Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Book Review: How to Read a Book


Konkvistador suggested that I review “How to Read a Book” by Charles van Doren and Mortimer Adler, so I picked up a Kindle copy and re-read it. My post the other week about learning better reading habits with modern technology provoked the recommendation.

While it may seem like a silly topic (the introduction itself recounts that earlier editions set off parodies like “How to Read Two Books”), it’s actually an important one, especially considering that the school system tends to teach poor reading habits, even in private schools with solid reputations.

The least useful parts of the book are the beginning parts which discuss elementary and analytical reading. But some of the more general observations made by the authors are useful to put at the top of your mind. From the early parts of the book:

Admittedly, writers vary, just as pitchers do. Some writers have excellent “control”; they know exactly what they want to convey, and they convey it precisely and accurately. Other things being equal, they are easier to “catch” than a “wild” writer without “control.”

The ability of the writer and the ability of the reader must match one another for the reader to get much of use from the material. Language is symbolic and imperfect in its capacity to convey meaning.

The authors criticize speed-reading everything, which I partially agree with, but I also disagree with some of their assessments of what properly-executed speed reading is.

A lot of speed-reading involves physically training the eyeball with drills and managing your head movement to minimize physical eye movements, going down the center of the text while using your peripheral vision to take in the whole line. You can ‘speed-read’ in this way slowly enough for your thoughts to catch up. This, the author addresses on p. 39 of the linked edition, and his generalization of speed-reading courses is accurate enough.

That’s really a digression, though, because this practical manual mostly concerns itself with how to read solitary books, along with how to conduct syntopical reading — which just means picking a large number of books in a given topic, selecting the ones worth reading, and then going through them in a time-efficient fashion.

This is the particular area which made the largest difference to me, in part because my reading tends to be haphazard, directionless, and based primarily on whatever is making me most curious at the moment.

Adler and van Doren break the method into two parts on p. 309:

Knowing that more than one book is relevant to a particular question is the first requirement in any project of syntopical reading. Knowing which books should be read, in a general way, is the second requirement. The second requirement is a great deal harder to satisfy than the first.

This may require making a list of 100 books or more, breaking them down into different classifications, reading some, eliminating others, and then continuing through the process. While this is supposedly taught through the assignment of research papers in contemporary undergraduate schools, in practice, nothing like this method gets through, because the student just learns to parrot whatever conclusion the professor wants him to rather than being actually going through an independent process.

The authors have a strong point of view on ‘non-active reading’:

Most of us are addicted to non-active reading. The outstanding fault of the non-active or undemanding reader is his inattention to words, and his consequent failure to come to terms with the author.

He advocates instead to make frequent notes (even if they are simple), contemplating whether or not one has understood the author, and making use of titles, subheadings, chapter names, and other structural guides to aid in comprehension ahead of time.

We would probably not see advice like this in today’s uncivil times from p. 137:

Ordinary conversations between persons who confront each other are good only when they are carried on civilly. We are not thinking merely of the civilities according to conventions of social politeness. Such conventions are not really important. What is important is that there is an intellectual etiquette to be observed. Without it, conversation is bickering rather than profitable communication. We are assuming here, of course, that the conversation is about a serious matter on which men can agree or disagree. Then it becomes important that they conduct themselves well. Otherwise, there is no profit in the enterprise. The profit in good conversation is something learned.

From p. 346:

Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. The are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them.

With even more effective distractions, it’s even easier to be diverted from our common goals of finding more profitable information for ourselves and our friends.


If you are interested in learning how to become a more effective reader, this is worth picking up. At the time that the authors wrote it, it was intended as a remedial text to address the rapid reduction in educational standards at that time. Because educational standards have dropped even more since the early 1970s, it will likely be relevant to you, even if you went to a fancy college in Cambridge.

The appendix also contains a useful ‘Great Books’ reading list along with some quiz material to test your reading comprehension. While the book is certainly liberal in orientation, and appears to be motivated by a Dewey-democratic-universal-education impulse, it is also emphatically pro-Western in some of the last years in which it was permissible to be so. If you want to make better use of your reading time, go ahead and buy it.

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Sound Money and Societal Morality

It’s an old historian’s saying that sound money and morals are intimately connected: that when the sovereign debases the currency, the public morals also become debauched. Which one causes the other might not be a terribly important question to tease out, but nonetheless, I would like to reason out why this must be.

Sound money is of a common weight. It contains as much valuable material as it says that it does. It is held as something worthy of trust, even internationally, without the need to refer to any treaties or legal statutes. It is what it is, and what it is can be objectively assayed.

The idiom is used because a common coin makes a certain, distinct sound when struck, identical to that of its sister-coins, so that when you drop one, she sings the same tune as her siblings.

Money is a tool of calculation used in trade. When we make calculations, it is better that they be accurate than they be inaccurate, because we use those calculations to inform our economic decisions. Should we buy a pound of butter today, or wait until tomorrow? What is the price of butter? What is impacting the price of butter? When the currency is a stable unit, these questions become solely about the unit in question, rather than complex monetary matters.

When we use imprecise units in calculation, we must harm the quality of our calculations, and thereby harm the quality of our decision-making processes. It harms our ability to coordinate with the surrounding society in a way that consistently produces positive-sum exchanges .

A currency of fluctuating character, in which what the unit is changes by the day or by the hour, makes it so that economic relationships past the immediate circle of trust are continually not as they seem to be. Further, trades can subjectively appear to be ‘bad trades’ after the fact due to monetary fluctuations that had nothing to do with the trustworthiness of either trading partner.

