Literatures Are Superior to Canons

Deep conversations among experts are more intellectually rewarding than superficial conversations among generalists

Henry Farrell has an interesting discussion of the book cultures of Silicon Valley and DC. It seems that, in the former, the founder and funder set have been quite anxious to define their shared culture through a canon of works. Farrell is responding to Tanner Greer, who has a rather flattering take on the proffered Silicon Valley canons. Personally, when I look at these lists what I see is a rather unfocused set of pop nonfiction (and not even blog posts, but blogs per se) alongside science fiction and some fantasy. Nothing wrong with that on its face, of course. Few appreciate scifi and fantasy more than I. And pop nonfiction books by genuine experts like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow can be a great entry into a scholarly field for outsiders.

But the problem is that they are often treated as the last stop rather than the starting point. The portrait that Greer and Farrell draw is of generalist readers who go through dozens of pop nonfiction books on every topic under the Sun but never go any deeper than that into any of the topics raised. If this does not accurately describe every single “Silicon Valley intellectual” (Patrick Collison, though mentioned in both posts, is very much not of this mold, for example), it apparently describes the intellectual culture of the tech professional community, very much driven from the top.

Farrell argues that “the differences between Washington DC and Silicon Valley are more the product of different political economies of elite reproduction than of different individualized propensities to read books and derive internal lessons and satisfaction from them.” That is certainly true, at least from the zoomed-out height at which Farrell and Greer are observing those cultures.

My own personal reading has essentially nothing to do with my career, though it has a great deal to do with the work we do at Liberal Currents, of course. But mostly it’s because I find some questions interesting, and I try to find what answers have been offered to them. In my 20s, I certainly was reading a lot of pop nonfiction. I read Kahneman’s book, as well as every book by Nassim Taleb; I read The Long Tail by Chris Anderson and Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. I listened to EconTalk and This Week in Tech and other commentary podcasts and kept up with the kinds of books they discussed.

The result was an extremely superficial engagement with a wide variety of topics. That would be bad enough, but the problem is that this kind of conversational community tends to breed confidence rather than humility at the same time it is encouraging superficiality.

If what you are looking to do is indulge your intellectual curiosity rather than advancing your career in tech, I would encourage you to invest real effort at surveying various scholarly literatures. I do not mean becoming a world class expert yourself (at that point you might as well try to make a career out of that field). I mean something between that and just reading one book on the topic (perhaps just to stay current with the conversations among the audience of particular podcasts).

Pop nonfiction by its nature is biased towards offering simple (if sometimes purposefully counterintuitive) answers to questions that a general reader might have about a topic. But even the most academic, nuanced, and cautious books offer just one perspective; where they might not offer singular answers, they will nevertheless offer a single perspective on what the important questions are.

What I want to suggest is that you can gain much more by reading 3-5 books in a literature than 20 pop nonfiction books on 10 different topics. Indeed, even 3-5 papers on a topic can often be more valuable than the latter. When you engage with the work of multiple subject matter experts on the same topic or overlapping topics, you get a better sense of the kinds of questions that are relevant to those experts, whether or not there’s much agreement on the best available answers the field can produce for those questions. In short, you become able to participate, to a limited degree, in a conversation of far higher quality.

Here are some books I have read and found valuable:

• Nationalism by Ernest Gellner

• Nations by Azar Gat

• The Deadly Ethnic Riot by Donald Horowitz

• One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict by Russell Hardin

• Ethnicity and Electoral Politics by Jóhanna Kristín Birnir

I want to know more about why some ethnically diverse societies are orderly and peaceful and others are not, or why some ethnic groups in such societies can live peacefully with one another and others seem caught in intractable patterns of conflict. I want to know whether democratic and liberal institutions have encouraged peace or exacerbated conflict (or proved irrelevant to some underlying dynamic), and why. There are literatures on nationalism, there are literatures on ethnic conflict; and there are a lot of scholars who have touched on the topics or adjacent ones with a wide variety of approaches.

The five books above are a great starting point for thinking about that line of questioning. Moreover, they raise questions one might never have thought to ask before reading them. I am certainly not an expert on ethnic conflict now for having read these works and others like them. But I do feel I have a better sense of the literature, of the general outline of what is known.

Nor would I say the five above are the beginnings of some kind of “canon.” There are other books and papers in the nationalism and ethnic conflict literature that will serve you just as well as these served me. There’s a large set of influential past works and there’s a scholarly community that is still producing new work. Offering recommendations is helpful for people who are trying to get started but trying to crystalize around a Canon seems to me a rather superficial and intellectually bankrupt endeavor.

Subject matter expertise is valuable. When I read Farrell’s post I was puzzled at how investing a lot of time and effort into developing deep topic expertise could ever be perceived as a bad thing, or indeed somehow anti-intellectual. I’m still more generalist than not, but for that very reason I’m extremely grateful for the specialists who are producing works that are available not just for their peers, but for people like me as well.