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Life is a fight, said the Apostle Paul, one of the Bible’s
great dignitaries of faith. I agree. Living out our
existence is like an exacting 15 round heavyweight fight.
Life is a race, the scholarly ecclesiastic also declared.
And it is. In fact, life is a marathon, to be more precise.
And now, having just completed my Ph.D. after a long, often
brutal eight-year journey, although I am tired, these
concluding words by Laurien Alexandre, Ph.D. provide me with
a second wind.
The speech was delivered just a few short hours prior to the
recent mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio’s Oregon District and
approximately a day and a half before the death of Toni
Morrison, our (and the world’s) remarkable and revered
literary genius.
Alexandre’s remarks are so relevant for such a time as this.
Here are a few excerpts.
“.. I usually tell
graduates during these Graduate School Commencement speeches
to go forth and be bold engaged scholar-practitioners. Go
forth to do powerful research, to write meaningful books and
blogs, to speak passionately about the causes you value. I
still want to tell you that. But today I am going to tell
you to go out and READ.
“No question, you’ve
learned that habit in your years in the program. A forced
habit I might add. Taking five random dissertations
published this year, you read a total of 350 books, 520
articles, 50 websites, blogs and white papers. That’s A LOT
of reading.
“So why am I talking about
reading today? It is because – reading is essential for a
healthy democracy.
“Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish intellectual and writer, who
died in 1936 after living years under house arrest and exile
for using his public voice and writings to condemn the
Spanish dictatorships wrote: ‘Fascism is cured by reading
and racism is cured by travel.’ For him, fascism meant
ignorance…and racism was the close-minded expression of
fear.
“But let me share a few
thoughts. At Commencement, I typically go back to Horace
Mann, Antioch’s founding president – so let’s start there.
“Mann’s statue on the
Boston State House lawn shows him holding a book. That’s
intentional. Mann believed that education – tax-supported
public education - could ultimately eliminate poverty, and
unite a society fragmented by class, race and gender. His
revolutionary idea - one that still seems contested today –
was that a high level of general education for women and
men, majority and minority - was good for all. Mann
believed that reading books could inspire students and open
minds. ‘A house without books,’ he wrote,
‘is like a room without windows.’
“It isn’t surprising Mann
believed in the power of reading. He drew heavily from
Transcendentalists, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who thought
reading was at the core of engaged democratic citizenship
and a necessary counterweight to blind allegiance and
ignorance.
“I’m sure if they were
alive today both would argue that reading was a necessary
counterweight to the lies that currently fill our public
discourse. Theirs was a vision of human potential tied to
learning how to read words and the world differently, a way
to develop the imaginative capacity to put oneself in the
place of others and to develop empathy and rise above
self-interest.
“Bottom line, for Mann
like Unamuno and others, there is nothing as costly as
ignorance. And, that’s why those who want to control what
others think and do, try to control reading.
“Think about that.
“Dictators know an
illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule, thus the history of
reading is replete with book bannings and burnings.
“Perhaps the most
ingrained in our recent memories are the bonfires across
World War II Germany, incinerating the texts of Freud and
Einstein, the books of Marx and Lenin, the novels of
Steinbeck, Hemingway, and so many more. They say over
million books were burned in those years.
“In his fabulous
History of Reading, Alberto Manguel recounted how during
his high school years, the Argentine military government
censored and banned books. It became dangerous to be seen in
cafes or streets with the poems of Pablo Neruda or books by
Steinbeck. The very fact of being in possession of a book
was sufficient grounds for imprisonment or worse.
“Let’s look in our own
country.
“We aren’t immune to
efforts to deny the freedom to read to others. Slave owners
were concerned that a ‘literate black population’ might find
dangerous ideas in books and if slaves could read the Bible,
then they could also read abolitionists’ texts and be
inspired by notions of revolt and possibilities of freedom.
Some states still had laws up to the mid-1800s that forbade
all blacks, whether slaves or free men (let alone women) to
be taught to read.
“More recently, literacy
tests were embedded in voter registration processes
throughout the Jim Crow South to deny African Americans the
right to vote; And bilingual ballots weren’t commonly
available until the mid 1970s making English-only ballots a
de facto literacy test for Spanish-speaking citizens.
“Imagine –the right to
vote depended on the right to read.
“During the 1950s’ Cold
War, the American Library Association felt compelled to
issue a public statement ‘defending the freedom to read’ and
fought proposals to burn textbooks perceived as
insufficiently patriotic.
“It’s not over.
“Between 2000-2010, the
Association received over 5,000 reports of challenges to
that freedom, efforts to remove, restrict or ban books. The
list of the most challenged books in the US invariably
includes Twain, Huxley, Salinger, Steinbeck and a
disproportionate number of black writers, such as Maya
Angelou, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright.
