“No wonder your President has to be an actor, he’s gotta look good on television.” Doc Brown, Back to the Future.
TechnoUtopia
Many would argue that we are, today, living in an era in which our inheritance from Athens is stronger than ever. We have allowed scientific inquiry to raise us to heights previous generations could have only dreamt about. Before I was five years old, we had put a man on the moon. But the phone in my pocket now holds more computing power than the rooms full of computers that helped us to put him there. Clearly, we are living in the age of reason, science, technology, and intellectual advances. As for art: our movies and television dramas, the 20th and early 21st Century’s favorite mass medium pop cultural events, integrate music, storytelling, art, design, costuming, acting, and state-of-the-art special effects to create spectacles that would have made the groundlings in Shakespeare’s globe weep.
When it comes to upholding our cultural inheritance from Athens, many would argue, we have nothing to fear. We believe in reason, science, technology, and the arts. We are standing on the shoulders of intellectual giants and reaching, literally, for the stars.
The Stupidity Problem
The problem with this rosy scenario is that it ignores a few inconvenient facts, about how stupid the vast majority of Americans have become in this age of “reason” as our electronic devices, technologically impressive wonders that they are, make the humans who use them increasingly less impressive. As Mark Bauerlein has argued in his book, The Dumbest Generation (Tarcher Penguin 2008), television, video games, social networks on the internet, mobile phones, and other video devices have had the effect of completely killing reading among the emerging generation, and that in turn has killed much of the functional capacity of their brains.
Troubling signs of the times include: The incredibly tiny percentage of the population that has the slightest idea how their mobile phones actually work, but play with them for hours which used to be spent, by their grandparents, reading or learning to play a musical instrument; the numbers of American Ph.D recipients in medicine, science, and technology who were raised in foreign, non-Western, countries, compared to the percentage of native-born American citizens who are qualified to pursue a similar education; that when an American calls a help-line to assist him or her with a technological conundrum, the Indian on the other end of the line has been trained, not without reason, to think of Americans as fairly stupid, and to patiently help them through their issues using the simplest language possible; that while the percentage of High School graduates pursuing college has increased, so also has there been an increase in the number of American college students, even those arriving on government funded scholarships, who require remedial course-work during their first year; that most Americans cannot identify any of the literary, historical, biblical, or classical allusions referenced in their most popular entertainments; and that a large majority of High School graduates will never voluntarily read a book after leaving High School (and that’s the statistic for the graduates).
The End of Reading and the Rise of Screens.
The most telling blow to the idea that we are living in an age of reason and appreciation for the arts is to be found in the decline of reading, and the concurrent decline in participation in other forms of art. It has now been almost a decade since the National Endowment for the Arts published its landmark study, “Reading at Risk”. Key take-aways from the press release that accompanied that 2004 report:
“Literary reading is in dramatic decline with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature, according to a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) survey . . . . Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America reports drops in all groups studied, with the steepest rate of decline - 28 percent - occurring in the youngest age groups. The study also documents an overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002, representing a loss of 20 million potential readers. . . . Reading also affects lifestyle, the study shows. Literary readers are much more likely to be involved in cultural, sports and volunteer activities than are non-readers. For example, literary readers are nearly three times as likely to attend a performing arts event, almost four times as likely to visit an art museum, more than two-and-a-half times as likely to do volunteer or charity work, and over one-and-a-half times as likely to attend or participate in sports activities. People who read more books tend to have the highest level of participation in other activities.”
This is not a portrait of a culture that has retained its ties to the values of Athens. Reason requires reading. Appreciation of art does as well. You don’t have to have researched a book on this subject, like Mark Bauerlein, to know intuitively where to place the blame. It lies, clearly, on the most destructive invention in the history of the world: the screen, be it the television screen, the movie screen, the videogame screen, the computer screen, the internet screen, or the smartphone screen.
Here’s an experiment: Find a precocious second or third grade student, one who is considered bright, and capable of reading far above the average ability in his or her grade level. Choose a book to read together that was written for the-mid elementary years: for 8 to 10 year-olds. But choose a book that was published before the advent of television. Ben and Me, by Robert Lawson, would be one appropriate example. You will likely find something very sad. The book is no longer written for today’s precocious nine year olds. Its vocabulary is too advanced. The background facts one would be expected to understand to pick up on the book’s nuances are out of reach. You’ll have to wait a few more years for most children to get there, years interrupted by their viewing of screens.
We are no longer a nation of readers. We are a nation of watchers. And since the medium is the message, this means we are no longer a nation that thinks. We are, instead, a nation which emotes.
