An arrogance too far

From The Dangers of Making Reading Spiritual by Noah Berlatsky.

Berlatsky is responding to an almost incomprehensibly mushy essay by Karen Swallow Prior in the Atlantic, where she argues, without evidence and without definitions, that:

It is "spiritual reading" -- not merely decoding -- that unleashes the power that good literature has to reach into our souls and, in so doing, draw and connect us to others. This is why the way we read can be even more important than what we read. In fact, reading good literature won't make a reader a better person any more than sitting in a church, synagogue or mosque will. But reading good books well just might.

[snip]

The power of "spiritual reading" is its ability to transcend the immediacy of the material, the moment, or even the moral choice at hand. This isn't the sort of phenomenon that lends itself to the quantifiable data Currie seeks, although Paul demonstrates is possible, to measure. Even so, such reading doesn't make us better so much as it makes us human.

Codswallop

I understand what Prior is getting at but this is gibberish. The problem is that people, including myself, who are convinced of the beneficial and potentially redeeming power of reading have no empirical ground on which to stand. There is a high correlation between enthusiastic reading and high IQ and good life outcomes but it is not clear whether there is simple correlation, covariance or causation. Prior's attempt to further narrow the parameters to just literary fiction reading is, in my mind, a rather embarrassing revelation to her actual argument which might be satirized as "I like reading literary fiction, I believe it makes me better, others ought to read literary fiction as well."

Without defining spiritual reading, without defining what it means to be human and how reading is relevant to being human, without linking empirically literary fiction reading to desirable life outcomes, without defining good literature, this is just a self-interested opinion masquerading as a serious argument.

Berlatsky's criticism of Prior's essay inflicts deep wounds on her argument without even being particularly comprehensive (there is much more to criticize than he tackles). His final paragraph gets at the meat of the issue.

You learn to be human and spiritual, not by reading, but by treating others as human—especially others who are not like you. Books can, perhaps, teach you about that. But to make books the measure of humanness is to restrict that measure to the brainy and the privileged. If books make us more human, then some of us are less human that others, which is the same as saying that all of us are less human.

There is in the book world, or at least in the public forums of the book world, an almost distasteful element of blindness to the intolerance, classism, and bigotry inherent in the position that you should read more and you should read better.

I advocate that people ought to read more solely on the grounds that I personally believe that it is beneficial and because I can see a correlation between enthusiastic readers and good outcomes (even if I cannot demonstrate that there is causation.) But that is as far as my argument can go - it is a faith-based matter. To hold the belief that you ought to be able to judge others on the basis of whether they read, and what they read, and how they read, is an arrogance too far.

I am sure that is not what Prior intends, but it is the logical inference of what she is arguing. So much for the tolerance and empathy that literary reading is supposed to cultivate. "Read the books I like, you Morlock."