I’ve
been thinking lately about the pervasive decline in reading,
a phenomenon I noticed as a college prof over many years
of teaching, and which now seems to have become even more
prevalent. These reflections were spurred by two films
which I’ve recently re-watched, the rather gruesome
three-part Hannibal series starring the inimitable Anthony
Hopkins, and the ever-delightful six-episode Oliver’s
Travels featuring a charming performance from Alan
Bates.
What
struck me about the Hannibal trilogy was the surname Lecter,
a homonym for the word 'lector' from the Latin for 'reader,'
and which gives us the common word 'lecture.' Hannibal
the Cannibal is a reader of sorts, a rather voracious
one. A forensic psychotherapist by profession, he is deeply
educated, can lecture on Renaissance art and history and
recite Dante in the original, loves and understands music,
knows precisely how to detect life histories from a modicum
of cues—and devours people as if they were texts,
relishing choice passages.
Oliver,
for his part, is an inveterate wordsmith, an anagram maestro,
a crossword buff, an incorrigible punster and an excellent
scholar who has been “rendered redundant”
as a lecturer in Comparative Religion at the University
of the Rhondda Valley in Wales, which has revised its
curriculum to reflect “market strategy.” What
is now important is 'accessing information,' whereas 'history,'
as Oliver quips, “has become a thing of the past.”
The university has become a vast computer lab and erudition
is now regarded as quaint and obsolete. There is no place
any longer for a playful and richly-stocked mind like
Oliver’s. One surveys printouts rather than reads
Aristotle.
I was
intrigued by these productions in part because each in
its different way had something to do with the problem
of reading, of 'ingesting' knowledge, of “devouring”
a complex world as if it were a book, of scholarship in
a world dedicated to markets, mere information processing
and the devaluation of wit (both Hannibal and Oliver evince
a lively capacity for witty utterance). It is a world
obsessed with droids rather than people, with mediocrity
rather than meritocracy, with surfaces rather than depths,
and with artificial intelligence rather than real intelligence.
The director of the Hannibal films, Ridley Scott, dealt
with the concept of artificial intelligence in Blade
Runner, whose replicant anti-hero assumes a human
quality only at the end with his “tears in the rain”
speech. It is no accident that a leading software system
is called “Android.” Novelist Alan Plater’s
and director Giles Foster’s Oliver’s Travels
gestures toward the great satirist Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels and to the comic Restoration
dramatist George Farquhar, who figures waggishly in the
plot.
Reading
code, computer printouts, operation manuals, milk cartons,
instant messaging, emails, instruction sheets, promotional
material, condo by-laws, Twitter and Facebook, online
posts, political blogs and the like is not what is meant
by reading in any significant sense. There is no inwardness,
no temporality, no reflectiveness. Indeed, Nicholas Carr
in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our
Brains is not so sure that reading has much of a
future in the modern West. He cites the Nielsen Company’s
media-use survey revealing that American teens and adults
spend “half their waking hours looking at screens
[while] daily reading drops to less than three quarters
of an hour a week.” The effect on the nervous system
is profound: “attention splinters, thinking becomes
superficial and memory suffers.” The Net—the
ubiquitous screen—provides fast food for the brain
rather than solid nourishment, with the consequence that
cognitive vigor is degrading as we speak. People tend
to read little and comprehend less.
Articles
on the Net, for example, tend to come adorned with a time
trigger: 2 minute read, 4 minute read, 6 minute read.
Longer reads tax our patience and mean fewer clicks to
boot. Given that we no longer live in a reading culture,
but a scanning-and-video culture, the prospects for deep
understanding, intellectual substance and introspective
awareness grow increasingly ephemeral. Carr titles his
book, aptly, The Shallows. It can no longer be
denied that we live in a surfing culture, not a thinking
culture.
Many
neuropsychologists have shown through experiments and
surveys that the 21st century brain is re-mapping itself,
closing older neural pathways and opening new ones that
favor a different way of experiencing both self and world.
Maggie Jackson’s Distracted: Reclaiming Our
Focus in a World of Lost Attention, Richard Haier’s
The Neuroscience of Intelligence, Joseph LeDoux’s
Synaptic Self and Michael Merzenich’s Soft-Wired,
among a plethora of texts on the subject, provide in-depth
analyses of how the brain reprograms itself as it responds
to events, people, objects, intellectual disciplines and
new technologies. In the long run, this mutation, a function
of neuroplasticity, does not necessarily or always lead
to a richer, more reflective, self-aware, and insightful
symbiosis of self and world.
That
requires more than cognitive exercises, computer training,
so-called 'smart drugs' (or nootropics) that influence
the role of neurotransmitters, electroceuticals as a cognitive
enhancement tool to boost mental function, and other brain
stimulation strategies. None of these recommended techniques
can serve to redress a cultural trend that may plausibly
amount to a species change, a reconfiguration of the brain’s
neural networks eventuating in successive generations
proficient at skimming and scanning but unable to think
laterally, to reason cogently, to conduct logically sound
arguments, to use language efficiently, and to experience
what we might call 'historical resonance'—in short,
to develop the faculty of 'inwardness,' now an unfashionable
term.
