Reading the Other
C. S. Lewis’s introduction to a modern translation of St. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation offers an apologia for reading old books. “Every age has its own outlook,” each with peculiar insights into truth and unconscious errors. In every age Lewis found men disputing with rivals “as though they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united … with each other and against earlier and later ages by a great mass of common assumptions.” Each age finds fault with the errors of preceding ones. And errors they may truly be. Lewis calls the reading of old books “the only palliative” to our temporal myopia, the only means to “keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.” This is not just conservative nostalgia: “the books of the future would be just as good a corrective … unfortunately we cannot get at them.”
To Lewis, then, the power of great books derives chiefly from the cultural otherness between author and reader. This is not only a corrective. When we find shared ideas in the works of authors with whom we have little else in common—a thought we imagined original, or a deep yearning of our private heart—this unity of human experience stands out in starker relief against the backdrop of our difference. This observation may seem a commonplace; hopefully it does. But on college campuses, among the commentariat, and elsewhere, increasingly it is rejected.
In academia, objections to Lewis’s claim would reflect the influence of “standpoint theory,” a sub-strand of third-wave feminist thought. The basic premise is simple and uncontroversial: that personal knowledge derives substantially from experience and is colored by perspective. In other words, “knowledge” of many important questions may vary between people who experience similar or identical situations differently. A second premise follows, that such experience is often social: i.e., groups of people may experience situations differently. Again, this at least seems intuitive enough. Why else is humor so notoriously resistant to translation, or the same statement more insulting to hearers of one nationality than another? But standpoint theory does more than passively observe that cultural experience produces differing perspectives. It positively asserts a hierarchy of value in which “marginalized groups” have qualitatively more valuable knowledge of certain questions—those relating to their own feelings of alienation—than do others. The concept is transposed from Marxist language of class consciousness. Such privileged knowledge does not come to group members automatically, it derives from shared struggle against the dominant oppressor culture.
As Yascha Mounk has written recently in The Identity Trap, “in its more modest versions, standpoint theory reminds us… [that] it is easy for the comparatively privileged to remain blind to the challenges faced by those less fortunate.” For decades this concern has motivated reform efforts for grade school and college curricula to include works from more “diverse” authors from “historically marginalized groups”. In many instances such reforms are wise and constructive, and their effects salubrious. Every American, for instance, should read Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ now a standard text in high school curricula. It is a masterful statement of fundamental liberal principles. And, while it doubtless resonates in particular ways to many African American readers, King’s letter belongs in some sense to all Americans because the Civil Rights movement is not just Black history, it is American history. Unfortunately, though, during the past decade standpoint theory has been popularized in an extreme form that repudiates some of the Civil Rights movement’s noblest commitments. Its contemporary political application takes the “intuitive insight” that privilege can obscure human understanding, stretching it to a dogmatic taxonomy of social knowledge with implicitly impassible categorical boundaries. This poses several obvious problems. Firstly, who decides which individuals do or do not authentically represent the labelled group? We may speak meaningfully of collective memory, but in the most literal sense only individuals experience events—groups are abstract aggregations with uncertain boundaries and many exceptions. Further, the assertion that all those sorted into groups labelled privileged must uncritically accept the policy proscriptions of marginalized groups’ designated political leaders will at best provide what Mounk calls “a thin model of solidarity,” and may prove destructively fractious to multicultural democracies.
In campus “curriculum wars,” extreme forms of standpoint theory are all-but unchallenged orthodoxy in much of American academia. This at least implies that requiring minority students to read “dead white men” is oppressive per se. Such thinking is tragically flawed. It disregards the power both of great authors in all times and places to find universal truth in local instantiations of human experience, and it woefully underestimates the capacity of other human souls to grasp that truth. Innumerable examples of might be given to illustrate this point, but three will suffice.
Firstly, Frederick Douglass, who proclaimed the written word a power greater than slavery. When the young bondsman’s master found his wife teaching Douglass to read, he admonished her to desist, warning that literacy “would forever unfit him to be a slave.” “These words sank deep into my heart,” Douglass later wrote. “From that moment I understood my pathway… to freedom.” Douglass determinedly set himself to learn, exchanging spare bread from the household pantry for reading lessons from Baltimore’s literate white street urchins. Later, Douglass came into possession of a volume of orations that included a speech of Richard Brinsley Sheridan in support of Catholic emancipation in Ireland. Douglass’s heart stirred at words that “gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul … enabling me utter my thoughts and meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery.” These words awakened and freed a soul within a body still bound in slavery. From this moment Douglass determined to escape. His resolve endured through unspeakable trials, thanks in part to the half-century old words of an Anglo-Irish Whig in Britain’s House of Commons.
