I don’t know why it feels so radical when you say “to read more, do other things less” but it’s true. I used to enjoy a beer in the evenings but I’ve cut way back because it prevents me from reading the books I’d like to read. Same with TV - binge-watching a series takes the same amount of time but is less worthwhile than reading a book (for me). Of course, I still have a YouTube problem…
Re: death of literacy - the whole debate strikes me as primarily an emotional one, similar to the “death of the liberal arts” debate. The people writing these pieces, with the perspective to report on changes, have truly had their lives changed by literature and humanities. We are the people who have experienced that power and want others to share that experience! But it’s such an emotional experience, to be formed by books, that the defenses of liberal study often come off as completely irrational and self-serving because they are. Taking the long view, more people read books (even difficult books) now than when most of the great works we extol were written, and there’s no danger of them dying out.
Personally I just want more people to read Proust so that I can gain social value with normies (many of whom haven’t heard of him) and also enthuse about why he’s so great more often than just randomly online. I do think these works can be life changing, but people who want their lives changed by books will find them. Lots of people just don’t care and that’s okay!
I agree--it's just very emotional for us. A lot of people also have a lot of cultural capital tied up literature, which is not quite the case for me, so I think this is more anxiety-provoking for them
I do make a mostly conscious effort to mix great books with good middlebrow books with entertaining books with entertaining trash. Part of this is due to being a devoted reader of genre fiction (mostly SF, but Romance and Mystery too.) Part of this is an interest in popular fiction of a century or more ago. Lots of it is an acknowledgement that sometimes I need to read something relaxing. Reading, say, Anna Karenina (the last officially sanctioned Great Book I read) is absorbing and fascinating and truly inspiring at times -- but not relaxing), while reading, say, D. E. Stevenson (a once quite popular writer of better than average light romance novels (or lightly comic regular life novels, plus one rather poor SF novel) is indeed relaxing -- but satisfying too.
Also I read books for a book club and sometimes we pick a downright bad book because we didn't know in advance it would be bad. Though I have tried the occasional big bestseller that is really really bad and I have to give up -- they can be unreadable. (I'm thinking of Dan Brown and E. L. James here.)
Last authors read ... Ellen MacGregor. Mat Johnson. Sofia Samatar. K. J. Parker. Kaliane Bradley. Katherine Rundell. J. D. Salinger. Alex Jeffers. James Morrow. Leo Tolstoy. Cordwainer Smith. Gene Wolfe. Dorothy Strachey Bussey. Ethel M. Dell. (Better than you might think, but not good!) Fred Pohl. Winifred Watson. Edna O'Brien. Christopher Priest.
Hopefull there are enough bad books in there to overcome the problem of reading good books! :)
I love old popular novels. They're like reading contemporary popular novels, but...they're all good. You should write something about older popular novels you like! I have this book by Michael Korda which is just a century of bestseller lists, and sometimes I browse the lists from a hundred years ago and pick something. My last find was E. Phillip Oppenheim, who wrote spy novels in the early 20th century (the man _hated_ the Germans). I read like four books by him. Loved them
I've read a couple by Oppenheim -- his most famous, The Great Impersonation, and also The Wrath to Come, in which he predicted World War II somewhat accurately 15 years in advance. (Somewhat accurately in that he suggested an alliance between Germany, Russia, and Japan, and got the time frame right. Didn't predict Hitler, though.) Oppenheim can be very fun but you do have to filter the racism ... but that's pretty common throughout that period.
I do write about some of the old popular novels I like (and some I don't) at my blog, which I actually started specifically to write about old popular novels, beginning with Michael Arlen's The Green Hat (though it's morphed a lot since then.)
I don't even notice the racism in these books anymore. I liked his political books too, A PEOPLE'S MAN was my favorite--about a socialist leader who's been bribed by (who else) the Germans.
