Not everyone has the available time or energy to do deep reading. But if you’re going to make confident public pronouncements on matters that require a lot of research, books will help you avoid dangerous foolishness.
"Reading books is for losers who are afraid to learn from life. So they try and learn from the life OTHERS have lived. But you never REALLY learn unless you lived it. You must feel it to believe it. Books are a total waste of time. Education for cowards." - Andrew Tate
“I would never read a book.” - Sam Bankman-Fried
In the past few years, you might have noticed the rise of a certain archetypal figure: the Guy Who Doesn’t Read Books. Sooner or later, we all meet the Guy. He takes many forms, but he has a few defining characteristics. He’s almost always male. He has strong opinions about things, often in the areas of politics and economics. And he’s supremely confident in his own intelligence, despite—and because of—his non-reading ways. This is the real kicker. There’s nothing stopping the Guy from reading; it’s not that he lacks the time, or has any kind of disability. He just doesn’t see any reason to. He’s already right about everything.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is a Guy Who Doesn’t Read Books. In a 2022 interview, Bankman-Fried said that he was “very skeptical of books,” and that “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something very close to that.” (He also thinks Shakespeare is a bad writer because of “Bayesian priors.”) In a similar vein, self-proclaimed genius Kanye West has told reporters that “I actually haven’t read any book” because “reading is like eating Brussels sprouts for me.” Andrew Tate, the social-media influencer and alleged human trafficker who was kicked off YouTube for being too misogynistic, might be the most extreme example. He’s claimed to be “too smart to read,” and said that “Books are a total waste of time.”
Elon Musk claims to read books, but his contributions to public discourse often suggest otherwise. (Musk once claimed, incoherently, that “[Karl] Marx was a capitalist. He wrote a book about it,” a view that isn’t supported by any actual Marx book.) Unfortunately, because a lot of political discussions take place on “X” (Twitter), as a political writer I have to spend a portion of my time monitoring the platform. It was always something of a cesspit, but is more toxic than ever under Musk, a credulous man who swallows virtually any right-wing talking point he comes across.
I don’t think it will surprise anyone to hear that on Twitter, I regularly see people saying incredibly ill-informed and/or bigoted things with extreme confidence, and then I see thousands upon thousands of other people reposting the remark—often including Musk himself, who has posted comments like “interesting observation” or “you have said the actual truth” in response to all kinds of racist and sexist nonsense. There seems to be no limit to how loopy or vile a theory can be and still have people take it seriously on the platform. Here is someone arguing, for instance, that there was a Jewish conspiracy to discredit Michael Jackson by labeling him a pedophile.
Here are a few popular lowlights just from the last few days:
- “[Here are photos of] Lebanon in the 1960s, when it was still a Christian-majority country. Then the Palestinians started a war, massacred the Christians, and ruined everything.”
When I read this stuff, two thoughts always come to mind. The first is Brandolini’s Law, aka the Bullshit Asymmetry, which states that “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” And what do you do when the bullshit comes in the kind of volume that it does on Twitter, where 6,000 new tweets are sent every second? The second thought that always comes to mind is: “Jesus, don’t you people ever pick up a book?”
Now, I should make a couple of caveats clear here. First, I’m not an elitist about book-reading. I have known plenty of wise, sensible people who do not read books. I’ve known plenty of idiots who read books constantly. Reading books does not make you inherently intelligent, and failing to read books does not make your opinion invalid. I’ve heard people say often of student activists that they don’t seem like they’ve done adequate research on the issues they protest, and my instinct is always to insist that if a moral issue is clear, and you are on the right side of it, then it doesn’t really matter how much research you’ve done. There is a risk of ableism in an insistence that people read books, too. People of limited literacy have important thoughts and experiences.
I’m talking about the Guy Who Doesn’t Read Books: a specific class of people who could do the reading on a topic, should do the reading on a topic, but refuse to do the reading on the topic, instead spouting off ignorantly with confident, wrong opinions. I’m talking about people like Charlie Kirk, who tells people they should read the Great Books of the Western World and then admits he hasn’t himself. I’m talking about men like Tucker Carlson, who recently declared a Nazi-sympathetic podcaster to be the greatest living popular historian, which leads me to the strong suspicion that Carlson does not read books. I’m talking about Jordan Peterson, who turned up to a debate about Marxism having only read the Communist Manifesto, which is a pamphlet. I am talking about men like the streamer Destiny, who has extremely strong views about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and has broadcast many hours of his opinions about it, seemingly without having read any of the thousands of available books on the subject. (Destiny says that when a contentious issue comes up, he “Googles around” for information, and may “grab the book and read some of the original passages” if “something seems fishy.” I wish I were joking.) There are others, too, who I don’t know haven’t read any books, but doubt actually read books cover to cover (e.g. Joe Rogan and Donald Trump). And of course, the three Twitter-posters quoted above, who would be unable to maintain their misconceptions if they did some amount of actual research on the topics they’re completely convinced they’re right about.
