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.”
“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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