But what does that *mean*? That deep down, we suspect that the claims are actually true? Or that we believe the methods of modern science & media filtering are so flimsy and easily manipulated, so unrelated to the truth, that someone could easily write an entire high-quality 'nonfiction' book which seriously argues that white is black and up is down? Or that we have no opinion on the topic at all and could believe the psychological harms/benefits of reading could really be just about anything, but we don't care because we would still read for other reasons and so the value of the information is zero and the topic is merely of entertainment value to us?
Sophistry has its place. It is entertaining, and it teaches people how to argue for their ideas. Sophistry doesn't really aim for truth, but it gives people the tools they can use to arrive at the truth, if they want to.
I think my point however was mostly that these kinds of books aren't very rigorous and you can write one that says anything. That's why I (and I assume most people) don't really believe any of these pop nonfiction books that purport to tell me one counterintuitive truth that will revolutionize everything
I feel like Robin Hanson has written a bunch about how using literary (or story) framing for real world scenarios can lead to bad stuff. Like the others, I totally believed it was real, and I even googled "Robin Hanson on the Literacy Delusion" because I was certain to find something. The AI I asked, surprisingly for once, replied that I must be mistaken as to the book's existence, instead of hallucinating it for my benefit.
I am 100% on board with the general thesis that you can learn faulty moral/logical methodology from book/movies/stories, and I don't mean like "the book was pushing a bad philosophy" but "the scene in the book was set up in such a way that the protagonist was going to be right no matter what" so if you go into some social situation with the idea that you are protagonist, and if someone does something that you find distasteful, that if you treat that as story characterization of their inner lack of qualities, you are going to have some difficulties, that, as per the fictional book above, might lead to depression/unhappiness.
I think there are probably real live people out there whose ideas of how many standard social interactions go (and who is generally wrong or right in them) is primarily informed by versions of them they've read/watched.
I think that I would have a dozen caveats, exceptions and different contexts before I would want to say "reading is bad" but I can see the skeleton of a case there.
There's definitely a case, but it would be hard to prove that it's worse than watching TV. That's what makes the literacy delusion really powerful--the idea that literacy is bad precisely because it is more convincing and effective than television.
Definitely, I think that "case" would also apply to any kind of stories, in proportion to how easy it is to fool oneself into reading "story elements" into real world situations, or yourself as the protagonist. I don't think I'd want to rank various media types, (TV vs reading) or even "low brow" vs "high brow" but rather specific examples, and even then, it would be contingent on the viewer/reader.
"the idea that literacy is bad precisely because it is more convincing and effective"
I think the core of the issue might be that stories trick us into identifying not only with the emotions and meanings, but the implicit (and often unintended) messages (that yes, in certain media types, or in the hands of certain authors, might be more convincing and effective, even unintentionally) about the moral weight and likelihood of events.
For one example, it's a trope in stories that the little guy/underdog ends up winning, and his underdog-edness is itself a moral virtue. That's extremely common in stories, and certainly morally true in the story's framing, as determined by the author. But if you take that moral lesson and apply it to the real world, it may not work, and lead you to make bad decisions. Just like the researchers in your fictitious book found! :)
There's a book that talks about the effects of literacy on human consciousness and it's Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy" (1982). This is not one of those pop science books; it's the real deal, and it blew my mind when I read it. It will completely change the way you think about literacy, what it is, and how it's led to modern society, starting with Plato.
I'll attempt a brief summary: Ong talks about the transition from an oral society (most of human history), to a literate society (Plato), to a print society (Gutenberg). He talks about the work of certain key figures (Milman Parry) who studied and recorded oral bards in 1930's Yugoslavia to show that stories such as The Iliad and The Odyssey were oral creations, not literate ones; in other words, these stories and their composition revealed a consciousness shaped by orality. Another key figure (Eric Havelock) then used this evidence to argue in "Preface to Plato" that the ability to understand abstract concepts is a result of literacy: think of something like Plato's forms, a pre-literate culture could not have conceived of this idea, according to Havelock. More radically, this case could be made for abstract notions such as "justice" "truth" etc. This gets a bit at your point about vigilantes, morality, and book readers. A final point: it's true that today people probably read more text than ever before, but the text they read, such as social media and "texting", often bears the characteristics of orality (it's instantaneous, contextual, present), rather than literacy (slow, distant, isolated). We have a paradox now where we read more but are less literate. Anyway, that's probably enough. I took a class back in college where we read Ong and it's stayed with me ever since.
