Reading, Learning, and Compassion
My current strategy for selecting books to read reflects my hope to learn better how to live in these troubled times by reading works by and about people who lived in troubled times before now, focusing on those who challenged the power and authority of oppressors. One of the people on that list — the person on whose work and life I’m focusing at the moment — is Hannah Arendt. Interestingly, my reading of Arendt helps me to see value in my current strategy, even as she reminds me that I can and should cast the reading net more broadly. Consider this from Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography:
[Arendt] addressed the “crisis of values” in America by speaking of the proper way to read and to teach the great works of Western literature and philosophy. “To look at the past in order to find analogies by which to solve our present problems is, in my opinion, a mythological error. If you cannot read these great books with love and pure motives, just because you are fond of the life of the spirit — of the life of man — it won’t do you any good and it won’t do the students any good” (p. 449).
Reflecting on Arendt’s words helped me to see that I shouldn’t be reading these books as if they’re strategy manuals or how-to books. Rather, I should read them to get some sense of how insightful and thinking people – people in some ways like me but in others very different from me, who lived in a world in some ways like mine but in others very different from mine – understood and responded to the world that they encountered.
I don’t think that Arendt’s observation implies that I shouldn’t be reading the books that I’m reading. But she’s pushing me to continue reading other sorts of books as well. Moreover, she’s suggesting that I won’t find in my reading – whether by analogy or by some other method — particular and specific strategies for responding to the problems of the day. What I’ll find there — what I hope to find there — is some understanding of how these people lived their lives in good times and bad.
I see the same counsel in other parts of my reading. In his book Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom, Ariel Burger says that he asked Wiesel a question when the two of them met for the last time, shortly before Wiesel died.
“How do you teach faith and ethical awareness?”
“I tried to teach all of my students love of learning — learn, learn, learn. It is only through learning that we develop ethical awareness.”
After surviving his time in Auschwitz, Wiesel was shocked to learn that many of the leaders and others in the Nazi government had earned advanced degrees from prestigious universities. He knew then that knowledge does not always lead to ethical action. But, he said, learning from and about the other opens up the possibility for empathy. And such empathy become more likely, the more we expand the range of our learning.
Moreover, he insisted that we can find the other from whom we learn not only in our day-to-day encounters but also by reading books — lots and lots of books. Similarly, Arendt thought that reading great literature and philosophy opens up not only new ways of seeing the world but also alternative ways of living in the world. I think that a central element in what Arendt calls “the life of the spirit” is responding to Wiesel’s imperative to “learn, learn, learn.”
So I’ll continue to read writers like Arendt, Wiesel, and other writers and activists who did so much to counter oppression in their time. I’ll also continue to read novelists like Solvej Balle and Madeleine Thien who open up new ways of understanding not only the world and my relationship to it but also the different worlds of other people. But I’ll continue to read philosophical and more contemplative texts as well, making sure to include writings of those who stand outside the so-called canon of the Great White Dead Males™.