Do Books Even Matter?
- Josiah Mitchell
- Feb 13, 2021
- 4 min read
Imagine for a moment a strange world in which the internet doesn’t exist. Don’t panic! It's only in your imagination! Without Google and other such browsers, where do you turn to find the source of your academic questions? Out of habit you may start asking, “Hey Siri”—but no! Remember Siri doesn’t exist for the time being! Again I ask, where does one find knowledge in this strange world seemingly robbed of easily accessible information? Allow me to terminate your consternation and give you the answer: it’s books! Books have the power of written words and can be useful, entertaining, and enlightening. What impact can books have on society? Let’s take a look!
Books have been around for centuries and although the exact date for the first book ever written does vary, it is factual that books have had a massive sway in politics, modern thinking, religion, and leisure. When reading for leisure, books can hold one’s attention for hours and time flies by. “The Importance of Books,” is an article written by an unspecified author for The School of Life which claims that reading books for fun can bring about the best in people. By reading a novel, we see the main characters' life in black and white, simplified in their drama, yet robust in their plot. The author states that, ideally, “Through books’ benign simplification, we become a little better at who we always really were”, meaning that books can bring about the best in people, making them more compassionate and feeling, or even more confident and assertive.
In spite of the fact that some say books can bring about the best in people, books can also bring about the worst in people. Harken back with me to May 10, 1933 in Germany where it seemed that pleasant bonfires were being lit and folks were celebrating. Upon closer investigation you will notice the large ashes that rose from the flames are ashes that still bear resemblance to pages. That’s right, university students were standing around the bonfire, throwing in books from authors such as Hellen Keller (whom they deemed as less than human), Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. Using statistics from an article named Book Burning in Germany, 1933, over twenty-five thousand books were burned that night. Think of the waste of knowledge, the mindful destruction of human intellect, simply based on bigotry! The Nazi party discarded years of research in order to promote their political agenda.
On their own, books aren’t meaningful. Simply pages bound in an outer covering, without insight and understanding, books are worthless. What’s inside a book, that’s where the importance lies. It wasn’t the books themselves that Germans were burning, it was the knowledge contained therein. R. C. Sproul explained how he came to understand why the Germans wanted to burn such books and undermine their wisdom. When working at a hospital as a garage sweeper in 1959, Sproul met an older man who worked alongside him sweeping. After Sproul mentioned being a college student, the older man asked what he was studying, to which Sproul replied, “Philosophy.” The older man was delighted, and Sproul came to find out that his friend was German and had been a professor of philosophy in Germany at the time Hitler came to power. Sproul states Hitler and the Nazis “sought to eliminate intellectuals whose ideas were at odds with the ‘values’ of the Third Reich.” Sproul then continued to tell how his friend spoke against such actions and, as a result, the man’s wife and almost all of his children were arrested and promptly executed. Thus, Sproul states the weighty sentences, “I was pushing a broom because I lived in a culture that sees little value in philosophy and gives scant esteem to those who pursue it. My friend was pushing a broom, on the other hand, because he came from a culture that gave great weight to philosophy. His family was destroyed because Hitler understood that ideas are dangerous.” (Consequences of Ideas, Understanding the Concepts That Shape our World, page 8-9)
Books do have an influence on society. One may want to read with a grain of salt, assessing if an author is merely trying to push an agenda or use clickbait and filler stories. An example for such comes from a writer named Kelly McMichael. McMichael is an avid, enthusiastic reader therefore she writes how reading has influenced her worldview in a blog named How the Books We Read Shape Our Lives. McMichael asks, “How have books shaped my life?” To which she answers saying, “They [books] have reinforced values I was taught in my home. They have made me question the values I was taught in my home. They have opened my eyes to entirely new places and ways of being. They have made me open and accepting of difference.” These seem to be positive aspects of book reading, but one must see a book’s opinion through the lens of their own worldview, without accepting what is written as law, unless the opinion’s stated are clearly parallel to one’s own beliefs. Otherwise, we are no better off than university students burning thousands of books for political gain.
R.C. Sproul, The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts that Shaped Our World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 8-9.
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