Reading Good Books

How many books have you read in the last twelve months?

By “books” I am primarily thinking of serious books, whether serious non-fiction or fiction on a literary level.  There is nothing wrong with reading for pure entertainment (although I rarely do any more!).  But my focus is on books that teach us, make us think.  Good literature can certainly do this, but good non-fiction is designed to inform us and make us think.

As I wrote in my last post, one of the greatest challenges we all face in this life is the sheer  extent of our own  ignorance.  We may be very knowledgeable about our chosen field – engineering, statistics, music, physics, medicine, automotive mechanics, computer design, or whatever.  But that type of highly specialized knowledge and technical expertise in a single field can actually make us more provincial, not more broadminded.  No matter how much we may know about designing buildings and bridges, how much can this teach us about understanding life in general?  How much does it make one wiser? 

Wisdom, for me, is the effective application of knowledge to fundamental problems of real life.  It is effectively the same as “good judgment.”  It is not merely the same as having common sense.  To grow in wisdom requires growth in understanding, and understanding requires knowledge.  Wisdom is certainly not the same as knowledge, because it is quite possible to be knowledgeable about many things and lack wisdom.  Yet one cannot truly be wise without knowledge. Gaining knowledge and understanding are important prerequisites to the acquisition of wisdom. 

My religion teaches about the sacredness of such things.  I won’t go into any theological analysis here, but let me just recite a few verses from the Doctrine and Covenants.

The Glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth. (93:36)

It is impossible for a man to be saved in ignorance. (131:6)

It is my will that you should . . . obtain a knowledge of history, and of countries, and of kingdoms, of laws of God and man. (93:53)

Study and learn, and become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues, and people. (90:15)

Teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith. (88:118)

Teach ye diligently and my grace shall attend you, that you may be instructed more perfectly in theory, in principle, in doctrine, in the law of the gospel, in all things that pertain unto the kingdom of God, that are expedient for you to understand; of things both in the heaven and in the earth, and under the earth, things which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass; things which are at home, things which are abroad; the wars and the perplexities of the nations, and the judgments which are on the land; and a knowledge also of countries and of kingdoms.

The most remarkable thing for me about these verses is that they clearly teach the importance not only of learning spiritual truths, but also of learning things like languages, history, politics, law, geology, etc.  The most remarkable line, I think, is to “become acquainted with all good books”!  What a challenge!  The number of worthwhile books is huge – no one can literally become acquainted with all of them in this life, although  we can certainly make a serious attempt at it.

Indulging your patience, let me make the (perhaps obvious) argument of why serious reading is such an important activity.  It goes back, once again, to our ignorance.  So much of the time we make (important) decisions based on highly faulty – or at least highly limited – information.  As I’ve acknowledged before, we can never acquire all the necessary information to make truly informed decisions.  We must rely, in the final analysis, on our intuition.  But it should be an informed intuition, and the only way to become informed is, well, to read books. 

What!?  you gasp.  What a ridiculous statement!  One can become informed by all sorts of means apart from books.  There are good magazines, newspapers, websites.  There are personal experts that can be directly consulted.  All of this is true, yes -  but books are still our best source for expert, thorough, in-depth understanding of most subjects.

Why my emphasis on books?  Books are simply the best resource we have when it comes to understanding subjects in sufficient depth, in great part because of the effort involved in getting a book published.  It takes many months – or more likely many years – to write a book, and getting a manuscript approved for publication is not easy.  In the huge majority of cases an author must have established at least a degree of expertise in the subject matter, and there is a complex editorial process before a manuscript sees the light of day.  This process contrasts dramatically with (to take a purely random example!) publishing a blog.  None of this process guarantees that everything you read in a book is necessarily true, let alone free from bias.  But it does provide a reasonable degree of assurance that the author basically knows what he or she is talking about.

To be quite clear – not all books are worthwhile; indeed, some are chock full of nonsense and absurdities.  But if it’s at all a serious book, one has at least some assurance that the author made a considerable effort to acquire and distil a certain amount of knowledge and has made considerable effort to get it into the light of day.  Beyond that, the reader must summon up her own knowledge, understanding and wisdom to decide whether the book is worth her time or not – indeed, whether it is even worth finishing.

What I am really arguing, of course, is the importance of education.  And not just random education, but a sustained, lifelong effort to acquire knowledge.  And my main motive for arguing this is not merely because education is self-rewarding, although it is.  I argue instead for the welfare our nation.

It is well known that the Founding Fathers greatly favored education as a mainstay of freedom and good government.  Benjamin Franklin, when asked after the Constitutional Convention what sort of government the delegates had created, famously replied, “A republic – if you can keep it.”

