Our higher values don't preclude base enjoyment

From Niall Ferguson: By the Book, in the New York Times.

Ferguson, like so many Oxford men, can be enormously erudite, intelligent, garnished with ready and sharp wit. Agree or disagree with them, they are fun to read, hear, or engage. You cannot help but feel sharper and improved.

Sometimes, though, the momentum of their wit carries them into territory where the wittiness of phrasing supersedes the substance of the observation.

For example:

If you could require the American president to read one book, what would it be? And the prime minister?

I agree with you that it would be wonderful if both Mr. Trump and Mrs. May read one book. I don’t much mind which one it is.

Please. That's just playing to the bleachers. It's a lazy pandering to the bien pensant who imagine themselves superior to those whom they simply despise.

And it reflects an academic hothouse attitude which I do not associate with Ferguson.

My native interests and capabilities incline me towards the temple of knowledge but my career has been entirely in the real world of commerce and volunteer organizations.

While I have great admiration for the deeply learned, I can vouch that the great majority of deeply accomplished people in other fields are not readers of any sort. I celebrate finding a C-level executive who is a reader (particularly a reader of substantive volumes) in part because they are relatively rare.

Ferguson's comment reflects a reading culture's disdain for the unread. It is an acceptable bigotry that does not wear well or accord with reality. Whether Trump, or May, or earlier, Bush, or Reagan, or Thatcher or any of a host of other accomplished individuals who were made fun of, usually inaccurately, for not reading, is beside the point. Intense reading is not deterministically related to great accomplishment. Comments such as these are crude bigotry worn casually and with pride.

But for all that pedantic chiding on my part, it doesn't preclude a certain enjoyment of the cutting repartee. My emphasis.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

The first book I ever abandoned was Captain Marryat’s “The Children of the New Forest,” which came highly recommended but bored me rigid. I also struggled with “Swallows and Amazons.” At the time, I felt quite guilty about these sins of omission. As I grew older, however, I became more cavalier and now treat books with the contempt they mostly deserve. To give an example of a book I found overrated, Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” was both conceptually unsound and tediously executed.

Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite or the most personally meaningful?

Volume one of “Kissinger” is the best thing I’ve done. Second prize goes to the first volume of “The House of Rothschild.” Both these books were constructed on a foundation of prodigious research. But I am also very fond of “Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power,” because it so infuriated a certain species of second-rate professor of post-colonial studies — though not so much that they actually read the book.

Our higher values don't preclude base enjoyment.