27.6.13

It might be possible to resolve the "does reading make you a good person?" debate by hypothesizing that it doesn't, but it might make you a better person in one of two relevant senses. The first is not unlike the sense of 'better' than C.S. Lewis claims for Christianity in Mere Christianity. Christians are not moral exemplars, and certainly not initially, just somewhat nicer, etc, than they would have been otherwise.

The second is that reading reinforces whatever one's natural personality tendencies are. The guards at Auschwitz read Goethe, Camus reads Dostoevsky: the guards see nothing that contradicts the things they are doing; Camus somehow finds in Dostoevsky nothing that challenges his worldview; each is confirmed in his decisions and dispositions by the things he finds in the text. Reading, on this account, reveals because it forces you to be more like you. Self-realization and humility might be the result of that, but since human do not incline towards humility, the result we see will probably be something else entirely.

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