Norm Geras challenges recent assertions that reading makes people more moral:
It may be the case statistically, for all I know, that avid and careful readers of good or great fiction become better people on the whole than they would otherwise be if they were not readers. But this isn’t the same thing as the claim that readers are invariably better people than non-readers are. We know from ordinary experience that that isn’t true, since there are plenty of people who don’t do much reading and are kind, helpful, compassionate and possessed of many other ordinary virtues, while at the same time there are some very well-read selfish bastards or worse than selfish bastards.
His other big point:
The thesis that reading makes us either human or more human – because it is ‘the most spiritual of all human activities’ – is more dubious still. What is one to say, then, about people who can’t read or can read but don’t? That they aren’t human, or aren’t fully human, or aren’t as human as (we) readers are? It isn’t a good way of talking. One method of defining human nature is – more or less empirically – as constituted by those characteristics which human beings share in common. On this basis, reading good fiction can’t be one of the constituents of human nature, given how many members of the human species haven’t read Proust, Tolstoy, F. Scott Fitzgerald or whoever else it might be.
Previous Dish on the subject here.
The Dish 