Reading is listed under the interests or hobbies in almost every vitae I have encountered in Lebanon. Do you know how many people have I met in the last four years who were interested in philosophy? At many points, I felt stupid so I tried to read about the philosophers they mentioned and I got stuck for hours trying to understand one line of the definition of one's philosophical ideas. How do all those people read a book about Heidegger in a week? How can they understand Nietzsche's ideas in hours? By the way, it is currently trendy to have Nietzsche as your favorite philosopher in Lebanon. There has been a shift in the last decade from the admiration of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates; those guys are outdated. You are only an intellect if you admire Nietzsche.
In an effort to organize my thoughts, let me define reading. "Reading is a complex process of decoding symbols in order to derive a meaning". Once the meaning is derived, I don't believe it can be lost in a relatively short time. However, talking to those geniuses, most of them are out of it. Why is that?
We are diagonal readers or even worse, we are last page readers. We are superficial readers who once we get one idea of what we read, we dwell on it. We read one idea and then analyze it and talk about our analysis for hours thinking we got the point of the writer. We are so smart, we do not have to read the rest.
If you don't like to read just admit it. Saying nothing due the lack of knowledge is way better than talking with the lack of the real understanding. Knowing a little from many things is good but it has to come after knowing a lot from one thing at least. People admire and listen to those who talk with sense and one can only talk with sense about something if one knows it well.
I cannot wait for a device linked to a search engine that one can carry and it beeps every time somebody says something inaccurate. I swear to you this machine will be playing symphonies as you sit with many people around here. Worse than that, there is a common Lebanese quote: "Talking is tax free" translated from "El 7aki Ma 3li joumrouk". This really reflect the sense of forgiveness that people have towards inaccurate speakers. Forgiveness is great but not when the distortion of knowledge is concerned. Knowledge is not show-off, it is a tool when combined with self-experience generates deep self-understanding and facilitates the understanding of the surroundings.
In an effort to organize my thoughts, let me define reading. "Reading is a complex process of decoding symbols in order to derive a meaning". Once the meaning is derived, I don't believe it can be lost in a relatively short time. However, talking to those geniuses, most of them are out of it. Why is that?
We are diagonal readers or even worse, we are last page readers. We are superficial readers who once we get one idea of what we read, we dwell on it. We read one idea and then analyze it and talk about our analysis for hours thinking we got the point of the writer. We are so smart, we do not have to read the rest.
If you don't like to read just admit it. Saying nothing due the lack of knowledge is way better than talking with the lack of the real understanding. Knowing a little from many things is good but it has to come after knowing a lot from one thing at least. People admire and listen to those who talk with sense and one can only talk with sense about something if one knows it well.
I cannot wait for a device linked to a search engine that one can carry and it beeps every time somebody says something inaccurate. I swear to you this machine will be playing symphonies as you sit with many people around here. Worse than that, there is a common Lebanese quote: "Talking is tax free" translated from "El 7aki Ma 3li joumrouk". This really reflect the sense of forgiveness that people have towards inaccurate speakers. Forgiveness is great but not when the distortion of knowledge is concerned. Knowledge is not show-off, it is a tool when combined with self-experience generates deep self-understanding and facilitates the understanding of the surroundings.
You are sooo right. I wish that liar detector existed too.
ReplyDeleteI think that this process of reading without understanding is going to get worse as people watch more TV and play to video games, they lose the ability to pay attention.
I beg to differ on the TV and the video game. I am pretty sure if those two are managed well they might actually enhance critical thinking. This is actually a matter of debate still, I just googled it and it gave many results on this issue.
ReplyDelete