Why I Read

Books Received 2009-11-14

If we wait for history to present us with freedom and other precious gifts, we risk waiting in vain. History is us — and there is no alternative but to shoulder the burden of what we so passionately desire and bear it out of the depths.

—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ed. and contributor.”Foreword”  From Under the Rubble. 1981.

Modern Spiritual Masters (Orbis Books): Essential Writings of Pedro Arrupe, Dom Helder Camara, Thomas Merton, Evelyn Underhill, Simone Weil; Compendium, ed. Robert Ellsburg. (Each a separate volume)

You want to be,
excuse me,
first get free
of that excess
of goods
which cram
your whole body
leaving no room
for you and even less
for God.

—Camara, p. 100.

I get depressed when I’m not reading. I don’t mean reading casually. I mean reading which, if not lectio divina, is at least its first cousin. Reading that unravels what you thought you knew. Reading that unsettles, challenges. Reading you argue with. Reading that keeps you up nights.

Without that kind of reading I might as well be dead. I am dead. Only the body doesn’t know it.

What worries me is that the people who form our “free society” have learned how to manipulate us. There’s a book I think called Manufacturing Consent. By Noam Chomsky. I haven’t read anything of Chomsky’s, but have seen the PBS documentary on his ideas.

You see how I get suckered into believing what everybody else believes about Chomsky, at least all the “liberals”?

It’s incredible! When you give someone power and freedom, the next thing you do is hedge them in, “help” them, so that they exercise their freedom the way you want them to.

In America that means that you put in front of people’s eyes a shiny new carrot, version 12.5. IT costs so much they go in debt to get IT. Before 12.5′s paid off, you’ve put the next version in front of them, not all that much different except IT costs more.

Everybody’s got IT. Everybody’s kids have IT in pastel colors, or goth with I Am an Individual! or No Fear! stenciled on IT.

You teach people how to think the way you want them to think.

The Golden Calf!

IT’ll solve all our problems. IT’ll beat the Egyptians at their own game.

You get people to self-enslave. You don’t need chains. You don’t need whips.

All you need is carrots.

That’s one reason why I read.

The other is Fear.

It’s more potent than carrots.

You get people to be afraid “of people whose eyes are oddly made,” says the Hammerstein lyric.

Fear of Arabs, Arabic, the Qur’an. Of jihad. Of terrorists.

Fear of people who do things you can’t imagine (but you like trying to imagine) things they do in bed—those people.

Fear of ideas.

Fear!

You can build a war machine on Fear and its offspring Hate.

You cultivate them both in the petri dish of Ignorance. A little darkness. A little heat.

And before you know it, your freedom smells of fascism.

That’s another reason why I read.