Ideas Worth Expressing

Thanks to the Internet, the gatekeepers of content and what gets published are dead. Anyone can post a blog, tweet his view, or post a comment below an article and the whole world can see it. But that’s not always a good thing, says Alan Jacobs:
“What if your ideas are crap? What good does it do — for you or the world — if you are clever and efficient in communicating thoughts that are carelessly arrived at, or ill-formed and incompletely worked through, or utterly unimaginative repetitions of what people in your would-be peer group have already said?”

Reading a lot isn’t the solution. If you read stuff from a certain era only (say, present day), then CS Lewis warns that you are blinded to the “great mass of common assumptions” shared by most people in any age. Lewis’ solution?
“The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”
No, not because the classics are smarter:
“Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.”
Jacobs says reading opposing views is worth the effort:
“If you want to have thoughts worth expressing, you’re going to have to take the risk of being slowed down and even seriously altered. But if you do take this risk, you’ll learn a lot.”

Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out another problem with just reading a lot:
“In reading, the work of thinking is, for the greater part, done for us…our head is, however, really only the arena of some one else’s thoughts.”
And so, someone who only reads but never reflects or analyzes would have “have read themselves stupid”!

Calling someone “well read” doesn’t sound like a complement anymore, does it? It’s just another form of name-dropping!

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