Lots of deep chuckles with this one. Though it's not exactly in line with the verve of your piece, I just finished a Chekhov story that discussed literacy and its fallacies here (warning, incoming long quote):
"Teaching peasants to read and write, giving them little moral pamphlets and medical assistance, cannot decrease either ignorance or mortality, just as the light from your windows cannot illuminate this huge garden," I said. "You give nothing by your interference in the lives of these people. You only create new demands, and a new compulsion to work."
"Ah! My God, but we must do something!" said Lyda exasperatedly, and I could tell by her voice that she thought my opinions negligible and despised me.
"It is necessary," I said, "to free people from hard physical work. It is necessary to relieve them of their yoke, to give them breathing space, to save them from spending their whole lives in the kitchen or the byre, in the fields; they should have time to take thought of their souls, of God and to develop their spiritual capacities. Every human being's salvation lies in spiritual activity—in his continual search for truth and the meaning of life. Give them some relief from rough, animal labour, let them feel free, then you will see how ridiculous at bottom your pamphlets and pharmacies are. Once a human being is aware of his vocation, then he can only be satisfied with religion, service, art, and not with trifles like that."
"Free them from work?" Lyda gave a smile. "Is that possible?"
"Yes.... Take upon yourself a part of their work. If we all, in town and country, without exception, agreed to share the work which is being spent by mankind in the satisfaction of physical demands, then none of us would have to work more than two or three hours a day. If all of us, rich and poor, worked three hours a day the rest of our time would be free. And then to be still less dependent on our bodies, we should invent machines to do the work and we should try to reduce our demands to the minimum. We should toughen ourselves and our children should not be afraid of hunger and cold, and we should not be anxious about their health, as Anna, Maria, Pelagueya were anxious. Then supposing we did not bother about doctors and pharmacies, and did away with tobacco factories and distilleries—what a lot of free time we should have! We should give our leisure to service and the arts. Just as peasants all work together to repair the roads, so the whole community would work together to seek truth and the meaning of life, and, I am sure of it—truth would be found very soon, man would get rid of his continual, poignant, depressing fear of death and even of death itself."
"But you contradict yourself," said Lyda. "You talk about service and deny education."
"I deny the education of a man who can only use it to read the signs on the public houses and possibly a pamphlet which he is incapable of understanding—the kind of education we have had from the time of Riurik: and village life has remained exactly as it was then. Not education is wanted but freedom for the full development of spiritual capacities. Not schools are wanted but universities."
"You deny medicine too."
"Yes. It should only be used for the investigation of diseases, as natural phenomenon, not for their cure. It is no good curing diseases if you don't cure their causes. Remove the chief cause—physical labour, and there will be no diseases. I don't acknowledge the science which cures," I went on excitedly. "Science and art, when they are true, are directed not to temporary or private purposes, but to the eternal and the general—they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities, like pharmacies and libraries, then they only complicate and encumber life. We have any number of doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, and highly educated people, but we have no biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets. All our intellectual and spiritual energy is wasted on temporary passing needs.... Scientists, writers, painters work and work, and thanks to them the comforts of life grow greater every day, the demands of the body multiply, but we are still a long way from the truth and man still remains the most rapacious and unseemly of animals, and everything tends to make the majority of mankind degenerate and more and more lacking in vitality. Under such conditions the life of an artist has no meaning and the more talented he is, the stranger and more incomprehensible his position is, since it only amounts to his working for the amusement of the predatory, disgusting animal, man, and supporting the existing state of things. And I don't want to work and will not.... Nothing is wanted, so let the world go to hell."
