As the 2016 presidential election made clear, we live in the era of the echo chamber. To escape their own, progressives need to be reading the best conservative thought — certainly Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, but also more contemporary figures such as Antonin Scalia and Robert Ellickson. The same is true for conservatives, if they hope to learn from progressives. Here are five books with which they might start.
.. Many conservatives insist that judges should adhere to the “original meaning” of the Constitution. Dworkin offers the most systematic response to this view. He emphasizes that the Constitution contains a lot of open-ended phrases, containing abstract moral language: “equal protection,” “freedom of speech,” “due process of law.”
.. He contends that whatever judges say, all of them end up as “moral readers” of such phrases — and so their own convictions must play a significant role. The question, then, is what kind of moral reading we will give, not whether we will give one.
.. After reading these books, conservatives are hardly likely to rush out and volunteer to work for the Democratic Party. But they will end up a lot more humble.
Saint Ambrose – the man who invented silent reading
Some have disputed this, but it is claimed that Ambrose invented silent reading. The Romans were in the habit of declaiming a text, even in private, reading aloud to audiences, even an audience consisting only of oneself. But Augustine says of Ambrose, in Book 6, chapter 3 of his Confessions:
When [Ambrose] read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.
It strikes me that Augustine would not have mentioned this if it had not struck him as something completly novel. But why is it important? Silent reading is something interior, which involves listening to the quiet inner voice. Ambrose’s discovery of silent reading marks the beginning of the Western way of doing things, our quite appropriate emphasis on the importance of our inner and interior lives. This is something of which we are in danger of losing sight: what counts is the interior person, and my real life is my inner life: this is the locus of salvation. Because Ambrose is the first to point to this through reading, he stands at the head of a great tradition.
Donald Trump doesn’t read much. Being president probably wouldn’t change that.
Trump’s desk is piled high with magazines, nearly all of them with himself on their covers, and each morning, he reviews a pile of printouts of news articles about himself that his secretary delivers to his desk. But there are no shelves of books in his office, no computer on his desk.
.. He said in a series of interviews that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”
.. Trump said reading long documents is a waste of time because he absorbs the gist of an issue very quickly. “I’m a very efficient guy,” he said. “Now, I could also do it verbally, which is fine. I’d always rather have — I want it short. There’s no reason to do hundreds of pages because I know exactly what it is.”
.. Trump has no shortage of strong opinions even about books he has not read.
.. “It’s certainly legitimate to desire a reflective person in the Oval Office, but the absence of that isn’t inherently dangerous,” Greenberg said. “In Trump’s case, his attitude toward reading is hardly unprecedented, but when you combine it with the vulgarity and the authoritarian style, it shows a locker-room, business-world machismo that pervades his persona.”
.. There is no clear correlation between studious presidents and success in the office, historians said. Carter and Nixon shared “a kind of obsessional quality,”
.. In his 2006 book, “Trump 101: The Way to Success,” Trump recommended, in addition to his own autobiography, the longtime bestseller “The Power of Positive Thinking,” by Norman Vincent Peale, who was Trump’s minister through the early part of his life,
The Blogger and the Mechanical Bull
“Research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links”
As a group of Northwestern University professors wrote in a 2005 article in the Annual Review of Sociology, the recent changes in our reading habits suggest that the “era of mass [book] reading” was a brief “anomaly” in our intellectual history: “We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.” The question that remains to be answered, they went on, is whether that reading class will have the “power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capitol” or will be viewed as the eccentric practitioners of “an increasingly arcane hobby.” (108).. what does all this research suggest about our ability to meditate on Scripture and the preached Word?