Consider in addition the following quotations:

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.  This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power

(Thomas Jefferson)

"If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved.  This will be their great security.” (Samuel Adams)

"Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people.  They throw that light over the public mind whcih is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty." (James Madison

"I consider knowledge to be the soul of a republic, and as the weak and the wicked are generally in alliance, as much care should be taken to diminish the number of the former as of the latter.  Education is the way to do this, and nothing should be left undone to afford all ranks of people the means of obtaining a proper degree of it at a cheap and easy rate."  (John Jay)

"Freedom can exist only in the society of knowledge.  Without learning, men are incapable of knowing their rights, and where learning is confined to a few people, liberty can be neither equal nor universal."  (Benjamin Rush)

Note especially the following declaration by Alexander Hamilton:

"Men give me credit for some genius.  All the genius I have lies in this, when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly.  Day and night it is before me.  My mind becomes pervaded with it.  Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought."

They were fully aware of how self-awareness of one’s own ignorance could drive the passion for self-education (i.e., reading books!)

John Adams:

"I read my eyes out and can't read half enough either.  The more one reads the more one sees we have to read."

Jefferson:

"The wise know their weakness too well to assume infallibility; and he who knows most, knows best how little he knows.

We need to read a lot and read widely in order to escape our own narrowmindedness and ignorance.  Many of our assumptions are false, or perhaps merely misleading, and will lead us astray in our reasoning.  As I discussed last time, it is entirely plausible to conclude that all swans are white . . . because the overwhelming majority of swans in the world are white!   But nonetheless, such a conclusion is false, and it only requires a small effort on our part for us to realize our error.

Not all problems resulting from ignorance are that easily solved.  But the more knowledge we have, the easier it becomes to acquire new knowledge, and to learn to judge more quickly, for example, whether the opinion piece we just read on the internet really makes sense or is a boatload of nonsense.

I have argued before that our ignorance should lead us to be modest. It should also make us curious, indeed, more than curious.  It should cause us to crave knowledge.  As I age (gracefully, I hope), I am increasingly aware of truly how little I know in comparison with the amount of knowledge “out there,” as well as how little time remains to me in this life to try to remedy my ignorance. Accordingly, I increasingly crave knowledge and understanding and consciously hoard my free time available for reading. 

Just ask yourself – how would my life be different if I read one good book a month?

(P.S. A  suggestion:  Perhaps your immediate reaction is, Great idea!  But what do I read?  There are tons of books out there.  Where should I start?  The best answer to that question is to start with what ever your own curiosity prompts you to read.  Curiosity is an essential element of any program of study.  But I do have one suggestion:   Why not start reading a series of biographies of the American Presidents (or other statesmen if you are not American)?  That is a goal of mine, though I am far from accomplishing it, and I have many other goals as well, and other priorities.  But it seems to me that studying the lives of past presidents (virtues, warts, and all!) will help us acquire a degree of wisdom in general, but especially regarding qualities of leadership, which should help us decide wisely how to vote in future elections.)

How Ignorant Are We?

How much do we know? How much knowledge about the world is it possible to acquire? A while back I wrote about Socrates and the importance of intellectual humility. He recognized not (as is often claimed) that he knew nothing, but simply that human beings are not in a position to know very much over all, particularly in the area of true wisdom. As a result, we should not put on airs and suppose that we know more than we actually do.

It should be the most obvious truth that we are all highly ignorant. But ignorance is not a very comfortable situation to be in. So what do we typically do to make up for our lack of knowledge? We extrapolate. Extrapolation is essentially an attempt to extend our knowledge by inference. We infer something based on what we already know to be the case. Oxforddictionaries.com defines it as "the action of estimating or concluding something by assuming that existing trends will continue to a current method will remain applicable." In the final analysis, then, when we extrapolate we are engaged in making intelligent or informed guesses or speculation.  There is of course absolutely nothing wrong with this practice, so long as we remain aware of what we are doing. The key to realizing what extrapolation means is the word “assuming.” We assume that existing trends will continue. Is this valid?  I’m no mathematician or statistician, but this is certainly a common enough practice, e.g.:  “The population of dodo birds in this area has grown by 5% every year since 1950. Therefore, if this trend continues, we can anticipate that by 2030 the number of dodos will have increased to . . .

How do we use this practice in normal life? Let's say we're in the market for a new laptop.  We say to ourselves, the last two laptops I purchased were Brand X and were very good, therefore I will buy another Brand X laptop on the assumption that it too will be of good quality. But what we may be ignoring, of course, is that management of Brand X, Inc. has determined to cut costs to increase their profits and increase their dividend to investors. As a result, the quality of their products has plummeted. If we buy another brand X, we are likely to be disappointed.

