Reading in Decline

 

Thomas Martin

Thomas Martin teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. You may contact Thomas Martin at: martint@unk.edu.

In the preface to the recent survey, “Reading at Risk,” conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts, Chairman Dana Gioia notes that “literary reading in America is not only declining rapidly among all groups, but the rate has accelerated, especially among the young.” The percentage of men reading literature has dropped in the last twenty years from 49 percent to 37 percent and among women from 63 percent to 55 percent. At this rate, in 40 years, Americans will approach the literacy rate of people before the advent of the printing press.

The obvious cause of the decrease in literacy levels (those who read literature of any kind and not just classical works) is the massive shift toward electronic media for entertainment and information. The decline in reading points to the fact that more and more Americans are seeking the instant gratification of being electronically stimulated by sit-coms, sports, movies, reality shows, twenty-four hour news programs and, alas, pornography, which reports a larger revenue than sports in America. We are rapidly becoming a nation of spectators, sedentary people watching reflections of life while living a life that is not reflective.

However, a well-ordered mind does not require information as much as formation. Furthermore, only a mindful person is able to discriminate between passing fashions and the enduring truth.

Without good literature, for example, a person does not understand that the picture of Narcissus by the pool is also a picture of himself or that the Prodigal Son’s father is his Father. Nor is he able to measure himself against Atticus Finch, Ebenezer Scrooge, Anne Frank, David and Goliath, or Cathy Ames to see his failings and what he ought to be.

The survey shows that a dramatic decline in literacy also “parallels a larger retreat from participation in civic and cultural life.” It is not surprising that a people who are illiterate lack a sense of belonging to anyone other than themselves, never understanding themselves as members of a nation. Likewise, knowing little if any history, we fail to understand ourselves as members of a people that extends beyond our immediate generation.

I would venture to surmise that as literacy levels decline and old age sets in, more and more of us will not have found meaning in life, leaving us at the mercy of therapists and anti-depressants to see us through till the end.

Don Welch, a Nebraska poet, recently told me, “The best literature is an articulation of the soul.” This is because the best authors speak to our souls. In a world where all else will pass, only the truth remains. When we stop reading, we lose teachers, the lamps necessary to illuminate the ways of life that are eternally worthy. Without such teachers as Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoyevsky, O’Connor, Hawthorne we are left in a world of mirrors reflecting only the present, the momentary and the mundane.

Thomas Jefferson saw the reading of history as essential, for if Americans knew the “past, [it would] enable them to judge the future; it [would] avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it [would] qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it [would] enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.”

Imagine how easy it is to be a politician in America before people who do not know history and lack the ability to “know ambition under every disguise . . . and knowing it, to defeat its views.”

Leo Strauss, in his 1959 commencement speech at the University of Chicago stated, “There is no need to make a case for literacy; every voter knows that modern democracy stands or falls by literacy.”

What Leo Strauss once saw as obvious no longer is so. We Americans are becoming and illiterate and uninformed people. Our politicians no longer have to impress us with sound arguments and intellectual debate; they have only to create the image of appearing presidential in their campaign advertisements. Their speeches are written by others and, when they do appear for debates, their performances are scripted and the time is limited.

What becomes of a nation with an attention span set to sound bites raised on the Hollywood version of history remains to be seen.

We would do well to remember that all the empires, Rome, France, Spain, and England, fell when they became most comfortable in their pleasures.

And so it goes.     *

“Who so neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.” --Euripides