“Within the past several
years, we’ve witnessed Koran burnings in Florida. A
California-based nationalist group wanted to burn all the
books of ‘liberal, democratic values,’ which ironically, it
felt were contributing to the decline of our country! And
just last year, the Iowa director of a ‘pro family’ group
called for burning LBGTQ books from the public library live
on Facebook.
“Yes, these are one-offs
but they are frightening reminders of what can happen to
democracies.
“So, what is the state of
reading these days?
“Reading is at risk,
whether from reader apathy or from zealots’ zeal. The US
ranks # 22nd of all countries in terms of the
average reading hours per week. India and Thailand top with
about 10 hours. The US sits at less than 3.5 hours a week.
“The US ranks as only the
seventh most literate country in the world - quantified by
number of libraries, newspapers, years of schooling,
computer availability and so forth. And, according to
National Endowment of the Arts recent report, less than half
of all US adults read even one book a year if it isn’t for
work or school in 2017.
“If you believe reading is an essential practice of engaged
democratic citizenship,
these trends are disheartening at best and are deeply
frightening at worst.
READ WE MUST.
“Despite the ineffective
banning and showcase bonfires, ideas don’t burn and books
rise again. They come back even more powerfully as
survivors. After all, we’re still reading Freud, we’re
still debating Marx, we’re still getting lost in the novels
of Steinbeck and Morrison, and dreaming with the poems of
Neruda and Angelou. Authors never vanish and ideas don’t
disappear.
“A German Foundation has
plans to create a Library of Burned Books, to bring together
in one place all of the titles that went up in flames and
disappeared from public life. Now, those thousands of
authors will come back home again.
“And Argentinian artist
Marta Minjuin used 100,000 Nazi-prohibited books to
construct a Parthenon of Books, an ancient Greek symbol of
democracy, on the site of the 1930’s German book burnings.
She actually first constructed the statue on the streets of
Buenos Aires using 25,000 books taken from cellars where
they had been locked up by the Argentine military in the
mid1970s
“So, to my theme today -
Reading is a form of action. Don’t take it for granted.
“First, one reads to
educate oneself.
“As a form of personal and
professional development, reading really does matter. Not
that these are my heroes, but Warren Buffet says he reads
500 pages a day, Mark Cuban reads three hours a day, and
Bill Gates reads 50 books a year. For them, reading is a
necessary precondition of their leadership roles.
“But let’s go to reading
as an act of engaged democratic citizenship, an act of
empathy building, knowledge expanding. Book clubs – on site
and on line – are popping up everywhere. And libraries,
seemingly threatened a decade ago, today have become digital
hubs as well as physical spaces to gather, learn, work and
connect.
“Iranian author Azar
Nafasi, famous for Reading Lolita in Tehran, reminds
us that the reader, in selecting what to read, chooses to be
her own person and can take individual initiative to go
against the dictates of family, church or state. She argues
that believing in the Constitution’s ‘We the People,’ means
defending the right to free thought and imagination. And
that that right can only be guaranteed by the ‘active
participation of every one of us, citizen readers.’
“Nafasi dreams of creating
a Republic of the Imagination, as a ‘Nation of
readers, large and small, old and young, rich and poor, of
all colors and backgrounds, united by the shared sense that
books matter, that they open up a window into a more
meaningful life, that they enable us to tolerate complexity
and nuance and to empathize with people whose lives and
conditions are utterly different from our own.’
“So, let me conclude by
saying, as your PhD Director, I want to encourage you to go
read – to be proactive and irreverent now that you no longer
have residencies, learning achievements, and dissertations.
“Read for the joy of it.
Read for professional development. Read so that your bold
research, powerful voice, and compelling practice will be
well-informed.
“But more.
“As Emerson, Mann,
Unamuno, Manguel and Nafasi remind us, A well-read society
recognizes demagoguery and will reject it.
“As a citizen of a
democracy in turmoil, I encourage you to:
“Read without walls or
borders. Read to build bridges of understanding. Read to get
to know the other. Read about topics you don’t know much
about. Read about people who don’t look like you or live
like you. Read about places you’ve never been. Read about
places you want to go.
“Read as if our democracy
depends upon it.
“It does!”
Laurien Alexandre, PhD, is the provost of Antioch
University’s Graduate School of Leadership and Change, a
university division dedicated to preparing
scholar-practitioners to lead change that improves the lives
of those being served in organizations, workplaces, and
communities around the globe. During her over 30 years in
higher education, she has served in leadership roles at
Antioch University as well as the Immaculate Heart College
Center, an ecumenical institute devoted to research and
training on peace, justice and global concerns, where she
directed a teaching training (K-16) program on international
and multicultural classrooms. She also taught for over 10
years at California State University, Northridge, in the
Department of Mass Communications/Journalism where her focus
was on graduate courses in media analysis.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, D.Min, at
drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org
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