[M]an's greatest strength lies in his capacity for irrelevance. In the midst of pestilences, wars and famines, he builds cathedrals; and a slave, he can think the irrelevant and unsuitable thoughts of a free man. The spirit is slave to fever and beating blood, at the mercy of an obscure and tyrannous misfortune. But irrelevantly, it elects to dance in triple measure—a mounting skip, a patter of descending feet.
~ Aldous Huxley in Antic Hay, 1923
If "well-read" means "not missing anything," then nobody has a chance. If "well-read" means "making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully," then yes, we can all be well-read. But what we've seen is always going to be a very small cup dipped out of a very big ocean, and turning your back on the ocean to stare into the cup can't change that.
"Well read" when said of Thomas Jefferson (The League's example) or David Foster Wallace, or a witty conversationalist one meets at a cocktail party certainly does not mean "not missing anything." And "making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully" doesn't seem very helpful for those who wish to be "well read."
A natural way to interpret the phrase is in terms of a list of must reads, works anyone must have read in order to be "well read"—as The League points out, however, if this list is identified with the canon as taught in high school, it seems problematic. How was it chosen? Why Thomas Hardy, whom every schoolboy hates?
If custom, or even whim, dictates some of the members of the high school English class canon, how can we separate out the wheat from the chaff? I think there is definitely a unique set of problems which arise post-20th century for this endeavor.
1. Maybe sufficient longevity of popularity is enough to ensure the read-worthiness of some works (e.g. The Iliad or Shakespeare), but this process is open to artificial corruption (e.g. continued "popularity" of Thomas Hardy as measured in sales of books to students for whom it is required), requires culling itself (e.g. must one today have read Caesar's Gallic Wars to be well read? Even if that might have been the case 200 years ago in England?), and, perhaps most importantly, does not apply to contemporary works which one must read to be "well read."
Strangely, Ebert's musings are set off by reminiscing about authors considered required reading in the mid-20th century, but whom have become forgotten, irrelevant, or both:
"Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his "field") is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Lillian Hellman, John Crowe Ransom, Stephen Spender, Daniel Fuchs, Hugh Kenner, Seymour Krim, J.F. Powers, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Rahv, Jack Richardson, John Auerbach, Harvey Swados--or Trilling himself?" [Ebert quotes Ozick]
But this brings us to:
2. Being "well read" seems context specific. Certainly, temporally context specific—if Ebert's discussion is presumed to be relevant, than a greater onus falls upon he who would be "well read" to pursue the top works of his own time, than those of the past. Or, to put it in the above terminology, his culling of contemporary works is assumed to be less severe.
Also, here, one might want to add cultural or geographic context specificity. Can the "well read" Englishman and the "well read" Spaniard be expected to read the same (or even largely the same) books? Surely one is to read Shakespeare in the original and the other to read Cervantes. But in an age of increasing informational contact between cultures, how much from outside and how much from within is the "well read" supposed to consume? Am I expected to read every Nobel Prize winner? Has anyone? What if their works have not been translated into my language? And also here, one must temper the value of such works by the cost of translation: a lesser work by a writer of one's native language may have a greater positive effect in improving one's rhetorical and linguistic skills (marks of the "well read"?) than a superior work translated from the original.
3. The problems of media and genre. The League rightfully defends the value of cultivating genre interests. Part of the benefit of being "well read" comes in uncovering layers of meaning in new works, of spotting allusions, of recognizing influences and references, of fully understanding the language they use—yet this endeavor seems possible today only within a narrowly defined genre / medium. Although I cannot grasp all the languages in communicative use today, I may be able to grasp the language of film, of poetry, of comics, of the mystery novel, the sci-fi novel, the pot-boiler, or some other one or handfull of the myriad niche markets which have arisen.
As the amount of available information increases, inevitably, the expected overlap in background knowledge diminishes. While a British novelist in the nineteenth century might have been able to assume a broad familiarity with Shakespeare and Chaucer and major Latin works amongst his readers (hmm, here also contextualization by class?), the modern writer can make no such assumptions. Within the confines of genre, however, expectations are heightened. If you would only be reading this piece were you a fan already, and being a fan implies reading such and such other pieces, then the writer / creator can assume you've read them, and reference them and build on them. Ideally, heightening the complexity of their work (and also your enjoyment of it). Not that things always work out this way.