--- Anton Chekhov, "The House with the Mezzanine" 1896
I prefer a catholic taste in literature too, but I don’t actually know of anything that suggests the readers of Colleen Rooney *do* go on to read Shakespeare or whatever. And I think part of the problem is a pandering to easy taste as opposed to catholic taste.
For example, the problem with articles like the latest Atlantic piece is that it over claims that people “can’t” read and then says that Percy Jackson, a book my 8yro reads, is adequate college prep!
If it has been about the true story that people “won’t” read (an admission they slip in ) then the job is to persuade them to the best books, something they aren’t interested in beyond saying Homer is about the “human condition”…. A boring cliche that won’t get anyone to pick up a book!
Whilever literati elites are more interested in writing their sorts of pieces the culture will surely remain as it is. If they cruelly argued for a catholic taste in literature I’d be all for it
I mean...but I started off as a kid reading Michener and Isaac Asimov and all kinds of stuff. Now I read Proust! Is that not the experience of most people? I certainly didn't read serious books when I was 18
Yes sure but adults reading that stuff don’t move on and my view of the current culture is that we are saying to young people don’t worry Percy Jackson is good. At some point don’t we just have to advocate for Proust?
I agree. But people will only read Proust if they already know how to read books. Nobody will go from not reading books to reading Proust. Thats the whole point of the Atlantic article.
The number of people reading books of any sort is down. And the number of books that they read is down. So the number of people who have the capacity to be convinced to read Proust is also down.
The source of that cultural shift is somewhat mysterious. It's probably a combination of a lot of things. I don't really know how to solve the problem. My suspicion is that books do have a pull on their own, and that they will endure.
I definitely don't think encouraging people to read lighter fare is the answer. And yet...we do need people to be out there reading lighter fare! It is an absolute necessity that a ton of people be engaged in light reading, so that a pool of people exists who can move on to heavier reading. And yet to advocate for light reading is absurd. Just one of life's paradoxes
A very interesting post and substack. I think that advocating or lighter reads is exactly the right route, and I'm not sure we have to view it as absurd.
Yours truly would be exhibit A for starting with easier, popular fiction and moving later (much, much later) into literature. Two things have to happen for literature to work: your reading self has to grow strong enough and patient enough to enjoy it, and your life experience has to be sufficient to appreciate the work. There is no circumstance I can envision in which my 22 year-old self could have tackled anything like Proust and enjoyed it.
Proust is a trophy read and that’s the danger. One may read it to get the medal, like having the 26.2 sticker on your car. And that would be a terrible, terrible misstep, because Proust’s work is also beautiful. And much of the beauty is hidden in tedious passages, which is part of what makes it such a strange, great work.
A final example: I’ve neglected deeply reading verse poetry for most of my life. Finally undertook it in October. I’ve started recording my thoughts as I go. This would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago. And still reading junk novels when I feel like it.
I don't read much because I like it too much. Once I get into a book I'm enjoying I find it hard to focus on or do anything else, and end up skipping important work and chores because I'm reading. So I try to avoid finding new books, and get my reading fix from blog posts instead
Incidentally, there are many popular video games that involve an astonishing amount of reading. For example, Metal Gear Solid, released in 1998, sold over seven million copies worldwide - and its English script is about 340,000 words, twice as long as "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire".
"Reading bad books is good; reading better books is better. I think that’s basically the opinion everyone has...."
There's a bold claim! Where I live (south China), everything is hysterically speeded up, so I get to witness an awful lot of people who don't hold anything like that opinion. But I suspect there's a lot of variation in opinion everywhere.
When my wife was in school (1980s/90s), reading of novels was punished. There are acknowledged classic novels here, but even having those in your desk, rather than textbooks, would get you rapped knuckles.
