Have you realised that the information age, with the huge amount of reading material, everything in English or translated to English, and vastly increased number of (sub-)media for books alone (physical, magazine, tablet, phone, e-reader, website, blog etc.), has destroyed the idea of being "well read"?
I think this for two reasons. First is the huge volume of stuff. You could read all day and never even read 1 % of all that "valuable" stuff. When it was 1600 and you could have read everything during your 3 years of formal education (more than 99 % of people) you could immediately join the intellectuals club. Now that's not true and it's demoralising.
The second reason is the killer. The idea of some sort of central planning bureau setting the list of required books is seen as farcical. We truly live in a much more multipolar world. Back in 1100 the Church told you to read the Greeks and the Bible and you are suddenly intelligent and well informed. There were no universities or companies or groups to tell you otherwise. These days, the huge increase in education means that everyone has an opinion and the arbitrariness of the "canon" has been exposed even to the most soody of pseudo intellectuals. Not only due to the multipolarisation within literature, but also the multipolarisation among activities. Who would claim that some Fields Medallist winning mathematician is an idiot because he hasn't read the Bible? It would take a high level of soodiness. But it would have been easy 1000 years ago.
Ultimately all this "well read" stuff was just a way for groups of people to signal social status / intellectualism or deriving other benefits by grouping their claimed interests together. We see it today when the academia-media-publishing industrial complex tells you that you have to read books or you're stupid. But this has been taken to a farcical new level now that writers like Tao Lin / Mira Gonzalez exist. It's also clear in other activities.
John Peterson
Democratization of opinion and industrialization were both mistakes. We all knew this. What took you so long?
Matthew Johnson
Disgusting idiot
Adrian Gomez
...
Cooper Gray
Repugnant philistine
Anthony Moore
So what do you suggest?
Anthony Wood
I don't think the amount of 'valuable stuff' has increased significantly. There is just a huge increase of trash, fueled by social media and blogging.
Mason Sanchez
Yep. Bring back the warrior caste, I wanna venerate them lol
Jason Anderson
>has destroyed the idea of being "well read"? There are well read people in our society, most people aren't. What you're hoping for is a man that knows everything in every field, but that was already unattainable centuries ago.
>I think this for two reasons. First is the huge volume of stuff. You could read all day and never even read 1 % of all that "valuable" stuff. When it was 1600 and you could have read everything during your 3 years of formal education (more than 99 % of people) you could immediately join the intellectuals club. Now that's not true and it's demoralising.
Literally not true, and even if it was just reading it would have been considered fucking worthless in 1600. Do you even realize to what extent those people were studying and memorizing Aristotle?
>The idea of some sort of central planning bureau setting the list of required books is seen as farcical. Absolutely false, most academical syllabus picks their required readings from the same bucket of books. To this day to have any sort of credibility in your field you are required to have read and studied certain works extensively.
>Back in 1100 the Church told you to read the Greeks and the Bible and you are suddenly intelligent and well informed. That's society's opinion, not a statement on wether they were really intelligent and well informed. Were those people well read and informed for the standards of even our undergrads? Would you really want to regret to that state? And in which fields?
>These days, the huge increase in education means that everyone has an opinion and the arbitrariness of the "canon" has been exposed even to the most soody of pseudo intellectuals. Do you really think that it is hard to argue on why Dante's Divina Commedia is better than Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban? Only someone who knows absolutely nothing about the craft would see no problem about it. Aesthetic relativism is way less common than you might think, and it works in a different way than you might think. Think about it in this way: there is no more a rank between the platonic ideas behind the pieces of art themselves, which is to say, saying that, for example, portraits are inherently inferior to landscapes. This does not mean that one can say nothing about the specific landscapes and portraits. To put in a clear context: saying that abstract paintings are inherently inferior is not an accepted statement in the academia, but to say that there are bad abstract paintings, or to say that the medium limits the possibility of creation of good art: that is perfectly accepted. It's a less arbitrary system, but still strict enough to be meaningful.
>We see it today when the academia-media-publishing industrial complex tells you that you have to read books or you're stupid. Aren't they right? Talking to uneducated people will show you how much is rare for someone to have at least on opinion on ethics. Books make sure that you'll get to at least that point.
James Rogers
I believe it was Solzhenitsyn who said (paraphrasing) "I left a country where you could not speak, to come to a country where you can say anything, but it does not matter". Looking for source
I tell my daughter that there are two types of people. Those who read and those who dont, and you will immediately know who is who. Furthermore, OPs argument about the canon is irrelevant if you are reading well cited non-fiction.