This becomes especially obvious in our modern foreign exchange market, in which companies that do not hedge effectively can suffer enormous costs that had nothing to do with anything besides purely monetary-financial fluctuations, which do not occur in a sound money international system.

The other major issue with a fluctuating monetary standard is that it adds risk to the accumulation of savings. It systematically punishes prudence and future-orientation in order to encourage the frequency of exchanges in the economy.

Exchanges with high frequency do not necessarily result in better quality trades when assessed over the long term.

When we think about this in the most basic terms — that of a person thinking over a significant purchase — it’s possible to conjecture that most purchases that are well-researched are more likely to result in trades that both parties believe were good. When both parties spend time determining one another’s interests, when both understand the terms of the trade, and understand the alternatives, the risk involved in the exchange decreases.

Soft money systems, especially those involving a currency that’s rapidly depreciating, creates incentives for people to make many poorly-considered purchases instead. They purchase items on ‘impulse’ that may not be especially durable, that may not meet their requirements or desires, that may be at the wrong price.

However, when a state earns money from each transaction through a sales tax, its members will have a strong desire to encourage these frequently-made, ill-considered consumer purchases. When there is an income tax, the state will want to encourage people to work for their entire lives, spending imprudently, because it can tax both of those more effectively than it can tax savings and investments, especially when those investments result in the accumulation of physical capital equipment, antiques, relics, or hoards which can be unwieldy to seize.

While a sound currency is a means of encouraging prudence throughout a society, its opposite encourages graft and impulsiveness. Which aspect encourages the other is less relevant than making the traditional argument in favor of prudence and foresight in all things.

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Tiffany’s Is As Gay As Marriage

From one of the blogs at Ad Age, we have some more fashionable celebration of gay marriage from the one of the premiere jewelers in America.

Here’s the ad:

Tiffany's gay ad

The copy reads:

Will you promise to never stop completing my sentences or singing off-key, which I’m afraid you do often? And will you let today be the first sentence of one long story that never, ever ends?

WILL YOU?

Ogilvy & Mather, the agency responsible, only won the Tiffany’s account this past February.

The Holiday sales results for Tiffany’s this past season were down by 1%, with overall worldwide sales down by 3%. This news coincided with an 11% drop in the stock price.

The blogger at Ad Age was nonplussed:

Yet with Tiffany & Co. already following in the footsteps of brands including Gap, Banana Republic, Cheerios and The Knot, it’s likely that such ads will soon be commonplace, not bad ass at all — which is a good thing.

Is that good for the client, though? Is this good for Tiffany’s, which needs to turn itself around? An 11% dip in the stock price is considerable for a brand that dates back to 1837. Brands that date back to 1837 do not change ad agencies frequently.

If you look at the previous year, before the transition, holiday sales were actually up 4% for 2013 — making the results from the new agency even worse, in comparison to the momentum which was already in place, when the agency that got fired was running the show.

One of David Ogilvy’s most-quoted lines is that a copywriter needs to be both a ‘poet and a killer.’

Meaning that poetry is necessary to make the ad beguiling, but that the ad is a means to an end, and that end is to ensure that Tiffany’s doesn’t have to start firing people and shutting down stores because the ad agency is fucking up their account to agitate for social justice.

Let’s think about this for a moment.

Who buys from Tiffany’s? Who are the big customers?

Not gay men. Gay men barely get married, despite all the hooplah over it. There are two major groups of buyers of that little blue box: women and the men who love those women.

Statistically speaking, gay men are non-existent. It’s a total of roughly 9 million, including women. Some polls say 1.8% of men. If they wanted to reach just those men, they could have put the ad in Out or something like that. Instead, they promoted it nationally, to a general audience.

What Tiffany’s has done is to do more to alienate the people who are actually likely to be married, and are actually likely to get married, and are going to buy those little blue boxes as gifts for their beloved every Valentine’s, birthday, and Christmas.

Those people are overwhelmingly white, not transgender, and Christian.

Miley Cyrus praised the ad.

Miley Cyrus is the opposite of the sort of person who is supposed to be associated with Tiffany’s.

The brand identity of Tiffany is most easily phrased as “eternal love, elegant romance and priceless beauty.” Gay men tend to go for 0/3 of those. Unless you count obsessive workouts, meth addictions, and the pursuit of plastic surgery as ‘priceless beauty.’

The character most associated with Tiffany’s is Audrey Hepburn. Not Miley Cyrus.

What corporate America is going to discover as they continue going down the glory hole to social justice is that it does a lot of damage to their ability to sell things to the American core. And not just to the American core. But to the foreign affluent people who don’t believe in multiculturalism or the gay agenda or any of the rest of it.

They don’t care about this stuff in India. They don’t care about it in China. They don’t care about it in any of the Asian Tigers. It’s actually illegal in Russia. There are multiple big stores for Tiffany’s in Moscow alone!

This is a quirk of the Weimerian cities in the Anglo countries and Western Europe.

There are a lot of companies that you can buy high-end jewelry from. The main competitive advantage that this particular company has going for it is the symbolism of the blue box. That symbolism, worth more than $1 billion in sales a year, is now being associated with the thin fiction of eternal-gay-romance, a fiction that even gay men are often uncomfortable with, because it’s not borne out by reality.

The general comfort with the general unraveling in public mores is going to transition to surprise, then horror, as the results prove to diverge from the comforting fantasies of individualism taken to its logical conclusion. The empire, far from being cognizant of diversity, has become solipsistic, obsessed with its own lies of moral self-glorification.

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