Fast forward to 2024, and my project to get my kids reading encounters a lot of resistance from parents. Anything that isn't syllabus-required is looked on with extreme suspicion. My last Shakespeare class ended in failure because one of the teenagers refused to attend, and their parent apologetically explained: We can't make him go to class because we can't really understand what you're teaching. Why are you making them actually read all the words? All they need for the exam is to be able to write the essay...
I just had to vent about these little frustrations. But the broader point is - I'm not sure that your belief in a consensus around the value of reading will hold, or even that it does hold today. Reading certainly isn't going to die out, but it could become as niche as, I dunno, improv. Handball. Trainspotting.
I don’t know why it feels so radical when you say “to read more, do other things less” but it’s true. I used to enjoy a beer in the evenings but I’ve cut way back because it prevents me from reading the books I’d like to read. Same with TV - binge-watching a series takes the same amount of time but is less worthwhile than reading a book (for me). Of course, I still have a YouTube problem…
Re: death of literacy - the whole debate strikes me as primarily an emotional one, similar to the “death of the liberal arts” debate. The people writing these pieces, with the perspective to report on changes, have truly had their lives changed by literature and humanities. We are the people who have experienced that power and want others to share that experience! But it’s such an emotional experience, to be formed by books, that the defenses of liberal study often come off as completely irrational and self-serving because they are. Taking the long view, more people read books (even difficult books) now than when most of the great works we extol were written, and there’s no danger of them dying out.
Personally I just want more people to read Proust so that I can gain social value with normies (many of whom haven’t heard of him) and also enthuse about why he’s so great more often than just randomly online. I do think these works can be life changing, but people who want their lives changed by books will find them. Lots of people just don’t care and that’s okay!
I agree--it's just very emotional for us. A lot of people also have a lot of cultural capital tied up literature, which is not quite the case for me, so I think this is more anxiety-provoking for them
I do make a mostly conscious effort to mix great books with good middlebrow books with entertaining books with entertaining trash. Part of this is due to being a devoted reader of genre fiction (mostly SF, but Romance and Mystery too.) Part of this is an interest in popular fiction of a century or more ago. Lots of it is an acknowledgement that sometimes I need to read something relaxing. Reading, say, Anna Karenina (the last officially sanctioned Great Book I read) is absorbing and fascinating and truly inspiring at times -- but not relaxing), while reading, say, D. E. Stevenson (a once quite popular writer of better than average light romance novels (or lightly comic regular life novels, plus one rather poor SF novel) is indeed relaxing -- but satisfying too.
Also I read books for a book club and sometimes we pick a downright bad book because we didn't know in advance it would be bad. Though I have tried the occasional big bestseller that is really really bad and I have to give up -- they can be unreadable. (I'm thinking of Dan Brown and E. L. James here.)
Last authors read ... Ellen MacGregor. Mat Johnson. Sofia Samatar. K. J. Parker. Kaliane Bradley. Katherine Rundell. J. D. Salinger. Alex Jeffers. James Morrow. Leo Tolstoy. Cordwainer Smith. Gene Wolfe. Dorothy Strachey Bussey. Ethel M. Dell. (Better than you might think, but not good!) Fred Pohl. Winifred Watson. Edna O'Brien. Christopher Priest.
Hopefull there are enough bad books in there to overcome the problem of reading good books! :)
I love old popular novels. They're like reading contemporary popular novels, but...they're all good. You should write something about older popular novels you like! I have this book by Michael Korda which is just a century of bestseller lists, and sometimes I browse the lists from a hundred years ago and pick something. My last find was E. Phillip Oppenheim, who wrote spy novels in the early 20th century (the man _hated_ the Germans). I read like four books by him. Loved them
I've read a couple by Oppenheim -- his most famous, The Great Impersonation, and also The Wrath to Come, in which he predicted World War II somewhat accurately 15 years in advance. (Somewhat accurately in that he suggested an alliance between Germany, Russia, and Japan, and got the time frame right. Didn't predict Hitler, though.) Oppenheim can be very fun but you do have to filter the racism ... but that's pretty common throughout that period.