Don’t get me wrong. I love movies. I really, really, do. Few Americans from my generation (around 11 when Star Wars hit the big screen, about 15 when Indiana Jones outran that giant boulder) grew up without developing a deep fondness for the movies. And television has become much better in recent years, with its serialized adult dramas, like Lost, now telling lengthy stories on the (once) small screen. But this has come at a horrible price.
The Educational Cost.
During a child’s developmental years, reading activates and develops different parts of the brain than those developed by watching television, or playing video-games. The neurological connections which are, or are not, formed in early childhood, have lifelong implications. Denying the rising generation of the neurological connections which will enable them to prosper later in life is a form of neglect.
The reports and statistics on life outcomes for struggling vs. proficient readers are not difficult to find. Take two third graders, one of whom reads at or above grade level, and enjoys reading voluntarily, for fun; and another who reads below grade level, and never reads for fun. The gap between the sheer volume of reading material read by the first student versus the second will begin to grow exponentially, and will obviously concurrently increase the gap in their relative reading skill and proficiency. Studies have shown that this will affect not only academic ability, but personality, with readers tending to be more empathetic than non-readers, as their immersion in fiction exposes them to the reality that other people have inner lives and feelings. In the latter part of the third grade, the so-called “Matthew Effect” (named for the Gospel in which the parable of the talents appears) will then begin to kick in. As more and more school reading is done, not to learn to read, but to learn other subjects, the non-reader will fall further and further behind his peers. The student who falls behind will become ever more frustrated with and detached from schooling. This will profoundly affect statistically probable life outcomes, in areas that go far beyond academics. The slower reader is more likely, not just to get bad grades, but to drop out of High School early, and is more likely to become involved in juvenile delinquency and crime. He is more likely to need government assistance at some point in his life, and more likely to have difficulty keeping a job, or maintaining a stable marriage.
The Political Cost.
In our adult years, we can’t hope to really understand what political forces were behind the big drama down at the County Commission hearing this evening, if all we know about it is the two minute blurb the local tv station gave us, and we don’t bother to read the lengthy articles and editorials in a special feature of our local newspaper. And so politicians get away with more crap, and have to reach us at a much more basic, and base, level, than was once the case. If you can’t convince an American of the validity of your cause with a two or three word bumper sticker (or better yet: a symbol on a bumper sticker that doesn’t even have to be read at all, let alone thought through), in the age of television, your cause is doomed.
Think what a tragedy this is for America, given our history. Until a few decades ago, we had always been a nation whose politics were fueled by passionate readers, and it has always been the written word which has moved our history forward. The Founding Fathers, almost to a man (Washington being the major exception) became prominent because they were writers, whose words found access to local presses, and were consumed, enthused over or argued about, by partisan readers. Benjamin Franklin’s satirical, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One”; James Otis’s speeches against the Writs of Assistance and the Stamp Act; John Dickinson’s “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania” essays, against the Townshend Acts; Samuel Adams’ “The Rights of the Colonists as Men”; The Novanglus letters, by John Adams, making the legal case for the sovereignty of the colonies; “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” by Thomas Jefferson, setting forth a similar argument in response to the Intolerable Acts. Each of these writings strengthened the colonists resolve to create their own continental congress, and propelled into prominence the men who would play leading roles in the drama of the American revolution and founding of the Constitution (although Franklin was already famous).
Common Sense, a 46 page editorial, which drew heavily on stories from the bible that most Americans had learned to read by, swayed public opinion in favor of independence just in time to give the Second Continental Congress political cover for declaring that independence. (Cagey guy, wasn’t he, that bible-quoting Thomas Paine–who later found his anti-Christian voice when writing to a much different audience of anti-clerical revolutionaries in France). Before the Revolutionary war had even been won, the presses were churning with essays on the problems with the articles of confederation, and the need for a new Constitution, to unify the colonies, such as Hamilton’s “The Continentalist.” Our proposed new Constitution was ratified by the States only after it had been passionately defended, primarily by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, in the Federalist Papers (and its potential pitfalls foretold with eerie prescience in the Anti-federalists’ writings). Later, the country’s political unity was reaffirmed by George Washington’s farewell address, not actually an address that was ever spoken at all, and mainly written by Hamilton, but which was published in all the major newspapers of the Country, and read by virtually everyone, and which is still quoted today. Later, de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America told Americans what was right about their country. The Lincoln Douglas debates were not viewed, but read, all over America, as were the other great speeches, books, and narratives that led to the Civil War and ultimately spelled the violent death of slavery: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Frederick Douglas’s autobiographical narrative, Lincoln’s Inaugural addresses and his speech at Gettysburg, and the fiery indignation of the radical abolitionist newspapers. The era of civil service reform, the demand for an end to the spoils system and political machines, greater health and safety regulations in our meat packing plants: they were all influenced by books, newspapers, and the written word. How might all of that history have been different, if we’d all been sitting around watching reality television, too entertained to read, laughing at Lincoln’s funny hair.
