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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 8, 2005
Novel-reading
In the past week, two of my most admired colleagues, among Canadian pundits, have written columns throwing spanners at technology. From slightly different angles, Barry Cooper of Calgary, and George Jonas of Toronto, observed how the Internet and our post-modern gadgetry contribute to the spread of moral and intellectual stupidity. Mr. Cooper focused more upon the technology itself, in drawing lessons from his experience marking term papers at the University of Calgary. "Loss of memory, loss of social life, and loss of language" are the three consistent effects of growing dependence upon e-mail and the web, as creatures designed for the social and biological life of communities, withdraw progressively into transient "virtual space". Mr. Jonas notes the advance of such technology is part of a larger educational abandonment, as he looks back over two generations: "What this period did coincide with was a departure from basics. It coincided with lower admission standards, more affirmative action, more entitlement to passing grades for failing pupils, less autonomy for principals and teachers, fewer choices for parents, more centralized bureaucracy, teacher salaries based on seniority instead of merit, and a significant decline in the cohesion and influence of the North American family -- to name just a few things affecting the system from elementary schools to universities." Neither man is a Luddite, and not even am I. Though as Mr. Cooper admitted, the introduction of moveable type to Europe by Gutenberg was itself a mixed blessing. "By enabling antagonistic religious tracts to reach wide but untutored audiences, the printing press and moveable type helped increase the ferocity and the duration of the religious wars of the 16th century. Likewise the growth of cheap newspapers during the 19th century fostered nationalist emotions that exacerbated the great wars of the 20th century." No one is against printing, however. It also made possible the spread of elementary learning, and through that, the great masses were raised to conditions of life unthinkable to former centuries. But at an often terrible cost. The very comforts and conveniences of modern life, the extension of life spans, the conquest of so much disease and want, can be part of that cost. For they create their own "virtual space" in which people become more and more insulated from the final and unalterable realities of human life, and become the less prepared to meet them. In the Biblical phrase, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" My own thoughts on technology have been advanced these last few months with the aid of a little illness and misfortune. For the first time in years, I found myself toying with an earlier modern invention, while flat out in bed: I was reading novels. For the most part, re-reading, for pure escapism, a shelf of these entertainments, by Max Frisch, Iris Murdoch, and Anthony Trollope. And enjoying them, after many years, as much as I could remember having enjoyed them when their authors were new to me, and I had the first thrill of discovery. I have never retreated from books, but I did realize that in the six years since climbing into e-mail myself, my whole way of reading them had been changed. I had almost lost the ability to read from beginning to end, to follow the linear argument for any serious distance. I'd instead, without any conscious decision, become fixed in the habit of pillaging books, of digging for and reading only what is relevant to my situation or need. I had lost my patience with them. Literary resembles culinary narcissism: I had become the diner who picks out only the morsels he most likes, then moves on to the next plate, till he feels jaded and cloyed and poisoned. The best novels are, in themselves, a very pleasant moral education. But they can only be so when the reader has the leisure to absorb them. Every attempt to skip ahead, to avoid the adagio and get back to the allegro, defeats alike the pleasure and instruction they offer. Our sense of the whole is sacrificed to an insatiable appetite for personal "results". Consider this for a moment. A man, with time at his disposal, on his own, could learn about women from novels, or from the Internet. It is in thinking about that, I realize how completely our system of public education has collapsed, and how far away from the schools and universities the wreckage now extends. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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