Improving Reading

As we’ve seen, one of the marks of the common reader is a sense that reading is important, even if it's hard to articulate why. This sense is often bound up with a belief that reading makes people better— not just intellectually or culturally better, but ethically better. Reading, according to this view, is a morally improving activity, one that can help develop character traits that good people need. This view is surprisingly widespread, and not just among passionate readers. A 2014 article in Scientific American declares that “everyone should read Harry Potter” because the “tales of the young wizard instill empathy.” The article reports that experiments conducted by psychologists at the University of Modena found that when young people read passages from the Potter novels dealing with prejudice against “Mud-bloods,” they became more tolerant toward immigrants and other stigmatized groups than their peers who had not. Most interesting of all, this increase in empathy didn't seem to be caused solely by the content of J. K. Rowling's novels. The study suggested that there is something about the process of reading that helps instill empathy and tolerance—an effect that other studies have claimed to find as well. But the view that reading makes us morally better is not advanced only by psychologists. Philosophers and literary critics have defended it for decades, indeed centuries. Recent discussions of this view often cite Wayne Booth's The Company We Keep, an influential work of literary criticism that mounts a spirited defense of the attempt “to tie ‘art’ to ‘life,’ the ‘aesthetic’ to the ‘practical.’ “ Another influential statement of this view is Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, which argues that certain kinds of literature can help us become aware of our capacity for cruelty and other worrisome traits. Major works by Andrew Gibson, Colin McGinn, and many other philosophers and literature critics explore similar terrain. To be sure, not everyone thinks reading is a source of moral improvement. No less august a reader than Harold Bloom warns that “you cannot directly improve anyone's life by reading better or more deeply […] I am wary of any arguments whatsoever that connect the pleasures of solitary reading to the public good.”