Throughout Kanye West’s spectacular plummet final fall, my associates and I’d typically marvel on the newest outrageous factor he’d stated. And we’d ship round clips of what have been, in hindsight, terribly suspect feedback he’d beforehand made. One such instance was “I’m not a fan of books,” which Ye instructed an interviewer upon the publication of his personal ebook, Thank You and You’re Welcome. “I’m a proud non-reader of books,” he continued. That assertion strikes me as one of many extra disturbing issues he’s ever stated, as a result of, in contrast to the patently reprehensible anti-Semitic tirades that drew the world’s scorn, his anti-book stance is shared by another extremely influential figures. It’s disturbing as a result of it says one thing about not solely Ye’s character however the smugly solipsistic tenor of this cultural second.
We’ve by no means earlier than had entry to so many views, concepts, and knowledge. A lot of it’s fleetingly fascinating however in the end inconsequential—to not be confused with experience, not to mention knowledge. This a lot is broadly understood and mentioned. The benefit with which we will know issues and talk them to at least one one other, in addition to launder success in a single realm into pseudo-authority in numerous others, has mixed with a standard American tendency towards anti-intellectualism and celeb worship. Toss in a decades-long decline within the humanities, and we get our superficial tradition by which even the elite will brazenly disparage as pointless our important repositories for the perfect that has been thought.
If one particular person managed to outdo Ye in that season of high-end self-sabotage marking the tip of 2022, it was the erstwhile techno-wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried. In an ill-conceived profile from September, revealed on the Sequoia Capital web site, the 30-year-old SBF rails towards literature of any type, lecturing a journalist on why he would “by no means” learn a ebook. “I’m very skeptical of books,” he expands. “I don’t wish to say no ebook is ever price studying, however I really do imagine one thing fairly near that. I feel, if you happen to wrote a ebook, you fucked up, and it ought to have been a six-paragraph weblog publish.”
It’s a galling sentiment, each bit as ignorant and boastful as Ye’s however much more worrisome as a result of SBF shouldn’t be an entertainer whose debut album was known as The Faculty Dropout. He’s a supposedly critical younger man who was celebrated within the corridors of energy not solely as a monetary savant but additionally—via his extremely publicized philanthropy and conspicuous affiliation with the “efficient altruism” motion—as an ethical genius. The title of that profile: “Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Advanced—And Possibly You Ought to Too.”
There’s an expression in journalism: “Three is a development.” Sadly, I’ve a 3rd instance of a outstanding ebook skeptic. In a characteristic reconstructing the undoing of Sean McElwee, the 30-year-old founding father of Knowledge for Progress, New York Journal famous, as McElwee “would put it, books are dumb—they solely inform you what folks need you to know.” I confess, I don’t actually perceive what meaning, not to mention why McElwee thinks it’s profound. Shortly after assembly SBF—who spent some $40 million on Democratic causes in 2020 and pledged to offer a mind-boggling $1 billion earlier than 2024—McElwee, additionally an effective-altruism evangelist, would develop into one among his trusted advisers, “telling him how greatest to direct a river of money,” David Freedlander writes. “It was ‘cool as hell,’ McElwee instructed associates, to be advising one of many richest folks on this planet earlier than he turned 30.”
“Cool” is one strategy to describe these assured younger males’s fiscal and political interventions; abysmally ill-informed, maliciously incompetent, and morally bankrupt additionally come to thoughts. McElwee’s fame could be ruined after the midterms, principally for producing error-ridden polling knowledge and even allegedly pressuring at the very least one worker to interrupt campaign-finance regulation and take part in a straw-donor scheme (a federal crime that SBF has additionally been charged with). All of this occurred simply as SBF’s crypto rip-off was crashing, obliterating tens of billions of {dollars} of different peoples’ wealth within the course of.
