Reading, Literacy and Our Responsibilities As Writers
I haven’t read The New Yorker Magazine since I left the East Coast a quarter century ago. But Michael Downend does — after all, he can drive into The City for dinner, if he chooses.
Michael has just sent me another link which he thought all of you would find interesting, perhaps even disturbing. The New Yorker’s online edition carries a long, very detailed [well, it IS the New Yorker, after all] essay entitled Twilight of The Books, by Caleb Crain. This is one extraordinary essay!
As I read it, I couldn’t help but think about a YouTube video a friend sent to me just days ago. The correlation between Crain’s essay and the video seems to me sadly profound.
Last Sunday, on CBS Sunday Morning, there was a provocative segment about how the art of conversation is dying. Conversation too? As one of the experts said, we don’t converse anymore, we “hold forth.”
One can certainly see evidence of that on cable’s so-called “news channels.” Where has civilized discourse gone? [Thank you, Rick Sanchez, for providing a glimmer of light on CNN.]
I’m left to wonder: how can this be? How can we, as writers, allow human culture — it’s not just the US — slip so dangerously away from intelligence toward instant gratification and mediocrity? Why aren’t we demanding better — of ourselves, our communities, our cultural institutions, our leaders?
I guess I’m of the old school, where writers are somehow guardians of civilization. Let’s guard it! Write letters to the editor, Attend PTA meetings. Lobby your congressmen to examine cultural priorites, to pay more attention to education and culture.
Forgive my outburst, but too much information has flooded in all at once. I cannot help but react.
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I don’t think I could bear to read the article, especially after seeing the video. After all, I’m not a masochist. What could the article tell me that I don’t already know all too well, and that the video illustrates all too well? If you can’t say it in pictures, preferably moving, you aren’t going to reach the general public. Even then, very little gets through. Literacy is a lost cause, and serious reading is becoming a rare (and rarified) use of one’s time.
So the question is: is there any route that writers can take to help improve the quality of public discourse? Or is it, after all, a hopeless cause?
Hmmm… think I’ll go back down to the beach and play some more blues. And maybe I’ll take my camera, rather than my Neo word processor.
Tom
Tom, Sylvie Mac,
The video is indeed shattering, and even more shattering the thought, nay,almost the conviction it could have come from almost any point or country of this planet - and yes, of course, moving pictures tell it all so much better.The Brits rightfully, call it Telly. And now there is YouTube.
But then again reading and writing has always been a privilege enjoyed by a few throughout centuries of human history, and our times make no ecxeption to this rule. Except for its preposterous claim that attending (any kind of) school for a few years could actually make a difference. Not even watching CNN does, in some cases not even reading the New Yorker.
Culture, as the atmosphere that surrounds our planet, is like a thin and very fragile skin that is incessantly punctured and corrupted by the outbursts of mediocrity corroborated by mass media publications where even comics are becoming too difficult to carry a message unless they use less than 10 words or so per pic.
For a starter, many people should really go back to good old crossword puzzles requiring at least a minimum of common knowledge - as in “country beginning with U”… or “who is currently the President of the United States?”
a) Oprah Winfrey
b) Hillary Clinton
c) the Dalai Lama
d) don’t know (and don’t matter either).
I see lots of articles today that can be summarized to, “The stupid people are outbreeding the intelligent people.” More and more proof that, yes, it’s the fault of my genes, or my parents, or whatever, to be stupid and go along with the crowd, be mediocre, buy another iPod, and drink another latte.
But I’ve always wondered why I’ve never seen someone explore the world through simple numbers, simple statistics.
As of July 2007, the world had a best guess count, within a reasonable standard deviation:
6,602,224,175
6 and OVER A HALF BILLION people.
Has all that’s really happened is that the world has gotten to crowded for people to remain dumb? I mean, for millennia, reading and writing has been reserved for the elite. There has always been a separation between “learned” and “ignorant,” just as there has always been a separation between the rich and poor. Why? My guess is because the world just wasn’t as crowded, as connected. People could easily isolate themselves from those not like them.
Okay, you survived my own rant this far, so I pose this question.
Is humanity simply begging for a change?
Perhaps, what’s really happening is that we, as a global civilization, now (too) regularly see the needs of our fellow human.
Perhaps we should be bothered because for the first time in forever we, the “common folk” actually have the power to do something for our brothers and sisters, and it’s simply our choice to take action or not.
Here is my (lengthy) reply to Jeremy who is wondering about statistics on those less intelligent people outbreeding the other ones - a very sensitive issue.
If I remember correctly what I learned as a kid some 50 years ago there was indeed a statistical and somewhat hypothetical experiment in the early 20th century which was based on social and genetic data of two cohorts of families differing sharply in terms of IQ, social background and education.
It was called the “KaloKak”-Experiment, concocting the 2 greek words for “good” (kalos) and “bad” (kakos) genes or background, whichever you prefer.
In essence, it became clear that after only a few generations of simulated development the offspring of the dumber kakos-tribe would heavily outnumber the kin of the smarter kalos-tribe, the relation being 1 to 5 or more, I do not recall that exactly. I wonder if literature on this mental or statistical experiment would be available today. At the time it was deemed to be too sensitive to be published and it was declared secret, given that the times in the 1920s (in Germany) were not good to highlight such findings.
