books I found fault with.)

I still think that it's important to read widely (not just deeply) in order to be exposed to many different points of view. However, it's also important to read deeply, and for theme, to be able to see into the heart of a book, to the underlying cosmos contained inside. The foundations of that cosmos may help us, as readers, to more clearly articulate the roots of our own souls--or may be quite at odds with our current modes of thinking. Challenges to our thinking may themselves deepen us in our values, or may shake us free of a long held belief.

So, no, I don't think that reading makes you nothing more than stamped wax. It does not make you stupider, but, as many studies have shown, increases your emotional intelligence. If you also learn to write about what you read, you sharpen your intellect on that of of the author. It isn't a zero-sum game. The writer doesn't conquer the mind of the reader; rather the reader uses the mind of the writer as a stepping stone into a larger perspective. A kind of shared mind, one that in no way reduces the individuality of either partner, results.

We are social primates, not orangutans. We can't live alone in the jungle, cut off from sharing ideas from others. We need art as much as we need bread and air.

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