Ben Sasse: By the Book

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/books/review/ben-sasse-by-the-book.html

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The junior senator from Nebraska and author, most recently, of “Them” says he and his wife would like their children to love books: “We want them to be addicted to reading.”

What books are on your nightstand?

“The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education From the Inside Out,” by Clayton Christensen and Henry J. Eyring. “Calvin and Augustine,” by B. B. Warfield. “The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place,” by Andy Crouch. “Across Five Aprils,” by Irene Hunt. “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” by James Agee and Walker Evans. “Our Young Folks’ Plutarch,” by Rosalie Kaufman.

Our 7-year-old regularly tries to get into bed with us, and he’s figured out that his odds of success are higher if he brings an interesting book. The last three of these have arrived with him in recent weeks.

Tell us about the last great book you read.

“The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” by C. S. Lewis, which we finished six weeks ago — see previous point about the enterprising 7-year-old. There are many themes and lines worth turning over in your mouth and head for a lifetime, but one that my children keep coming back to is the power of the white witch to keep it “always winter and never Christmas” in Narnia.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

I’m currently obsessed with how fast our understanding of the human brain is changing. There’s a Moore’s Law in terms of neurological imaging. What we’re learning about the brain — and especially about the frontal lobe of teenagers — is doubling every 18 to 24 months now. Most of what I’m learning in this space is coming from articles and meetings with neurological researchers, but some scholars are starting to write important books on the “so-whats” of bathing our brains in too much technology. Right now, my favorite work in this space is Cal Newport’s “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.”

Everyone should also read or reread Sherry Turkle’s excellent “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.” Mary Aiken’s “The Cyber Effect: An Expert in Cyberpsychology Explains How Technology Is Shaping Our Children, Our Behavior, and Our Values — And What We Can Do About It” is well worth a read.

What books do you think most accurately depict Washington?

I’m a fan of Joanne Freeman, but I hope that her new book — “The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War” — doesn’t end up feeling like an accurate depiction of present-day Washington.

What books best capture your own political principles?

Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” is the simplest answer. All governance east of Eden is imperfect. Democratic republicanism is the best form of government when it is functioning well, but instant, majoritarian mob rule is one of the most grotesque when it is moving fast. The conservatism with which I identify is humble about the dangers always around the next corner, and therefore it labors to be grateful for every spark of thick localistic community built on volunteerism and neighborly affection.

I think the most important American book on political philosophy is “The Federalist Papers,” by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay (and I am certain I will heartily recommend whatever project eventually flows from all of the commentary Harvey Mansfield has recently been offering on those founding federalist efforts). The most important book on America remains Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” And for teaching high school and college students, there’s really not much better than the Declaration of Independence.

What books would you recommend to somebody who wants to know more about Nebraska?

A compilation of the Associated Press college football polls from 1970 through 2001. Willa Cather’s “O, Pioneers!” is also pretty decent (although “Death Comes for the Archbishop” is my favorite Cather work).

Your children are home-schooled. What books do you have them read?

Melissa (my wife) and I think it’s important to distinguish between habits and content. Perhaps most importantly, we want them to be addicted to reading. To that end, we’ve been trying to build into them a desire to join “the Century Club,” which requires reading 100 books in 365 days. None of them have succeeded yet, but one of our teenagers might this coming year. To ensure that they don’t prioritize easy-quantity over quality, Melissa and I take an active role in the selection of every other book.

I just checked in on our teenage daughters and one of them was reading “Dracula”; the other is reading “Great Expectations.”

Are there books you feel all American children should read?

I devoted a chapter of “The Vanishing American Adult” to trying to build a “five-foot bookshelf” — of 60 books — that we would regard as a kind of evolving “family canon.” I wrestled there with how I think the canon fights often devolve into an endless argument about what book or identity group is being excluded at the arbitrary line between book 60 and 61, or between book 200 and 201. So I want to be clear that I don’t think our “family canon” is the only canon for every American family, but I do strongly believe that every American family should be developing their own canon of books they read together and repeatedly — and moreover that we should be comparing our lists with those of our neighbors and fellow citizens, so that we might enrich one another.

As we considered a thousand-plus candidate books for our canon, we ultimately decided to segment that work by limiting ourselves to 12 categories with a maximum of five books each. Our categories include big themes like: God, Greek Roots, Shakespeare, the American Idea, Markets, American Fiction, a Humanistic Perspective on Science, etc. Our category on Tyrants and Totalitarianism, for example, includes Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” F. A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” and “The Communist Manifesto,” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Which books do you think capture the current social and political moment in America?