Events nevertheless proved that racists and Nazis didn’t need such kind of hypothetical reasoning, and they started their genocidal extermination programs, including Euthanasia for citizens of all walks of life who were classified as “not being worthy to live”, whether they were physically incapacitated or just dim-witted. We all know now that at the end of all this Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and many other concentration camps were built and filled with millions of victims who never left alive.
Why am I mentioning this? Because I am a German, born in 1944, and feel guilty speaking of genetic and/or social differences in human people, and of “elites” dominating cultural or other achievements of mankind?
Well, for me it is a fact that since I started thinking I was saddled with my very own personal historical and social heritage of the Third Reich, resulting in an almost extreme sensitivity to questions of genetic and/or other differences between people, or races, for that matter. It has overshadowed, shaped - and driven - my conscious intellectual life almost every single day of my 63 years on this planet. And yet I maintain that the gift of (real) reading and (inspired) writing will always be “reserved for” and exercised by a relatively small proportion of the six and a half billion people populating the globe, economic circumstances, greed, corruption, violence and the cruel short-sightedness that is intrinsically built into our human nature being the main reasons for that, high IQ or no IQ. We all know it, many times by experience, from our early days in school when we were bullied or harassed by some jerks, high IQ or no IQ. Whether we document all that on Youtube or in the Britannica or not is oblivious: it remains a fact of life affecting us all in some way or other.
So is the internet or wikipedia at last going to change all of this, owing to our high connectivity and capacity to witness evil or poverty around the globe? I have my doubts.
Again: one has to be at least semi-literate before being able to become “computer-literate”, right? (Of course, the gamers are and will always be the notorius exception to this rule, and will presumably remain non-readers, as long as they are able to correctly identify and press the “start” button on their computer.)
A great deal of hope prevailed in the well-meaning and optimistic founders of the internet, who apart from better connectivity and faster communication were expecting a big push in “democratizing” information AND knowledge by making it available to millions and millions of people, schooling or not. This hypothesis has so far not been proven right, however successful as the internet is - up to a point. But even the “Third Wave” predicted earlier so far has not exactly been the Tsunami in (quality) information and (better) mass communication that Alvin Toffler and his wife somewhat naively expected.
Maybe we communicate more today than ever, yet do we really “tell” each other - or do we intellectually or emotionally “share” - anything that is more meaningful than it would have been, say, some 25 000 years ago? I sincerely doubt that and again have only our “human nature” to blame: it really hasn’t changed that much since then. Witness the ogres of last century cited above who were intent on reducing our species at the rate of millions, and were able to induce tens of thousands of willing and obedient “helpers” to be at their best service.
But then again, we may claim that we are not talking to each other in the same way as did Neanderthal Men during their time, or cavemen: we now have real language(s)! And yes, we use cell phones, or YouTube.
But what does our brain know, or care, about that - some people only need a few beers or a gun, or both, and you couldn’t tell the difference from a caveman.
(In fact, you could send them to Abu Ghraib and they’d actually think they are doing a good job for their country, for God and their President, the latter - after famously consulting the former - having had the enlightened foresight of, first, mentally conditioning and then sending them to Baghdad, all in the name of peace and for the general advancement of democracy. That’s the moment you start wishing even democratically elected presidents were given some REAL cool computer games in lieu of Armed Forces, both for the benefit of mankind, and to keep them busy and intellectually satisfied. But then again, who would elect a gamer, anyway? It’s bad enough they all turn out to be some kind of gamblers, witness R. Nixon or B. Clinton. So much for the “bl” in presidents and other powerful people, elected or not.)
So back to your question: is mankind begging for a change?
You bet.
Merry Christmas, and, by the way, TIME magazine just elected (or elevated?) a certain Mr. Vladimir Putin to be “Man of the Year”.
I think we have to beg - or even pray -for more than that, or else.
Or else what?
Well, no change.
Business as usual, and downhill, for all of us.
It’s so much easier.
Let me finish by quoting my personal “Thought of the Year” from one of my all-time favourite books by Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, the “Livro do Desassossego”, 1935 (1998), in German:, “Das Buch der Unruhe” or the “Book of Disquiet” (my translation):
“If the heart could think it would stop beating.”
Greetings from Manila.
PS: I would very much welcome if anyone could provide the correct English title of Pessoa’s book to me? Please?
Peter, you touch on one of the things that most worries me: “…[leaders] able to induce tens of thousands of willing and obedient “helpers” to be at their best service.”
Back when I was teaching modern world history in prep school, I used the English language version of a book written in the 1950’s or early 60’s for German high school students, illustrating how easily the people followed Hitler — as a warning: don’t let that happen again.
I instinctly believe that most people are good at the core, especially in one-to-one encounters. But I fear mass actions, when some other energies seem to take over.
Do we writers have any responsibilities amongst all this? If so, what are they?