I think these worries speak against the possibility of a list of canonical works for the "well read." I don't think this defeats the possibility of being "well read," though. To me, the word refers to one who has read widely, but also has digested and internalized the information he consumed. There must be a familiarity with classics, particularly those which shaped modern thought and language (Shakespeare on every list here). In terms of contemporary works, allowances for culling must be made. I would not withhold the term "well read" from someone just because they had not read (say) David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, even though that work is superior to most of those on Ebert's list. It's simply too much to expect.
Perhaps, though, the bottom line is just that to be "well read" is no longer meaningful. One could read the works that made one "well read" once upon a time, yet not achieve the same effect—understanding the context of every remark, catching every reference, spotting and understanding every allusion. And no alternative strategy seems able to achieve that effect either.
By 'order' we shall throughout describe a state of affairs in which a multiplicity of elements of various kinds are so related to each other that we may learn from our acquaintance with some spatial or temporal part of the whole to form correct expectations concerning the rest, or at least expectations which have a good chance of proving correct.
This definition of order is supposed to rule out chaotic systems like gas in a box or a climate. In such chaotic systems, local interactions do not necessarily give you information about global properties of the system. The bumping of two molecules together does not tell me anything about the overall density of a gas in a box. The weather in Calcutta does not tell me anything about the weather in La Paz.
A natural interpretation of Hayek's definition of order as applied to an economy might be something like this: a local interaction (say, exchange of money for a good) tells us something about global properties of the system (say, the marginal exchange rate of that good). This relationship between local and global properties depends upon the equilibria which develop in economic systems. Because local interactions produce global equilibria, I can learn about such equilibria from the local interactions in which I participate.
However, there is a problem here. Hayek has attempted to define a property internal to the system (its degree of order) in terms of the epistemic access of some agent interacting with the system. This definitional strategy does not (cannot?) take into account an important property of information: information is profligate—information is never monogamous!
What this means is simply that a local interaction contains information about an arbitrarily large number of complicating factors. The agent, attempting to derive "correct expectations" about the rest of the system has no principled way to determine which factors are potentially relevant to his local interaction.
Consider, for example, the case of beer in airports. On average in the U.S., the price of beer in airports is about double that in a regular street bar. If I walk into an airport bar and purchase a beer, the information I receive is qualitatively different from that I receive if I walk into my neighborhood dive bar. The transaction in the dive bar tells me something about the global marginal exchange rate of beer. The transaction in the airport bar tells me something about the marginal exchange rate of beer in airports. But how do I know that the fact that I am in an airport is relevant? We are trying to understand the informational content of a local interaction—how do I even know that I am in an airport?
Both the determination that I am in an airport and the determination that, in this case, the location of my exchange is relevant to the global information I receive from my transaction depend crucially on background knowledge. However, background knowledge is a property of the agent, not the system itself. So, Hayek's definition seems deficient in its attempt to define a property of the system in terms of the epistemological access of a potential agent.
Consider a final example: local beer in a Turkish airport costs roughly the same as local beer in an American airport. Now, suppose I am an American businessman traveling to the Middle East and I have a brief stopover in Turkey. I only see the inside of an airport and during my stopover I purchase a beer at an airport bar. What do I learn? On the basis of my background knowledge, I might deduce that the price of booze in Turkey is roughly that of booze in the U.S. This deduction makes sense on the assumption that the relationship between the cost of airport beer and everyday bar beer is the same in both countries.
However, I would be completely incorrect! As it turns out, the price of local beer at everyday bars in Turkey is about a third that of beer at everyday bars in the U.S. So, on the one hand, I have grossly overestimated the cost of beer in Turkey. On the other hand, the cost of hard liquor, since it is mostly imported, is approximately twice that in the U.S.—by generalizing to all booze, I have gone wrong again. Both assumptions (based reasonably on my background knowledge)—that beer in airports is twice that in an ordinary bar, and that the relative price of different types of booze tracks that in the U.S.—were in error. Again, if an agent's epistemic access is built into the definition, then the informational property defined is inherently relative to the agent's background knowledge and cannot distinguish a property purely internal to the system.
