Do the reading

By committing to reading something before you talk about it, you will set yourself apart.

Bacchus and Ariadne

As I worked on a current research project, I found myself not only reading a primary source – Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism – but also reading many books briefly giving the gist of that source. Without looking at my notes, I would guess I’ve read six summaries of Weber in six different books.

I am no Weber scholar, and my reading of The Protestant Ethic was not particularly deep; I was reading it to get something particular from it, and I haven’t consulted much of the secondary literature. But I can confidently say that the vast majority of the popular summaries of The Protestant Ethic are wrong. They are not only oversimplified; they peddle falsehoods that would reveal themselves easily if the text were consulted.

These books were not academic works; in fact, they were mostly written for wide audiences. This means that they don’t go through peer review; it also means that their misreadings of Weber won’t be contained to small bands within academia; they are telling the public at large false things about a foundational sociology text.

I cannot prove this, but I suspect that the explanation for this is simple: these people didn’t read Weber. They read summaries of Weber and then wrote their own. They didn’t do the reading.

I fear that this is very common among writers, even among scholars. They see everyone cite a book when talking about a topic, even if they don’t say much about it, so these writers and scholars decide that they will cite that book, too. Sometimes, they get a bit over their skis and decide to write a little summary, and so they model it on summaries written by others. It is mostly harmless, they think to themselves.

I am fond of Frankfurt’s term ‘bullshit,’ that kind of speech that is not a lie but is still detached from the truth. Bullshit is often thought to be mostly harmless, too, but it is not. Peddling bullshit trains us to be unconcerned with the truth; it makes us worse writers, thinkers, friends, and human beings.

There is a bright side to all of this, though it isn’t much of a consolation. If you are willing to commit to doing the reading – to actually read the sources you cite, reference, discuss, etc. – then you will be doing better than the vast majority of people. It really is that simple! By committing to reading something before you talk about it, you will set yourself apart.

Terracotta kylix

My university required that every student take two composition courses, one as a freshman and one as a junior. Freshman comp, as we all called it, could be skipped if you had test scores and grades that proved you were minimally literate; junior comp was mandatory, even for honors students.

Many departments taught their own version of the course, focusing on research methods for their particular discipline. The philosophy department didn’t, however, and so I wound up taking a research methods and composition course with English students.

It was one of the best classes I took in my college career. I learned more about prose style and the structure of a good piece of writing that semester than I had all through college. Once I grasped what an appositive was, I felt unstoppable. I was a writer, the next Nabokov.

I decided then that I would focus on improving the quality of my writing. I trucked my way to office hours, sat down in front of the Spenser scholar who was teaching the class, and asked him how I could become a better writer.

“How much do you read?” he asked.