NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 18, 2004
Freedom & aliteracy
It's an ugly word aliteracy . I don't like to have to use words like that but there doesn't seem to be an alternative. For illiteracy doesn't capture the predicament: we are dealing with people who can read but don't. Nor does "functional illiteracy" quite cut it: most are fully functional when it comes to deciphering road signs or dialling up e-mail. The issue for today is rather the sort of reading that is an end in itself and which can only be done with the whole mind. A large study commissioned stateside by the National Endowment for the Arts (around 17 000 human guinea pigs interviewed through each of the last three U.S. censuses against a background of other data) has established that there was a steady drop in "serious" or literary book reading through recent decades which has accelerated in the last decade or so. This applies across all classes races genders what have you -- though the drop in such reading among the young is quickest and portends an even faster overall decline through the coming generation. We don't have such a study for Canada -- at least not that I can find -- but I will assume that the observations apply here too and quite possibly throughout the West. Some groups read more than others: the wealthy read more than the poor; women read more than men; English-speaking peoples read more than most other-speaking peoples -- that sort of thing. But the trend-line is consistent: it goes down and only down everywhere. The study is entitled Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America and the full text may be tricked out of the Internet. In the prefatory words of Dana Gioia the National Endowment's chairman The concerned citizen in search of good news about American literary culture will study the pages of this report in vain. Well. As someone who has long been noting that this civilization is going to the dogs I am hardly surprised. I derive no pleasure from it however. I would dearly like to see some evidence of even modest recovery somewhere. And I shall continue to do whatever I can to fight the encroachment of night. But pretending things are not as they are will never get us anywhere. The paradox -- there is always a paradox -- is that the technical level of literacy remains so high. The general ability to read is about as rare as democracy in human history: it is one of those Scottish inventions (universal schooling) that has spread in defiance of human nature to the most unlikely places. But such narrow literacy as we have retained is now being sustained I think less and less by our bureaucratized schools more and more by technology. It is necessary to be thoroughly alphabetical to survive in electronic space. My own impression from watching two boys grow is that if we shut down the schools entirely about the same proportion would learn to "read" and type. The ability to think and articulate thought requires much more than technical literacy. It involves the projection by imagination into objects beyond ourselves. It depends upon mysteriously sophisticated apprehensions of time and space: of historical time and personal location. It requires the syntactical mastery of words a being-at-home in language that may be achieved even without technical literacy; though it is impossible to build without literacy over time. Poetry novels plays are among the toys with which the playful human animal acquires such skills. In defiance of human nature -- for humans are lazy and without grace would be motivated only by their hungers and lusts -- we were able to build a remarkable universal culture. The central accomplishment of modernity was making high culture available to people of almost all degrees. Its central risk was the abandonment of the elitism that sustained high culture at the cost of keeping most of the people at the peasant level grubbing the fields. And what we are now experiencing in post-modernity is the peasants' revenge; or what Ortega y Gasset called the revolt of the masses . This is not something sudden but cumulative a universal degradation of standards that has fitfully progressed through much more than a century -- the dying away at every level of society of the ability to sustain high culture and with it the ability to fight ignorance. With that loss comes the loss of freedom not for some but for all. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top