Reading is Fundamental

Thomas Piketty, John Edgar Wideman, and Orhan Pamuk walked along a corridor of my brain.

A few weeks ago I read French economist Thomas Piketty’s new book Nature, Culture and Inequality: A Comparative and Historical Perspective. It is a pithy book (especially compared to his famous text Capital in the Twenty First Century) which synthesizes his research on inequality and inegalitarian systems relying on the World Inequality Database. As he describes it, the database “allows us to track changes in the distribution of income and wealth over long periods- sometimes more than three centuries.” Piketty shows on the one hand that even as societies have moved toward greater egalitarianism since the mid 20th century, vast inequalities persist especially when it comes to wealth. And yet there are also dramatic differences in levels of inequality between nations.

There are three conclusions in the text that I think are especially important. One is that there is nothing natural about inequality, and he uses the example of Sweden to show how a country that was once very unequal can be made more egalitarian. Another is he makes a strong case for progressive taxation as a source of prosperity using the example of the. mid 20th century United States. Finally, he makes clear that climate disaster cannot be confronted adequately in such an unequal world where the excesses of the wealthy are not held back by the collective good.

The glaring absence in the text is the failure to take up the histories of slavery, Jim Crow and colonialism as clear causes for the persistence of inequality. The word race appears only once in the text. But, for example, when he criticizes Reaganism for its deceptiveness when it came to how to pursue prosperity, he doesn’t discuss how much the impetus of the Reagan revolution- to reject racial egalitarianism- explains why the Reagan era abandonment of a system which grew national prosperity was understood as a “victory” for the country. Likewise, when Piketty points to places that have extreme inequality (like South Africa) he fails to consider that they are places with dramatic histories of racial stratification and colonial exploitation and expropriation in contrast to past and present empires which maintain sizeable middle classes while still holding economic power over poorer nations which were often once colonies. The book is useful, as far as I am concerned, but there is a huge WHY that it never ventures into.

And this brings me to another book that I read a couple of weeks ago, John Edgar Wideman’s Slaveroad which has some aspects of literary modernism in that it is a single work of art but not at all a single form. Part memoir, part criticism, part fiction, Wideman describes the life we have inherited and that he has lived as a journey along the Slaveroad. Unlike Afropessimism, he isn’t saying that Black people continue to live as slaves but rather than slavery so shaped the modern world and its terms that it still shapes the grounds upon which we all live our lives- and WE are not just Black people. In the book, Wideman returns to some of the more devastating aspects of his own life: The four decades long incarceration of his brother, the incarceration of his son since adolescence, the death of his ex wife. And in that telling he weaves profound observations about William Henry Sheppard, a Black Presbyterian missionary to the Congo who behaved in all of the worst ways of missionaries. Indeed, reading Wideman made me rethink my decision to write about the far more noble George Washington Williams, an African American who rang the alarm about the violences of the Congo in my forthcoming book while avoiding Sheppard. But I digress. The point for me is this. I think it is essential to understand how to layer our understandings of paradigms that might explain the world as we live in it. The doctrinaire thinker chooses one explanation and treats it with conviction. But to become deeply educated about humanity I think we have to consider the interrelatedness of systems including how we are made as human beings. We feel hungry or full, the cold or the warmth of adequate heating, deprived or flush- inequality is an embodied experienced. And the location and phenotypic details of our bodies shuffle us in various ways.

Moreover, the persistence of inequality, the way it is gendered and racialized, can easily lead us to not only hoard but to invest in disassociating ourselves from others who are more vulnerable- others who have been classed this way or that. We race away from the bottom (pun intended.) Piketty tells us how dangerous that is, implicitly. Deep inequality is bad for the world, we feed it by constantly wanting to be better than others. Wideman shows us why the danger isn’t strong enough to compel us to behave better. And, he also shows that even those of us who have been historically and presently mistreated can participate, sometimes eagerly, in the injustices of others. I feel like I’ve been trying to say these things in one way or another over decades as have many others. But it bears repeating in many different ways.

And stories are among the best ways, because they operate on both intellectual and emotional terrain. Of course a good story can also distort the truth (see Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which comes up in Wideman’s work and my own- repeatedly.) But armed with a righteous moral imagination we can use the human need for story in the service of understanding the world with an eye towards bringing us closer to something like justice and decency.

Last thing: Tonight I went to hear Turkish Nobel Prize Laureate Orhan Pamuk speak about his new book: Memories of Distant Mountains, which includes paintings from his journals as well as narrative. I love Pamuk’s fiction and this was the first time I’ve seen him speak. At one point he made a pretty simple observation that just like a text a painting suggests a world view. But it made me think of what kinds texts we take at face value because of their form, as though they are straight forward documentation (which often happens with the work of economists for example.) Whereas with creative writing we assume some degree of subjectivity. But both always have a world view, just like a painting. That isn’t bad. Objectivity is perhaps the most fictional pretense possible. But what I see in the work of all three: Piketty, Wideman and Pamuk, is at once a mastery of concepts, artfulness and rigor, as well as world views, interpretations and commitments. And I think to be a good reader, is to contemplate about all of the above. Readers are partners in the lives of books.

At one point Pamuk also said that growing up he saw book reading more as a way to create oneself than a form of escapism pleasure although it was both of those things as well. That resonated so deeply with me. We become through reading as much as other life experiences. I become more fully as I read day be day. And I read broadly because I want to grow deep as well as wide. So I suppose that’s why I wanted to share these thoughts, to recommend these works on their own terms but also because together they illuminate something beyond what they each do alone. And that there’s something beautiful to becoming as a way of life.