Eight decades later, Richard Wright similarly yearned for emancipation of the mind and soul amid the poverty and ignorance of legal apartheid in the ‘Jim Crow’ South. One morning he read an editorial in the segregationist Commercial Appeal denouncing H. L. Mencken. This piqued Wright’s interest: “The only people I had ever heard denounced in the South were Negroes, and this man was not a Negro.” Knowing nothing else about Mencken, Wright “felt a vague sympathy for him” and resolved to read his essays. But how? He could not withdraw books from the city’s white-only public library. Eventually, Wright approached his only white co-worker likely to be sympathetic—an Irish Catholic whom the other white men hatefully called “a ‘Pope lover.’” The man let Wright pose as an errand boy and withdraw books in his name. When Wright sat down to read Mencken at last, his heart thrilled at the “clean, clear, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that?” He “pictured [Mencken] as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything… mocking God, authority.” Early in his hard life, Wright had learned to fight. But here was a man “fighting with words… using words as a weapon, as one would use a club. Could words be weapons?” Apparently so, and, thought Wright, “perhaps I could use them as weapons.” So he did. His memoir Black Boy so vividly excoriated the evils of segregation it was banned throughout the South for decades.
A final, more recent example comes from The National Public Radio show This American Life. Episode 680 recounted the dramatic childhood captivity of a Pakistani-American girl identified only by her first name, Shamyla. In the late 1970s, Shamyla came to America as an infant, sent by her birth parents to her then-childless aunt and uncle in an informal adoption arrangement. She only learned these details in 1989 when, on a trip to Pakistan aged-eleven, her birth parents essentially kidnapped her and forced her to return “home,” into an oppressive life of strict religious traditionalism enforced by brutal corporal punishment. Through nearly a decade of misery and isolation, Shamyla’s one point of contact with her American home—and a great source of hope—was a single book, Little Women.
A school friend bought the book at a local bazaar and gifted it to Shamyla, who cut it into eight sections and hid it from her parents in her mattress. Reading it over and over whenever she could, the captive Shamyla did not find in Louisa May Alcott’s classic account of mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts an alien world of unrelatable racial others. Rather, she cherished it as “a how-to for girls, a survival guide.” She related most to Jo, the most spirited March sister, taking strength from her resolve to never “be ladylike” or cease to “to run and romp.” Like Douglass, Shamyla clung secretly to her desire for freedom through long years of feigned subservience. Eventually, she had played the part so well for so long that her father consented to a trip back to the United States, convinced his daughter could gain skills “that would add to her bride price… driving, short-hand, swimming,” then would dutifully return home to marry. Instead, “as the plane took off, I just started crying nonstop because I knew I wasn’t coming back.”
Douglass, Wright, and Shamyla each found consolation and courage in the works of great writers whose words reached out to them across gulfs of time, place, and culture, giving voice to their inmost thoughts and steeling them for otherwise unbearable trials. This is what great books do. Lewis would doubtless ask contemporary standpoint theorists that if ancient writers can so move the soul of modern readers, how comparatively insignificant are racial differences? More importantly, the more tenuous applications of standpoint theory undermine a fundamental premise of liberal societies: that all human knowledge and experience is accessible to other humans. Through the power of words to communicate, of reason to apprehend, and of imagination to sympathize, each of us can truly know any other. Indeed, hard as the work may be, we can not only know one another but may go on from knowledge to love. How can we live as neighbors in a free society otherwise?
EDITOR'S NOTE: In today's Observer (email) I incorrectly referred to Harriet Tubman rather than Harriet Beecher Stowe. I regret the error.
Discussion Questions:
Is literacy an essential component of democratic freedom? Why or why not?
Given the relationship between freedom and power, what limits might the state want to set as regards the written word? What about libel or sedition laws?
What are the alternatives to standpoint epistemology?
