I’m of two minds about Facebook threads.
The concerns of others barging into my equanimity distract, often irk: a happy reunion of unidentified chums, a miscellaneous sunset. Some use Facebook to vaunt, others to amuse, others to groan. I never post on Facebook – why would I, when I deluge intimates daily with huge helpings of me?
I tell myself not to open the Facebook threads of marginal acquaintances: why fritter precious concentration? But then, oh what the hell, why not peek, and next thing you know…
Sometimes – not often, but often enough – I happen on a motherlode of substance. As this (presented in a chipper, pastel graphic):
SURPRISING BOOK FACTS
· 33% of High School Graduates never read another book the rest of their lives
· 42% of college grads never read another book after college
· 57% of new books are not read to completion
· 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years
· 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year
· The more a child reads, the likelier they are to understand the emotions of others
· Reading one hour per day in your chosen field will make you an international expert in 7 years
The data is not sourced, but its arranger must be a book purveyor, hoping to guilt potential customers into incremental purchases (good luck with that). Syntax, punctuation, information selection, and vocabulary strike me as semi-literate, odd for such an assignment. (Why capitalize High School Graduates, while consigning “college grads” to lower case? How do we know reading correlates with empathy? What’s an “international expert” – and why use a number for 7 while spelling out “five”?) As for that 57%, count me in. “Reading to completion” should reflect admiration not assiduity. I seldom read new books through; after a few pages, I get the gist and enough already.
These schoolmarmish edits aside, the maker of this graphic is my co-religionist. Reading teaches us to decode and decide like no other brainwork. Movies, music, screens may beguile, console, but a paragraph is a logic machine which demands our participation and enforces our attention to achieve any useful result. You’ve got to work at reading, and that exercise enhances your capacity. I buy that kids who read are more empathetic, for what is empathy but understanding? “Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves, which they do not desire for the rest of mankind,” observed Spinoza. Thinking, in other words, makes us nicer. And reading teaches us to think.
Yet we read – and think – less and less. Partly it’s laziness: thinking is harder than devouring sensations. Partly, a superabundance of temptations disrupts the stillness reading requires. Partly, reading isn’t cool anymore, as it was before electronics, when reading was new. I see nothing that will reverse this slide into bovine acquiescence. The less we work our brains, the stupider we’ll get, and that stupidity will cost us. It’s costing us now. I’ll bet you anything, non-reading correlates with support for Trump, who celebrates ignorance as worthier than thought. It is so if you feel it so! (Good luck with that too!)
Diagnosing Americans’ malaise is the pundits’ quandary du jour. What’s bugging us? Income inequality, class resentment, disinformation, and the pandemic are trotted out as explanations. I opt for the corrosion of community and abandonment of thought. Less and less we’re using either our hearts or our heads. If eighty percent of adult Americans didn’t read a book last year, what will train them to think? Our brains are turning couch-potatoes, all flab, subject to early death.