I do write about some of the old popular novels I like (and some I don't) at my blog, which I actually started specifically to write about old popular novels, beginning with Michael Arlen's The Green Hat (though it's morphed a lot since then.)
I don't even notice the racism in these books anymore. I liked his political books too, A PEOPLE'S MAN was my favorite--about a socialist leader who's been bribed by (who else) the Germans.
Great piece Naomi! Loving the mix of how lyrical and substantive your writing is.
Really interesting piece. Thanks for sharing. More fuel for my anti-universal literacy campaign
Brilliant post! I love that The Literacy Delusion isn't real. It makes this so much more real!
Thank you! It seems like an astonishingly real book, doesn't it? Someone could definitely write this book
But what does that *mean*? That deep down, we suspect that the claims are actually true? Or that we believe the methods of modern science & media filtering are so flimsy and easily manipulated, so unrelated to the truth, that someone could easily write an entire high-quality 'nonfiction' book which seriously argues that white is black and up is down? Or that we have no opinion on the topic at all and could believe the psychological harms/benefits of reading could really be just about anything, but we don't care because we would still read for other reasons and so the value of the information is zero and the topic is merely of entertainment value to us?
Sophistry has its place. It is entertaining, and it teaches people how to argue for their ideas. Sophistry doesn't really aim for truth, but it gives people the tools they can use to arrive at the truth, if they want to.
I think my point however was mostly that these kinds of books aren't very rigorous and you can write one that says anything. That's why I (and I assume most people) don't really believe any of these pop nonfiction books that purport to tell me one counterintuitive truth that will revolutionize everything
I feel like Robin Hanson has written a bunch about how using literary (or story) framing for real world scenarios can lead to bad stuff. Like the others, I totally believed it was real, and I even googled "Robin Hanson on the Literacy Delusion" because I was certain to find something. The AI I asked, surprisingly for once, replied that I must be mistaken as to the book's existence, instead of hallucinating it for my benefit.
I am 100% on board with the general thesis that you can learn faulty moral/logical methodology from book/movies/stories, and I don't mean like "the book was pushing a bad philosophy" but "the scene in the book was set up in such a way that the protagonist was going to be right no matter what" so if you go into some social situation with the idea that you are protagonist, and if someone does something that you find distasteful, that if you treat that as story characterization of their inner lack of qualities, you are going to have some difficulties, that, as per the fictional book above, might lead to depression/unhappiness.
I think there are probably real live people out there whose ideas of how many standard social interactions go (and who is generally wrong or right in them) is primarily informed by versions of them they've read/watched.
I think that I would have a dozen caveats, exceptions and different contexts before I would want to say "reading is bad" but I can see the skeleton of a case there.
There's definitely a case, but it would be hard to prove that it's worse than watching TV. That's what makes the literacy delusion really powerful--the idea that literacy is bad precisely because it is more convincing and effective than television.
Thank you kindly for your response!
Definitely, I think that "case" would also apply to any kind of stories, in proportion to how easy it is to fool oneself into reading "story elements" into real world situations, or yourself as the protagonist. I don't think I'd want to rank various media types, (TV vs reading) or even "low brow" vs "high brow" but rather specific examples, and even then, it would be contingent on the viewer/reader.
"the idea that literacy is bad precisely because it is more convincing and effective"
I think the core of the issue might be that stories trick us into identifying not only with the emotions and meanings, but the implicit (and often unintended) messages (that yes, in certain media types, or in the hands of certain authors, might be more convincing and effective, even unintentionally) about the moral weight and likelihood of events.