Tom, I do agree with you in that it is normally a lot easier to get some people to do something good and morally acceptable rather than something immoral or even illegal - our thresold to do something worthy of general praise seeming to be so much lower. Asked for help or even for some change most people reach for their wallet, even when something tells them their little gift might not even go where it should go - rightfully leaving that decision to the recipient.
But then again we all know about those much publicized experiments, this time undertaken in the USA, where ordinary people - sometimes randomly asked in off the street - were able to make real people “really” suffer, with electric shocks when they simply had the impression it would help them to do their own little job “better” or more efficiently. Most of them had no feelings of guilt or compassion when seeing their respondents “cringe in pain”, yet nobody had openly or directly appealed to their “dark” side, or allowed them to do something in hiding. That is where the rot starts, Tom, and, taken to its extremes, it ends in Auschwitz.
That is basically all we have to keep in mind when writing and asking to our readers to follow us: in a way, we all are
the “Pied Piper” whether we write and publish as journalists, TV anchors, script writers or book authors. The younger our readers are, the more they are in our hands, of course, the lesser experienced minds being the more gullible ones, ready to follow wherever the path will lead them, even if it takes seven fat volumes, as in Harry Potter…
So the responsibility lies - and ends - in “knowing one’s readers”?
That is truly asking for too much, even if a general idea on the possible consequences caused between the eyes and ears of our readers will certainly - and in most cases - help to gauge the likely reactions we are about to trigger. Which again is something that was artfully and convincingly considered by Ms. Rawlings, from what I know the first known writer to becoma a billionaire, and I don’t envy her one bit, but then, preferring Doris Lessing, I don’t read her either.
We need not take that torturous detour to gage all of our (imagined) readers, however.
There is one authority, and one only, we have to engage to make sure we are not doing too much harm. That is our own conscience, hopefully providing us with a set of ethical or moral guidelines (Kant used the word “imperatives”) that we never consciously violate. I am not talking religion here, for throughout history, too many monstrosities or absurdities have been written (and published, with horrid consequences) in the name of faith and religion already. The same goes, needles to say, for politics, or what certain people take for it.
So is writing primarily, and most importantly, a moral exercise then?
And how about all those famous and infamous writers who delighted in overstepping the boundaries of commonly accepted morals, even ethics - are they all guilty by virtue of exercising their art? (One of them, the great American writer Norman Mailer just left us recently, and for all the “moral” boundaries he gleefully overstepped I consider him one of the greatest writers of our times, because he was driven by his deeply moral thought as much as by his razor-sharp intellect and his own conscience, blessed be his soul).
So it’s another slippery slope: “commonly accepted morals” are not necessarily, and definitely not always, a good measuring stick to go by. By the way, they do keep changing as quickly as profoundly…
Just think back a couple of decades, or watch the original movie “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?” with Richard Burton and Liz Taylor and Hollywoods’ Big Bosses long discussion over releasing it to the movie-houses for fear of its “sexually explicit language” and “immmoral content” (words only), even after E. Albee’s piece had already been shown on stage for weeks and months in New York, but that was the Theater, right? and you see what I mean.
Yet there are seemingly unchanging or “eternal” moral standards, usually found in abundance, for example, in age-old proverbs all over the world, and they seldom leave the ethical limits as they are defined by the Ten Commandments. Again, I am not trying to sound religious here, not more than Mailer did who even sharpened his pen to brazenly re-tell or re-create parts of the bible, yet I am far from calling that an attempt in blasphemy. It just shows where his own moral thinking took him, even writing “his own” version of the Gospel, or parts thereof.
That doesn’t make him any more a saint than, say, a well-published pope, any pope, for that matter, and they all write or wrote a lot, whether we find their official teachings and musings more readable stuff, or more commendable, than Mailer or not. For my part, I have chosen my preference with Mailer, but then again everyone of us has to make their own choices.
So it boils down to what’s going on between our own ears before or when we write, and not think too much about the readers - they will come, and they will follow, or not. That’s up to them, and they can make us happy - even rich - witness Ms. Rowlings, or they can stay away, or not understand us at all, and make us suicidal: that is up to us.
It is our own conscience only to which we are accountable.
(Arguably, Kafka never wanted any of his scripts published. The debate on this question is still raging, so by his own will he wrote “on account of” and for his own conscience only, and supposedly never even cared whether he was read or not, but then, and admittedly so, that is an extreme position to take and to live by, or to die for, as a writer).
If we do get a “pass” from our own conscience, then, and
only then, we may publish and submit our product - as much as our selves, or our souls - to the verdict of the rest of the world, and not vice versa (as is the rule in 90 to 95 % of published journalism, if you ask me, and this doesn’t include TV, garnering 99% of that negative rule, or self-established standard, whichever is your vantage-point).
Both realms, our inner judge and the public, however, will act as a powerful system of “checks and balances” if we let it work, and assuming it works somewhat normally, that is, giving each his due. This sounds more rigid than it really is, and it actually almost never works that way: (too) many times we become the victims of what we can call the “Vincent-van-Gogh-Syndrome” - but I have bravely tried to answer your core question regarding our moral (or political) responsibility the moment we publish our first words, or put them on a website, for that matter, as I am daring to do just now.
Regards,
Peter
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