Let’s think about those claims for a second. The first is that Lebanon was amazing, then “Palestinians” began massacring “Christians,” and the whole country fell apart. The second is that Haitians have some inherent quality (laziness, barbarity, etc.) that causes them to turn places into “shitholes.” The third is the familiar claim that Yasser Arafat was offered a Palestinian state, turned it down in favor of terrorism against Israel, and thus we see that “they” (all Palestinians, not just Arafat) do not want to live in peace in a state of their own but want to destroy Israel.
We do not actually need books to refute some of this. We need only turn to Wikipedia, for instance, to find out that the causes of the Lebanese Civil War were actually incredibly complex, and that it was far from a story of innocent peaceful Christians being massacred by violent Muslims. The rant about Haitians comes from bogus reports, currently being spread by the right (including Donald Trump and his fascist-sympathizing running mate J.D. Vance), that Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city have been eating people’s pets. City officials have strenuously denied that anything of the kind has occurred, and it appears that Haitian immigrants there are mainly doing things like going to work and raising their children. When asked about the pet-eating claim in last night’s presidential debate, Trump said that he had “seen people on television” saying it was true, which gives you a sense of where he’s been getting his information.
But if we really want to understand the facts about historical events, or address questions like “What causes poverty in Haiti?” or “What has happened in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations?”, we cannot just rely on Wikipedia, today’s New York Times, and our critical thinking capacity. We have to turn to books and academic articles, because these are where people who have done deep research report their findings. For instance, if we really want to understand what happened during the Camp David negotiations, the first thing we need to do is get a big stack of books onto our desk. For example, we might choose:
- Shlomo Ben-Ami - Prophets without Honor: The 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-State Solution
- Clayton E. Swisher - The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process
- William B. Quandt - Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict since 1967 (third edition, covering up to the George W. Bush years)
- Raymond G. Helmick - Negotiating Outside the Law: Why Camp David Failed
We might supplement these books with major researched articles on the talks, such as Ron Pundak’s “From Oslo to Taba: What Went Wrong?”, Aaron David Miller’s “Lost in the Woods: A Camp David Retrospective,” Rashid Khalidi’s “The United States and Palestine,” Robert Malley and Hussein Agha’s “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors” (plus the responses), David Matz’s “Why Did Taba End?” and Helga Baumgarten’s “The Myth of Camp David.” This is a small portion of the literature, but it can get us started. What we immediately find when we dive in is that there are hugely differing accounts of whether the offer that Yasser Arafat was given at Camp David was indeed “generous,” and which party bore primary responsibility for the failure to conclude a peace deal. Khalidi argues that the “Palestinian state” that was offered at Camp David in 2000 “would have divided the West Bank into three disconnected segments, and would have given Israel complete control over the borders of a ‘state’ that would thereby have been much less than sovereign.”
Indeed, when we dive into the literature, we find a number of facts that challenge the simplistic narrative that Yasser Arafat’s stubbornness spoiled the chance for Palestinians to have a state. Even Shlomo Ben-Ami, who is highly critical of Arafat’s overall role in the peace process, says that “Arafat was right to turn down the summit’s offers.” Aaron David Miller, a U.S. diplomat who admits he has acted as “Israel’s lawyer” in the peace process, says that the issues at the summit were “mission impossibles,” and “the gaps between the two sides were Grand Canyon-like in scale.” Many writers point out that the summit was not well-prepared, with huge issues left for the end, very little preliminary negotiation conducted, and deep mistrust between the parties. Pundak, who faults Israel, the U.S., and the Palestinians, nevertheless concludes that “the two main obstacles to reaching an agreement” were “the insincere and incomplete implementation [of the Oslo accords] during [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s administration, and the mismanagement of permanent-status negotiations under [Ehud] Barak.” Several writers draw our attention to the fact that negotiations actually continued after the Camp David summit failed, and at the subsequent Taba negotiations the Israelis and Palestinians were very close to reaching a deal (until those negotiations were ultimately called off by Israel’s Barak). William Quandt observes:
Why did Camp David II fail? The easy answer is to blame one party or the other for intransigence, and there is doubtless some blame to be apportioned. But the negotiators were dealing with extraordinarily difficult issues that required a great deal of nuanced discussion and compromise.
The reasons for the collapse of the negotiations (in which Israelis and Palestinians seemed close to an agreement on the structure of a two-state settlement) are complex, which is why they have spawned a huge literature. To speak intelligently about the topic, we have to read deeply. We have to parse conflicting accounts. We have to consider the biases of different writers. Tweets, YouTube videos, and blog posts won’t cut it.
We can’t even just “read books,” because plenty of books are “pseudoscholarly.” They look like works of serious research, but if you closely examine their footnotes you find that they are distorting everything. (I’ve written before about how Alan Dershowitz does this.) Amazon regularly recommends to me books that offer deranged conspiracies, which are presented as careful exposés of historical facts—the latest being this one:
So, no, reading books does not make you intelligent, because it all depends on the kind of books you read. But Sam Bankman-Fried is still very wrong in his argument against reading books, which goes like this:
“I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
The case of Arafat and Camp David shows why Bankman-Fried is wrong. He believes that books are, essentially, too long, and therefore a waste of time. You could just write up any point you wanted to make with a book in a short blog post, and the reader wouldn’t get much more out of the three hundred page version than they would get out of the bullet points. (For fiction, of course, Bankman-Fried’s idea demonstrates such a misunderstanding of the purpose of reading that it is purely laughable. It can only even be seriously entertained when applied to nonfiction, where the central purpose is to convey information.)