It’s one factor in follow to not learn books, or to not learn them as a lot as one would possibly want. However it’s one thing else solely to despise the act in precept. Figuring out as somebody who categorically rejects books suggests a a lot bigger deficiency of character. As Ye as soon as riffed (prophetically) throughout a dwell efficiency, “I get my quotes from motion pictures as a result of I don’t learn, or from, like, go determine, actual life or one thing. Like, dwell actual life; speak to actual folks; get data; ask folks questions; and it was one thing about, ‘You both die a superhero otherwise you dwell to develop into the villain.’” As intelligent as that sounds, receiving all your data from the SBF excellent of six-paragraph weblog posts, or from the films and random conversations that Ye prefers, is as silly as figuring out as somebody who chooses to eat solely quick meals.
Many books shouldn’t have been revealed, and writing one is an excruciating course of stuffed with failure. However when a ebook succeeds, even partially, it represents a stage of focus and refinement—a mastery of topic and elegance strengthened via endurance and clarified in revision—that can not be equaled. Writing a ebook is an awfully disproportionate act: What may be consumed in a matter of hours takes years to deliver to fruition. That is its advantage. And the uncommon endurance a ebook nonetheless calls for of a reader—these treasured sluggish hours of deep focus—can also be a advantage. One would possibly fairly ask simply the place, in spite of everything, these males have been in such a rush to get to? One would possibly fairly joke that the reply is both jail or obscurity.
Late in Anna Karenina, in a interval of self-imposed social exile in Italy, Anna and her lover, Vronsky, are handled to a tirade on the damaging superficiality of the “free-thinking” younger males—proto-disrupters, if you’ll—who populate the period and have been steeped in “concepts of negation.”
“In former days the free-thinker was a person who had been introduced up in concepts of faith, regulation, and morality, and solely via battle and battle got here to free-thought,” Vronsky’s good friend Golenishchev observes. “However now there has sprung up a brand new kind of born free-thinkers who develop up with out even having heard of ideas of morality or of faith, of the existence of authorities.” The issue then, as Tolstoy presents it, was that such an formidable younger man would strive, “as he’s no idiot, to teach himself,” and so would flip to “the magazines” as an alternative of “to the classics and theologians and tragedians and historians and philosophers, and, , all of the mental work that got here in his approach.”
A Twitter follower directed me again to this passage after I complained on that social community in regards to the outlandish contempt our personal period’s brashest and most lavishly rewarded younger males—they all the time appear to be males—goal at typical types of studying. And although, in contrast to in Tolstoy’s time, these males may declare that you just “fucked up” if you happen to trouble to learn even magazines, they share with earlier freethinkers a prideful refusal to imagine that the previous has one thing to supply them. Just like the freethinkers that provoke Golenishchev’s scorn, these tech-obsessed autodidacts (even Ye fell sufferer to the cult of “engineering” our approach via each human quandary) now embed themselves in a worldview by which “the previous creeds don’t even furnish matter for dialogue,” as Golenishchev places it.
Though the three disgraced males I’ve been describing listed below are extremes, I don’t suppose I’m exaggerating once I say that we have now grown wildly estranged from real knowledge or the humility with which erudition tempers facile notions of invincibility. I don’t suppose it’s a coincidence that two of those self-satisfied nonreaders are adherents of efficient altruism, both—when taken to the intense an absurdly calculating mental onanism that may’t survive contact with a single good novel.
Once I was in my 20s and writing my first ebook—I do know, I actually fucked up there—I got here throughout a quote I can not discover the supply of that stated, primarily, “You would fill a ebook with all I do know, however with all I don’t know, you possibly can fill a library.” It’s a useful visualization, maybe probably the most primary and pragmatic justification for deep studying. And although correlation shouldn’t be causation, I submit that we’d save ourselves an unlimited quantity of hassle sooner or later if we’d comply with a easy litmus check: Instantly disregard anybody within the enterprise of promoting a imaginative and prescient who proudly proclaims they hate studying.