For one example, it's a trope in stories that the little guy/underdog ends up winning, and his underdog-edness is itself a moral virtue. That's extremely common in stories, and certainly morally true in the story's framing, as determined by the author. But if you take that moral lesson and apply it to the real world, it may not work, and lead you to make bad decisions. Just like the researchers in your fictitious book found! :)
There's a book that talks about the effects of literacy on human consciousness and it's Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy" (1982). This is not one of those pop science books; it's the real deal, and it blew my mind when I read it. It will completely change the way you think about literacy, what it is, and how it's led to modern society, starting with Plato.
I'll attempt a brief summary: Ong talks about the transition from an oral society (most of human history), to a literate society (Plato), to a print society (Gutenberg). He talks about the work of certain key figures (Milman Parry) who studied and recorded oral bards in 1930's Yugoslavia to show that stories such as The Iliad and The Odyssey were oral creations, not literate ones; in other words, these stories and their composition revealed a consciousness shaped by orality. Another key figure (Eric Havelock) then used this evidence to argue in "Preface to Plato" that the ability to understand abstract concepts is a result of literacy: think of something like Plato's forms, a pre-literate culture could not have conceived of this idea, according to Havelock. More radically, this case could be made for abstract notions such as "justice" "truth" etc. This gets a bit at your point about vigilantes, morality, and book readers. A final point: it's true that today people probably read more text than ever before, but the text they read, such as social media and "texting", often bears the characteristics of orality (it's instantaneous, contextual, present), rather than literacy (slow, distant, isolated). We have a paradox now where we read more but are less literate. Anyway, that's probably enough. I took a class back in college where we read Ong and it's stayed with me ever since.
Wow I wanna read this book!
...I may have not realized "The Literacy Delusion" wasn't a real book until I finished reading the piece...
It sounds so real doesn't it! This is a book that could definitely exist. Someone could make a million dollars writing this book
Lots of deep chuckles with this one. Though it's not exactly in line with the verve of your piece, I just finished a Chekhov story that discussed literacy and its fallacies here (warning, incoming long quote):
"Teaching peasants to read and write, giving them little moral pamphlets and medical assistance, cannot decrease either ignorance or mortality, just as the light from your windows cannot illuminate this huge garden," I said. "You give nothing by your interference in the lives of these people. You only create new demands, and a new compulsion to work."
"Ah! My God, but we must do something!" said Lyda exasperatedly, and I could tell by her voice that she thought my opinions negligible and despised me.
"It is necessary," I said, "to free people from hard physical work. It is necessary to relieve them of their yoke, to give them breathing space, to save them from spending their whole lives in the kitchen or the byre, in the fields; they should have time to take thought of their souls, of God and to develop their spiritual capacities. Every human being's salvation lies in spiritual activity—in his continual search for truth and the meaning of life. Give them some relief from rough, animal labour, let them feel free, then you will see how ridiculous at bottom your pamphlets and pharmacies are. Once a human being is aware of his vocation, then he can only be satisfied with religion, service, art, and not with trifles like that."
"Free them from work?" Lyda gave a smile. "Is that possible?"
"Yes.... Take upon yourself a part of their work. If we all, in town and country, without exception, agreed to share the work which is being spent by mankind in the satisfaction of physical demands, then none of us would have to work more than two or three hours a day. If all of us, rich and poor, worked three hours a day the rest of our time would be free. And then to be still less dependent on our bodies, we should invent machines to do the work and we should try to reduce our demands to the minimum. We should toughen ourselves and our children should not be afraid of hunger and cold, and we should not be anxious about their health, as Anna, Maria, Pelagueya were anxious. Then supposing we did not bother about doctors and pharmacies, and did away with tobacco factories and distilleries—what a lot of free time we should have! We should give our leisure to service and the arts. Just as peasants all work together to repair the roads, so the whole community would work together to seek truth and the meaning of life, and, I am sure of it—truth would be found very soon, man would get rid of his continual, poignant, depressing fear of death and even of death itself."