Some books, of course, are too long, and could easily be blog posts. In fact, there might even be some truth to Sturgeon's Law, which states that ninety percent of everything published is “crap.” (It often looks that way when I browse Amazon.) But the crucial thing that’s missing in a six-paragraph blog post is the supporting evidence and argumentation for a thesis, which is crucial for evaluating whether it’s actually correct. A six-paragraph blog post can state conclusions, but not what supports those conclusions, except very cursorily. So the reader is left unable to assess the statement. Concision gives the advantage to bullshit, and is is one reason why so much bullshit proliferates on Twitter. (I do miss the old days of blogging, when people would write 5,000 word posts “fisking” each other’s arguments.) I have written books myself, and the reason I have written books on subjects instead of writing blog posts is that on certain subjects I think anything short of a book is so superficial that it shouldn’t persuade anyone. For instance, I wrote Responding to the Right to demonstrate why I think conservative arguments do not hold up, but in order to prove that I needed to quote extensively from them, to show how different types of arguments work, to give detailed and well-sourced rebuttals, and to explain why I think the arguments convince people even though they’re false. If I’d written something shorter than what I’d written, conservatives would rightly have argued that I was not dealing with their case seriously and had left major points unaddressed.
Tate’s claim is a little bit different than Sam Bankman-Fried’s. Tate also has contempt for books, but instead of saying that anything in a book could be reduced to a blog post, he says that living life is more educational than books. Actually, he says something much more ludicrous than this (that he is “too smart to read” and his “advanced brain” needs “action” and “constant chaos”). Tate is a sociopathic sexual predator and I have no interest in taking his argument seriously. But there is a defensible version of a somewhat similar point that could be made by someone else. I agree that there are plenty of things that need to be learned through “on the ground” knowledge. For instance, I think interacting with prisoners teaches you something about the criminal punishment system that cannot be learned from reading The New Jim Crow, and my own experience of interacting with a man on death row (who was then put to death) was far more important to shaping my views on the death penalty than even reading a powerful argument like Albert Camus’ “Reflections on the Guillotine.” But Tate is phrasing it ridiculously, because there’s also plenty of knowledge you’re going to miss if you refuse on principle to crack open a book.
For instance, let’s say you don’t want to be ignorant and bigoted about Haiti or Lebanon. But you realize you don’t know that much about these countries’ history and politics. Well, on Haiti you might consider going to the library and picking up a book like Paul Farmer’s The Uses of Haiti or Laurent Dubois’s Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. If you wanted to understand why the Haitian economy is the way it is, you might look for a volume specifically on that subject, like Mats Lundahl’s Poverty in Haiti. (Lundahl argues, for instance, that for a long time high-quality education has been a “Catch-22” in Haiti: there is no supply of it because there’s no demand for it, and there’s no demand for it because there’s no opportunity to use it.) On Lebanon, you might get Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation, William Harris’ Lebanon: A History, 600-2011, and Andrew Arsan’s Lebanon: A Country in Fragments. You might supplement these with some Lebanese literature and poetry. And you might even seek out some Lebanese people for their perspectives. I strongly suspect that the people online who offer bigoted opinions do none of this work. Tate and his followers don’t even follow Tate’s advice to have rich life experiences that would open your eyes, say by interacting with Haitian Americans before having opinions about them.
It’s laughable to see the Guy Who Doesn’t Read Books boasting proudly about his own ignorance, but it’s frightening too. In Tate’s ridiculous clip about being “too smart to read” and preferring “action,” you can hear an echo of what Umberto Eco called “Ur-Fascism”:
[Fascism’s] Irrationalism depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.”
Tate, of course, hasn’t read Eco. But his whole worldview is about not allowing yourself to be “emasculated” by thinking too much. Likewise, in the famous “warning signs of fascism” poster that hangs in the U.S. Holocaust Museum, one of the signs is “disdain for intellectuals and the arts.” We might condense that down to “disdain for books.” It’s a short step from not reading books yourself to perceiving them as a threat, precisely because they encourage people to look deeper into issues, challenge conventional ideas, and empathize with people unlike themselves. This is already happening in the United States. Across the country, groups like Moms for Liberty are trying to ban any book they disapprove of from library shelves. Last month, the board of Florida’s New College—which, thanks to a wave of appointments from Governor Ron DeSantis, is dominated by right-wing culture warriors—destroyed thousands of books about gender, sexuality, and religion, sending them unceremoniously to the landfill. For these people, it’s not enough to be incurious and cling to ignorant ideas about the world without investigating further. They want to make sure everyone else lives like that, too.
If we are to escape slipping into a new Dark Age, books will not be optional. They are where a huge portion of the accumulated human knowledge is kept, and without them our conversations will be stunted and superficial. Most frightening of all, we will be unaware of our own ignorance, confidently expounding on subjects we know nothing about, unaware that off in some dusty book somewhere, everything we’re saying has been exposed as false.
