Is It “Morally Bankrupt” to Never Read Books?

Also: A history of the pipe organ, the end of the car, and more.

Gerard ter Borch, The Reading Lesson (1642). Image via Wikimedia Commons.

In The Atlantic, Thomas Chatterton Williams writes that “one of the more disturbing things” Kanye West has ever said is: “I am not a fan of books . . . I am a proud non-reader of books.” Williams continues: “Ye’s patently reprehensible anti-Semitic tirades rightly drew the world’s scorn. But his anti-book stance is disturbing because it says something about not only Ye’s character but the smugly solipsistic tenor of this cultural moment.”

Williams is one of the more interesting and level-headed cultural commentators writing today, but is this really “one of the more disturbing things” that West—the perpetual provocateur—has said?

Williams goes on to discuss two other proud non-readers— Sam Bankman-Fried and Sean McElwee, “the 30-year-old founder of Data for Progress.” Both say some silly things. Bankman-Fried told an interviewer late last year that “I’m very skeptical of books . . . I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.” McElwee told the New York Magazine that “books are dumb.”

Like West’s remarks, these seem mostly intended to provoke. Williams, however, goes DEFCON 1:

“Cool” is one way to describe these confident young men’s fiscal and political interventions; abysmally ill-informed, maliciously incompetent, and morally bankrupt also come to mind . . . It is one thing in practice not to read books, or not to read them as much as one might wish. But it is something else entirely to despise the act in principle. Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character . . . Writing a book is an extraordinarily disproportionate act: What can be consumed in a matter of hours takes years to bring to fruition. That is its virtue. And the rare patience a book still demands of a reader—those precious slow hours of deep focus—is also a virtue. One might reasonably ask just where, after all, these men have been in such a rush to get to? One might reasonably joke that the answer is either jail or obscurity.

Listen, lots of people never read books. The vast majority of people who have lived on this planet have never read at all. This isn’t a virtue, and Williams is right to point out that despising reading isn’t a virtue either. But I don’t buy the idea, as Williams suggests above, that reading or writing a book is inherently virtuous.

In fact, I suspect that West and people like Sean McElwee are reacting against the constant over-hyping of the virtues of reading one encounters in the national press (on the left and the right) and in our schools.