Books Are Dead, And We Have Killed Them

“Is it worth reading the classics at all?”

It was time to hear what he really thought. A casual conversation with my high-school-teacher-turned-boss had led to a discussion of my Great Books education, and I knew he was a skeptic. In high school, I was a student in two of his classes: “Global Design and Social Innovation” and “Global Perspectives in the 21st Century.” His international, postmodern pedagogy was at the center of the program I was now helping to teach: an innovation and design bootcamp built to equip students with “21st-century problem solving skills.” Mr. K was one of my favorite high school teachers. He was provocative. He began class with questions like, “What is culture?” and let the body of barely pubescent freshmen sit there in silence until someone spoke up. On essays, his most frequent comment was: “Needs more nuance. Go deeper.” He was not afraid to give half of the class C’s at a school ballooning with grade inflation. His future-facing philosophy challenged me to reconsider the purpose of education in the modern age—reconsideration which, ironically, led me to personally conclude that a Great Books education was the most important education I could get in college. Now, my respect for Mr. K had landed me back in Denver for a teaching internship with him, and in light of my admiration, I was wounded by his response to my question:

“Not really.”

Besides his own opinions that the classics were “outdated” and “vehicles for systems of social oppression” (important objections to remain unaddressed here) he also questioned the worth of reading old, archaic books at all:

“If the goal of reading is to understand what the author is saying, why shouldn’t I have ChatGPT summarize for me any book’s most important points? Particularly with what you call the ‘classics.’ These old texts have already been studied too much. Reading them is a waste of time in a world that is aching for new innovation and new ideas.”

In many ways, Mr. K was right. If the goal of reading the classics is the acquisition of facts (or “points”), then an AI summary will suffice. LLMs today can summarize faster and better than any undergrad philosophy major—and with none of the brash pretense. Even a luddite like myself cannot deny that the machine is correct when it tells me that, “For Kierkegaard, Abraham represents the knight of faith who, in absolute devotion to God, is willing to suspend universal ethics and trust the impossible ‘by virtue of the absurd.’ ” One might question if it could scratch the “deep esoteric layers” of a Platonic dialogue—but I would not be surprised if, with the right prompt and a high enough temperature setting, it could spit out an interpretation equally as fanciful as some of those I’ve heard in seminars.

AI summarization is something that the world of education, and particularly classical education, must reckon with if it is to show forth its value for young people growing up in the Intelligence Age. What is the value of the book if the ideas can be obtained separately from it? What is the value of the classroom if the explication of complex ideas no longer belongs to professors but can be accessed by all for free using pocket machines? Are the Critique of Pure Reason’s 900+ pages nothing more than an unnecessary obstacle to its ideas? Need the Bible still deliver God’s Word if one can instead ask AI to read, summarize, and preach the Gospel?

These several questions point toward a more fundamental one, which, I believe, needs to be at the heart of education in the next ten years: what counts as reading? If reading is the absorption of facts, books are useless; we should start burning libraries to make room for data centers. Perhaps reading is the way we teach children to think and communicate. But even if this is the case, why not put aside the parchment for the iPad? In the attention economy of today, teachers are asked to make their lessons more fun, more interesting, more stimulating, as if the learning of phonics could somehow induce the same fantastic dopamine hit one gets from a video game. Because children are increasingly exposed to higher amounts of stimulation, the only way for the teacher to keep up, seemingly, is to match that stimulation. All this results in the classroom looking like a PC cafe, the pencil like a magic wand.

How can we even mention the resuscitation of reading in the face of these changes? From a purely idealistic point of view, I cannot give an answer as to why the dead book should triumph over the chatbot or the screen. In experience, however, I am certain that the book is a better teacher of the human mind. To be clear, I am not here advocating that reading should be “fun” by modern standards. Reading deep books has never been and will never be “fun,” since instant gratification is increasingly the standard. Slowness and resistance are innate to reading, and this cannot change. As much as I may want to, I cannot torture Hegel into telling me how to understand him. The book is open, but alone it is silent. The onus is on me to make it speak. Almost in response to the book’s posture, I have to make myself open to letting another’s thought mix with mine. I have to ask the questions and I have to search for their answers. But with the search engine, and certainly with LLMs, the dialectic is split. I am only responsible for asking, while the machine is tasked with all the searching. And asking in the age of Google is often nothing more than the half-interested browse for an uninteresting answer. It is inauthentic, not really a searching at all but rather a skimming, a leafing, a scrolling. Real searching requires a more tenacious curiosity, a willingness to go out and see what really is, to be pleased when we find something true—whether it conforms to our expectations or not.

Don’t get me wrong: I will be the last to say I take pleasure in the ardor of reading. Many a time have I nearly fallen asleep with my nose buried in a book’s inner spine, the words transfigured into meaningless glyphs before my eyes. But something always grows in me when I pick up the same text the next day and, barely making it past the first paragraph, realize that I completely misunderstood what I thought I read. Thus commence the inglorious cycles of reading and rereading, interest and boredom, effort and resistance. At their least, these cycles cultivate grit and focus; at their most, they have the potential to be genuine preparation for the practice of human life. What the screen, the “agent,” the chatbot, and the machine share is their function as distance-closing, friction-eliminating tools. The book, on the other hand, does not respond so readily to my will, nor is it so willing to close the distance between my mind’s questions and the world’s answers.

Which one will be a better teacher of real life? I am made to think again of Mr. K’s claim about the future, which still calls out for a response: “Reading those books is a waste of time in a world that is aching for new innovation and new ideas.” We don’t need Plato anymore, he says; we need the next Plato. We don’t need Nietzsche; we need his philosophers of the future. Yes—and even with such hopes, it still seems to me that all such philosophers of the Intelligence Age will need three things: the vision to map out destinations beyond the known horizon; an openness to adapt to challenge and change; and the courage to embark down a road festooned with unforeseen troubles. These skills are obtainable, and I daresay even say teachable. But I doubt they will be obtained at all by a population that is unable to jockey with the real world—that is, the world of thoughts and things that do not conform themselves to our will.

We need the next Plato, but how will we be able to work toward the next when we are unwilling to study the previous? There are great distances to be traversed, and the future is farther from us than the past. The past may be buried under archaic language, forgotten concepts, faded and foreign cultures, but its remoteness is finite. The future, by contrast, is infinitely far off until we come to it—and in that future lies the security or demise of our humanity. If we expect education to prepare young people for what is coming, we cannot rob them of projects that will teach them to span great distances for themselves. Let them practice upon the great minds of the past. They must learn to work through the world’s inertia, to seek out answers to their own questions, to know the real ratio between effort and desire. Reading teaches precisely these skills. It is slow, it is embodied, and so it is edifying. Today will not be the last time that we will be asked, “Is it worth reading the classics at all?” Perhaps we can start by responding with this: that reading a dead book may still be the most valuable thing we can do to stay alive.