Fine, just read ONE good book!

Joseph Sobran

"To know a single old book well, even if it hasn’t been canonized as a “classic,” is to have a certain anchorage you can’t get from most contemporary writing.

There are no particular classics, not even Shakespeare, that you “must” read. But you should find a few meritorious old writers you find absorbing and not only read them, but live with them, until they become voices in your mind — a sort of internal council you can consult at any time.

When you internalize an author whose vision or philosophy is both rich and out of fashion, you gain a certain immunity from the pressures of the contemporary. The modern world, with its fads, propaganda, and advertising, is forever trying to herd us into conformity. Great literature can help us remain fad-proof.

The modern world is like a perpetual Nuremburg rally: everything that was wrong with Nazi Germany is more or less typical of other modern states, even those states that imagine they are the opposite of Nazi Germany. Political enemies usually turn out to be cousins, whose most violent differences are essentially superficial, masking deeper agreements in principle. Stalin, Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill were closer to each other than they realized; so are Bill Clinton and Slobodan Milosevic.

When confronted with a new topic or political issue, I often ask myself what Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, or James Madison — or, among more recent authors, George Orwell, C.S. Lewis, or Michael Oakeshott — would have thought of it. Not that these men were always right: that would be impossible, since they often disagree with each other. The great authors have no specific “message.”

But at least they had minds of their own. They weren’t mere products of the thought-factory we call public opinion, which might be defined as what everyone thinks everyone else thinks. They provide independent, poll-proof standards of judgment, when the government, its schools, and the media, using all the modern techniques of manipulation, try to breed mass uniformity in order to make us more manageable.

It’s up to us to maintain some detachment, and the literature of the past helps make this possible. That’s why tyrannical governments usually try to control, marginalize, or even abolish that literature, especially religious literature. This need not be achieved by overt censorship; it can be done through school curricula, or in the name of “the separation of church and state.”"