Visual imagery, accompanied by the right music, is much less likely to touch our brains, and much more likely to touch our heart. This is not always a bad thing. The images of wounded American soldiers which were seen during the Vietnam war, and in many subsequent conflicts, has probably made it far more difficult (as it should be) to drum up American enthusiasm for military conflicts. But, more often than not, politics based on emotion and visual images, rather than words and carefully presented logic, is overly simplistic, more easily subject to demagoguery, and less capable of the nuance that can lead citizens to understand that almost all of their political choices will be neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but will be subject to trade-offs, and have offsetting costs and unintended consequences. In my lifetime, as Americans have debated changing the definition of our most basic institution, marriage, emotions and sanctimony have run high. Words and written arguments? Not so much. Oh, lots of law review articles and legal briefs and even a few books have been written on both sides of the subject, but virtually no one has read them. A bumper sticker with a yellow equal sign on a blue background tells you all you need to know, namely, that the American intellect is dead.
Our laws are still written in words. But they are now sold to us on the basis of imagery. It is, accordingly, increasingly the case that the laws in question have less and less to do with the basis on which they were sold. Sell the sizzle, not the steak, is the mantra of the dishonest salesman. It is a mantra which visual images are particularly adept at exploiting. We learn about virtue, duty, honor, by reading books, especially religious texts. These are difficult ideals to show on a movie screen, which is far more adept at showing us fun, excitement, and enjoyment, arousing our anger, rather than our logic.
The Cultural and Historical Cost.
It has been argued, and not without some basis, that the rise of a post-literate screen-driven society spells the end of adulthood: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/11/03/secret-society-of-adults/
And so our culture suffers. Politicans and government officials can be less responsive and responsible, because no one will read about what they are doing. And so they become more corrupt. Newspapers can unfairly target their political foes, via headline scandals which don’t seem particularly scandalous if you read and reason through the text of the article, but that doesn’t matter because no one does that. And so they become more corrupt. Businesses can tout wares which have long since been exposed as not living up to their promises. But that doesn’t matter because no one has read those exposés. And so the businesses become more corrupt. Corruption, unchecked, increases the power of the few over the many.
And, as a medicine taken on an empty stomach may be overly potent, what little that is read has an increasingly powerful effect upon its recipient, regardless of its coherence, logic, or honesty. It becomes easier to lead us astray. Having no training in sophisticated and critical analysis of what we read, we peruse an article someone linked to on a facebook account (about whether vaccines cause autism, or a really weird trick that will help us lose belly fat) and we are unable to ask the critical questions which might debunk or strengthen the claims being presented.
But, most devastatingly of all, we don’t read history, and so we don’t remember our past, and so we have no past, and American culture means nothing because it never existed. Like an Alzheimer’s patient who no longer remembers his wife, we might as well have never had a wife. We might as well have never fought WWII, as we no longer honor those who won it, and, in winning it, ended a war started by Germany and Japan which took 60 million lives. Instead, we see something on Youtube about Hiroshima and conclude that our nation was the guilty one, and does not deserve our respect or our loyalty. We might know different if we had read any books about WWII, but who does that anymore?
As Bruce Feiler has argued eloquently in the New York Times article, “The Stories that Bind Us” March 15, 2013, the children of a family which tells positive stories about itself are given great psychological benefits, as they come to understand their family’s narrative, and see their own roles in the generational story. The same is true of military units, who have found that when recruits learn more about the history of the military branch or unit in which they serve, individual perseverance and group coherence are strengthened. Id. The same is true of companies and businesses. And of nations. A United States whose citizens understand the triumphs represented by the Declaration of Independence, victory in the Revolutionary War, founding of the Constitution, settlement of the west, abolition of slavery, and which understands the great moral good which was done by their country when it helped to defeat Naziism and Japanese military imperialism, and Soviet communist totalitarianism, is a nations whose citizens will love their country, and will believe that we can overcome current challenges, if we will get back on to a sensible path. But our children don’t read enough to know any of that history, and, when they do finally become interested, they are more likely than not to be given Howard Zinn to read, instead of something truthful or even partially positive. No wonder they decide it isn’t worth it to try to live within our means, but instead, with nihilistic self-contempt, fail to challenge a government whose debt will crush millions, in generations yet unborn, of our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Why should these modern nihilists care? They know nothing of their country’s past, so what reason do they have to care about her future?
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