I’ve been aching over Robert Putnam’s “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis” for two years straight. It was widely praised, but still not enough. We ought to be talking constantly about the troubling data Professor Putnam has uncovered. There really are “two different Americas,” but not in the way the phrase lingers in our ears because of how John Edwards’s presidential campaign in 2004 branded the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Putnam shows that the troubling resurgence of socioeconomic class in America centers primarily around the divide between the mobile educated elite (31 percent of our neighbors, according to Putnam) and the majority of America — the 69 percent of kids he says are born into a house with no college graduates. These children have collapsing family structures, decreasing socioeconomic mobility and rapidly thinning networks of kith and kin. I like J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” but Putnam’s work is, I think, the big backdrop for understanding the vicious cycle of how declining economic opportunities for the non-educationally credentialed and family and neighborhood collapse are becoming mutually reinforcing for broad swaths of America.

A close second: Nicholas Eberstadt’s “Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis.”

Which fiction or nonfiction writers inspired you most early your career?

Before I became a historian, I worked as a business strategist for companies and nonprofits trying to navigate the digital revolution. One big problem, though, was that at the front of that wave, most of us were blind to what was arriving. Nicholas Negroponte’s “Being Digital” offered baby steps into seeing how the I.T. revolution was going to upend sector after sector. It is obviously dated in important ways now, but I think we still aren’t reflecting nearly enough on the transformation of our sense of place as the economy is moving from being primarily about atoms to primarily about bits.

Similarly, Michael Lewis’s brilliant “Moneyball” is not really just about the transformation of baseball scouting; it is about the arrival of big data in everyday life. Before anyone had envisioned Uber and Lyft triumphing over the old taxi industry, Lewis was already seeing around the corner to how life is going to be transformed by digital technologies that will allow us to glimpse what the guy two floors up whom we don’t know is about to make for dinner, so that we can decide if we want to buy two servings of the dish.

Which historians and biographers do you most admire? Why?

As I’ve taught more — and particularly, as I’ve done more after-action evaluation on which books actually make a difference in the lives of students and friends — I’ve come to value more books and writers that economize well. Many people know the old joke that “I wrote a 500-page dissertation because I didn’t have time to write a 200-page dissertation,” but it remains true that there’s a major difference between the “order of discovery” and the “order of presentation.” We authors need to realize that not everything we’ve learned is really worth our readers’ time. We should be doing some of the work of culling and prioritizing for them.

For example, over time I’ve come to prefer Robert Dallek to Robert Caro for a biography of Lyndon Johnson. Both of them are brilliant, and Caro’s details are amazing, but there’s a lot more bang per paragraph in Dallek’s 400 pages than in Caro’s 3,000-plus-page version.

Are there genres you avoid?

I intentionally read no modern fiction. I wish it weren’t so, but life is short, work is full and kids are under our roof only for a short time. When I read fiction, I want a community of discourse to vouch for the fact that it’s already stood the test of a bit of time.

How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or several simultaneously? Morning or night?

I read articles in the gym in the morning on a tablet or phone. Then I print out a stack of them that I carry around with me throughout the workday. But when I’m getting into bed, I prefer a book to articles — and I move to exclusively paper. I don’t want any temptations to be drawn back into the immediacy of a phone with its demonic alerts.

Another recent innovation in my life is when I’m getting into a new book, I often download a few podcasts or book talks with the author and go on a long walk. Then I return to the printed words after having gotten more familiar with the author’s spoken words. The back-and-forth between forms helps me get up to speed with his or her argument more quickly.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

For a Nebraska kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Nebraska football was a quasi-religion, so I ran out to get The Omaha World-Herald every morning, salivating for the sports page. My dad, however, required that I read one front page story and one editorial before I was allowed to turn to the sports. Soon after my newspaper addiction was firmly established, the habit of reading spilled over to many typical children’s series: the Hardy Boys, Jack London, the Great Brain, the Boxcar Children. (I also spent an insane amount of time with the Guinness Book of World Records and various sports almanacs.)

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

There is a joke in here somewhere about 2 Corinthians, but I’m going to pass. Perhaps Barry Schwartz’s “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less,” or James K. A. Smith’s “You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit.”

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Martin Luther would be the headliner of any “dead-or-alive dinner party” I would ever throw. He is, quite simply, one of the most fascinating brains and compelling personalities in history. So I’d huddle with him first, and ask his advice on what additional two we should invite from among the shortlist of: William Shakespeare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Frederick Douglass, G. K. Chesterton, Flannery O’Connor and Martin Luther King Jr.

(He doesn’t seem to fit with this crowd, but I actually think Euclid would be pretty dang fun at a dinner party. And then I suspect making him respond to Lobachevsky would be mind-blowing.)

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I think lots of 300-page books could (and should) have been 30-page articles, but neither magazines nor book publishers have much of a market for 30 pages. I don’t need to gratuitously slap modern writers, but I’d probably make this critique of three-quarters of the books I’ve speed-read this year.

Whom would you want to write your life story?

There are far better things for folks to be reading and writing. My life is too mundane for anyone to write up.

What do you plan to read next?

My desk is stacked full of articles on cyber. As context for them, I’m looking forward to both Annie Jacobsen’s “The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of Darpa, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency” and Franklin Foer’s “World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech.”