Think of the standard form of the deductive syllogism:

All swans are white.
Your pet bird is a swan.

Therefore, your pet bird is white.

Deductive reasoning (if done properly) means that your conclusion will be correct, provided that your two premises are correct.  If we live in Europe or the United States, we may be well acquainted with the swan populations in those countries and quite confident in our knowledge about swans.  And because we know with absolute certainty that all swans that we have ever seen were white, we feel confident in extrapolating, based on our expert (we think) knowledge, and declare with great confidence that all swans are white.  That is, until we take a trip to Australia and discover, much to our horror, that our assumption was quite wrong - in fact, black swans not only exist but are quite common there.

A few years ago, Nassim Taleb wrote a best seller entitled The Black Swan, in which he argued that extreme and unexpected events do nevertheless happen, and more commonly than we normally think.  Yet we are typically blind to them – we don’t foresee them and don’t prepare for them - especially those who are experts in their field.  Taleb points out that experts often have developed theories about their field of expertise which they have considerable confidence in, based on their (presumably extensive) knowledge acquired to date.  Yet once we develop and attach ourselves to  a theory, it becomes very difficult to part with it, even in the face of contradictory evidence. 

A simple example of this comes from the experience of the 2008 financial crisis.  (Taleb’s book was written in part to try to explain how such an unexpected event happened, but the following example is mine.)

As you will recall, one of the major causes of the crisis was the crash in real estate values. 

It was the accepted wisdom of the time that real estate prices would never decline, except in limited areas due to local circumstances.  This assumption was based on the fact that, generally, real estate had never declined significantly since the Great Depression.  It was also based on the informed intuition that, since the supply of land is limited while the population continues to grow, prices naturally face upward pressure.  This assumption was supported by statements from experts like Alan Greenspan, who had been chairman of the Federal Reserve almost forever, and a highly respected economic thinker.  David Lereah, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, even published a book entitled Why the Real Estate Boom Will Not Bust – And How You Can Profit from It (2007).  It became common practice in the mid-aughts to “flip” houses, particularly in the booming real estate markets of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and elsewhere.  This practice, of course, was based on the assumption that one could purchase a house, make a few improvements, and then sell it, making a killing based on the rapidly rising market. . . .  That is, until prices started to decline, leaving countless homeowners and investors holding mortgages that were worth more than the underlying properties.

As Taleb points out, a turkey may live for a thousand days in the firm conviction – supported by copious evidence – that the purpose of life is for him to be generously fed by humans . . . only to discover on the day before Thanksgiving that he was grossly mistaken. 

Of course, we all  make judgments on a daily basis based on our assumptions and presuppositions rather than on firm knowledge. We do this partly because we are lazy, and partly because we have no real choice. There is far, far too much information for any one person to ever hope to acquire, so we have to make our decisions based on the limited knowledge we possess.

To get a sense of just how vast is our ignorance is, consider the following quotation from Timothy Ferris (Coming of Age in the Milky Way, p. 383) regarding the amount of “stuff” in the universe:

We might eventually obtain some sort of bedrock understanding of cosmic structure, but we will never understand the universe in detail; it is just too big and varied for that.  If we possessed an atlas of our galaxy that devoted but a single page to each star system in the Milky Way (so that the sun and all its planets were crammed in one page), that atlas would run to more than ten million volumes of ten thousand pages each.  It would take a library the size of Harvard’s to house the atlas, and merely to flip through it, at the rate of a page per second, would require over ten thousand years. Add the details of planetary cartography, potential extraterrestrial biology, the subtleties of the scientific principles involved, and the historical dimensions of change, and it becomes clear that we are never going to learn more than a tiny fraction of the story of our galaxy alone – and there are a hundred billion more galaxies.  As the physician Lewis Thomas writes, “The greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance.”

What should we conclude from this? We could of course decide that since the prospect of becoming truly knowledgeable is hopeless from the get-go, we might as well just give up and never start. We could stay in our bedrooms and make as few decisions as possible, to avoid making any major mistakes. That of course would be the wrong conclusion. A better approach is simply to say that we must remain aware of how little we know, and develop a habit of intellectual humility – recognizing that we ourselves, as well as everyone else out there, including scientists and experts of all kinds, can also be completely wrong. Not that we should dismiss their conclusions out of hand, but simply that we should all keep our minds wide open for all sorts of unexpected and unanticipated possibilities. Just not so wide open that our brains fall out.