We are reading less. We are reading worse. Should we worry?
Statistics abound. The slide away from reading for pleasure – reading stories, reading reasoning, reading at length – is incessant and precipitous. Sure, we read road signs, texts, captions, instructions, jokes – enough to get by. We remain, in a rudimentary sense, literate. But we do not use language to think, wonder, ponder, understand. Complexity and nuance vex us. Cut to the chase. Give us the bottom line.
As a word guy, language on a page is my chief means of comprehension. I must say to see. I’d be dumb as a post without vocabulary and syntax. Sentences tug me out of perplexity and despair. But there are other ways to process being. Music, the visual arts, mathematics, algorithmic logic – all herd the dumbfounding data of experience into satisfying sense. A brilliant younger relation, capable and content, informs me, “I don’t read books.” I try to imagine that. I can’t. But he’s doing fine.
The mind is a body part shaped by usage. Indolence diminishes and exercise enlarges its capacity. As we can bulk up abs, pecs, or glutes with different kinds of workout, so by practice can we strengthen different kinds of thinking. Language, while a whiz at parsing ambiguity, is lousy at math, for example. For the life of me, I can’t follow graphs beyond “getting the idea.”
The less we read, the less our brains can compass moral complexity. Children learning to read view contests with Manichean simplicity: good guys versus bad guys, white hats versus black, allegiances permanent and fixed. Are you with me or against me? Gradually – grudgingly – we learn to groan, “It depends…”
I’ll wager the Nameless One never reads a book. Surely his grammar is infantile, almost illiterate. His judgments admit of no gradations. You’re either a good guy or a bad guy, and if you’re a bad guy, I’m going to get you – that’s his consistent and tedious pledge. Granted, he’s “smart in other ways” – wily, devious, conniving, inventive in turpitude – but whether these strengths constitute credentials for leadership is open to question.
His acolytes admire and mimic his dichotomous simplicity. This is what makes them difficult to speak with. You don’t parley with the devil; you devise its extinction. They view reason, facts, logic – words themselves – as traps set by the clever, so no dice, Buster. Information they dislike they dismiss as fake.
Loss of literacy may not have caused the great divide in America, but it exacerbates a concerning trend. The more educated the voter, the less likely she or he to vote for the Nameless One. Courtesy restrains us from reviling the Nameless One and his adherents as stupid, but that’s the nub of it. Stupid is as stupid does. Why are we so shy about saying so?
Reading makes us better thinkers. Also better people. That’s because decency, goodness, kindness, collaboration, honesty, prudence, caution, humility are not ornamental but fundamental – plain common sense. All lasting literature subscribes to the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount. It gives me the creeps watching politicians – already prone to self-righteousness – veer so far from decency in their struggles to defend the indefensible. No, it’s not OK to lie, swagger, bully, flaunt, taunt, grab them by the pussy – not now, not ever, no-how. Lust for office has left them lost in offal. If they’d read a book now and then – a real book – they might know that.
The prospects for literacy look dim, even dismal, in this dumb, drubbing hour. But who knows? We’ll keep trying.