This
is where reading comes in. Reading is the key to the shaping
and revitalization of the mind, fostering the exercise
of memory and imaginative empathy. In a celebrated essay
titled On Reading, Marcel Proust reminds us that
“Reading is at the threshold of our inner life .
. . What is needed, therefore, is an intervention that
occurs deep within ourselves while coming from someone
else, the impulse of another mind that we receive in the
bosom of solitude.” Similarly, Susan Sontag writes
in Where the Stress Falls, “Books are not
only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory.
They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Books
. . . are a way of being fully human.” Regrettably,
she adds, “books are now considered an endangered
species.” Abandoning the Great Library “means
nothing less than the death of inwardness.”
This
is where we are now. Is there anyone at university today
who can read, let alone teach, Henry James’ The
Bostonians? Or, even more unlikely, The Golden
Bowl? Who among the student population, not to mention
the professoriate, has the intellectual ability to appreciate
the complex thought and finetooth style of a James novel?
Are these books even taught today? What about Henry Adams,
both the Education and the Chartres?
What American teacher, student or layperson reads that
great American, who is also the author of a major multi-volume
history of a significant American era and of a penetrating
novel on the pitfalls of political democracy—an
early herald of Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon
in Democracy? Who has the time for Dickens’
Bleak House with its mordant evisceration of
chancery law or his caustic yet amusing satire of America,
Martin Chuzzlewit? Who has the patience for Thomas
Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a profound allegory
of Europe sinking into its pre-1914 sickness? Who is willing
to learn from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility,
a primer on the importance of reason and modesty, or Dostoevsky’s
The Possessed, a harbinger of contemporary wokeism?
Who would bother cracking the spine of Plato’s Republic
or Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy
or Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World
or George Gamow’s One Two Three . . . Infinity
(an early favorite of mine) or Paul Johnson’s A
History of Christianity? One could go on, but these
questions are sadly rhetorical. All such books, after
all, are probably 1-week reads. The Greek tragedians,
the Bible, and the complete works of Shakespeare are more
like 1-year reads.
How,
then, asks Maggie Jackson in Distracted, can
we “turn data into knowledge”—a pet
maxim of Oliver’s—”an epidemic distraction
into exquisitely engaged minds,” to somehow “sharpen
our powers of focus,” to learn how to attend to
the world and recover “the building blocks of intimacy,
wisdom, and cultural progress?” “We are on
the cusp of an astonishing time,” she concludes,
“and on the edge of darkness. We can create a culture
of attention, recover the ability to pause, focus, connect,
judge, and enter deeply into a relationship or an idea,
or we can slip into numb days of easy diffusion and detachment.”
Along
the same lines, Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen in The
Distracted Mind propose the ecological concept of
optimal foraging theory, maximizing consumption per unit
of time against the constraints of the environment. One
such environmental constraint is the overly promiscuous
Internet where consumption of “value” is paradoxically
constrained by vagrant, non-nutritive foraging. Reading,
on the other hand, is “nutritive,” essential
to stimulating a facility, even a minimal competence,
with language, the medium not only of communication but
of thought itself. Reading is indispensable for the broadening
of the mind and to establish communion, affinity, and
rapport with other minds, in other words, empathy with
those who are present and those who have gone before us.
“Reading
at the deepest levels,” writes Maryanne Wolf in
Reader, Come Home, “may provide a part
of the antidote to the noted trend away from empathy.”
Indeed, empathetic reading is “about a more in-depth
understanding of the Other, an essential skill in a world
of increasing connectedness among divergent cultures.”
Reading, which promotes a perspectival opening of the
mind, “represents a complex mix of cognitive, social
and emotional processes that leave ample tracks in our
reading-brain circuitry.” This complex is what remains
tragically undeveloped in our digital culture.
“Our
transition to a digital culture,” writes C2C
Journal associate editor Patrick Keeney, “has
. . . rendered the paper book redundant, as hopelessly
out-of-date as cassette recordings, video stores or rotary
phones.” Real assimilative reading has fallen on
evil days, comparable in popular estimation to something
primeval like Hannibal’s indiscriminate appetite
or dismissively whimsical like Oliver’s preoccupations.
We might note, however, that books figure in both films,
prominently the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
in The Silence of the Lambs and the Ecclesiastical
History by the Venerable Bede in Oliver. Whether
the brain can be newly reprogrammed to foster a neural
hospitality to reading, study, patience, and mindfulness
is the question of the era. How would the reprogramming
be done? Will cortical resources be allocated, writes
Joseph LeDoux in Synaptic Self, “to processing
the new event,” in this case, an “executive
shift of attention” to books and reading? Will we
pick up Marcus Aurelius and the Venerable Bede?
In the
light of German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach’s famous
remark, “We are what we eat,” we would do
well to remember essayist Joseph Epstein’s obiter
dicta: “In a sense, we are what we read.”
He might have added: We are also what we do not read.
