Our problem as readers

You can read philosophy as a conversation stretched out across centuries. Some guy in ancient Greece wondered out loud about what exists and how it does, what we know and how we know it, what is a good life and how to live one, and he mulled it over and he wrote down some thoughts, and then years, or eras, later some other guy picks up and responds, agreeing, disagreeing or neither, just adding more texture or depth, building out the previous arguments or re-framing the problems altogether.

I see books through that same conversational lens. I imagine the page as an opening; an opening in time and space from which an author reaches out to a reader and thus begins a dialogue between the two. There’s a give and take that happens, a mutual exchange where each side brings to the table its own quirks and foibles that not only colour and bias, but also enrich, the interaction.

The book, in other words, is not an end in itself but a mere beginning; its truest potential and most personal significance only fully realized in the meeting of minds that occurs between author and reader. It’s a tangible apparition that allows us to converse with the dead and the living; it’s an invitation that says “Hey, I’ve been thinking a lot about this and here’s what I’ve discovered. What do you make of it?”

More often than not, though, we treat books as purveyors of expertise or containers for the Truth. We call authors — the bestselling ones, that is— gurus and authorities and thought leaders. We want them to show us the incontrovertible evidence (especially if it jives with our own views); we want the neat conclusion, the clever hack, the shortcut to success, the formula that we can follow to become superhuman or, at the very least, approximate a hybrid between Steve Jobs, Ryan Gosling and Yoda.

And so we miss out the deeper value of books. In our quest for the Holy Grail of money, happiness, productivity or a six pack, we grasp for the answers and brush aside the questions. We become starstruck adulators and blind followers when we could be and perhaps should be curious experimenters and critical thinkers.

I think this is one reason why Seth Godin avoids self-disclosure, why he acts cagey around compliments and favours questions over tactics. He said in one interview that it doesn’t matter what social media platform you use or what day of the week you post to optimize page views; what matters is what do you care enough to say?

In that same interview, Seth refused to share his own writing process because for him this, too, is not the point; what’s important is not the particular method but the having of a method.

In one of his illuminating celebrity profiles, journalist and author Oliver Burkeman talks about Malcolm Gladwell’s deliberate pose as “intellectual provocateur”.

The point isn’t necessarily to accept his conclusions, but to be jolted (…) into seeing the whole world afresh.

He further elaborates:

Gladwell calls his articles and books “conversation starters”, and that’s not false modesty; ultimately, perhaps that’s all that even the best nonfiction writing can ever honestly aspire to be.

If this is the case, then as readers we need an attitude change. To engage in a conversation — with the author, with one another, with ourselves — we need to embrace and even welcome disagreement. It’s tempting to attack the credibility of a writer whose views clash with our own, to poke holes in arguments we don’t agree with and negate the message of the entire work.

But conflict may be precisely that which we don’t want but need. Conflict in our personal lives is not just what tears apart relationships; it’s also what probes their depths. It’s how they expand and mature, too. Similarly, the intellectual clash that a book can provoke forces us to see our blind spots, surfaces our unconscious biases, grows our empathy and makes us sharper thinkers.

Besides being comfortable with disagreement, we also need to shed the glorification of our authors and see them more like peers. By that I don’t mean diminishing their accomplishments or intelligence. I mean accepting that, as Tim Kreider says in his fascinating essay The Power of ‘I Don’t Know’:

Every piece of writing includes the tacit caveat: Or I may be wrong.

Kreider also confides:

I don’t always agree with me; I certainly don’t expect everyone else to.

He says that he dreads it when the media presents him as an expert on some topic and he’d much rather swap that label for another one, which he feels is closer to what he really is, and what all writers are: PERSON IN WORLD.

I like that. It gets us back to a kind of symbiotic relationship between author and reader, a dance of two human beings wondering out loud, trying on different lenses to see things through, sharing discoveries, challenging each other, grappling together, entwined for a moment in a shared quest for the truth.