"But you contradict yourself," said Lyda. "You talk about service and deny education."
"I deny the education of a man who can only use it to read the signs on the public houses and possibly a pamphlet which he is incapable of understanding—the kind of education we have had from the time of Riurik: and village life has remained exactly as it was then. Not education is wanted but freedom for the full development of spiritual capacities. Not schools are wanted but universities."
"You deny medicine too."
"Yes. It should only be used for the investigation of diseases, as natural phenomenon, not for their cure. It is no good curing diseases if you don't cure their causes. Remove the chief cause—physical labour, and there will be no diseases. I don't acknowledge the science which cures," I went on excitedly. "Science and art, when they are true, are directed not to temporary or private purposes, but to the eternal and the general—they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities, like pharmacies and libraries, then they only complicate and encumber life. We have any number of doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, and highly educated people, but we have no biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets. All our intellectual and spiritual energy is wasted on temporary passing needs.... Scientists, writers, painters work and work, and thanks to them the comforts of life grow greater every day, the demands of the body multiply, but we are still a long way from the truth and man still remains the most rapacious and unseemly of animals, and everything tends to make the majority of mankind degenerate and more and more lacking in vitality. Under such conditions the life of an artist has no meaning and the more talented he is, the stranger and more incomprehensible his position is, since it only amounts to his working for the amusement of the predatory, disgusting animal, man, and supporting the existing state of things. And I don't want to work and will not.... Nothing is wanted, so let the world go to hell."
--- Anton Chekhov, "The House with the Mezzanine" 1896
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27411/27411-h/27411-h.htm#THE_HOUSE_WITH_THE_MEZZANINE
Thank you! Loving the Chekhov I'm getting from you these days =] Kinda makes me want to re-read him myself
I prefer a catholic taste in literature too, but I don’t actually know of anything that suggests the readers of Colleen Rooney *do* go on to read Shakespeare or whatever. And I think part of the problem is a pandering to easy taste as opposed to catholic taste.
For example, the problem with articles like the latest Atlantic piece is that it over claims that people “can’t” read and then says that Percy Jackson, a book my 8yro reads, is adequate college prep!
If it has been about the true story that people “won’t” read (an admission they slip in ) then the job is to persuade them to the best books, something they aren’t interested in beyond saying Homer is about the “human condition”…. A boring cliche that won’t get anyone to pick up a book!
Whilever literati elites are more interested in writing their sorts of pieces the culture will surely remain as it is. If they cruelly argued for a catholic taste in literature I’d be all for it
Sorry rant over! .
I mean...but I started off as a kid reading Michener and Isaac Asimov and all kinds of stuff. Now I read Proust! Is that not the experience of most people? I certainly didn't read serious books when I was 18
Yes sure but adults reading that stuff don’t move on and my view of the current culture is that we are saying to young people don’t worry Percy Jackson is good. At some point don’t we just have to advocate for Proust?
I agree. But people will only read Proust if they already know how to read books. Nobody will go from not reading books to reading Proust. Thats the whole point of the Atlantic article.
The number of people reading books of any sort is down. And the number of books that they read is down. So the number of people who have the capacity to be convinced to read Proust is also down.
The source of that cultural shift is somewhat mysterious. It's probably a combination of a lot of things. I don't really know how to solve the problem. My suspicion is that books do have a pull on their own, and that they will endure.
I definitely don't think encouraging people to read lighter fare is the answer. And yet...we do need people to be out there reading lighter fare! It is an absolute necessity that a ton of people be engaged in light reading, so that a pool of people exists who can move on to heavier reading. And yet to advocate for light reading is absurd. Just one of life's paradoxes
A very interesting post and substack. I think that advocating or lighter reads is exactly the right route, and I'm not sure we have to view it as absurd.
Yours truly would be exhibit A for starting with easier, popular fiction and moving later (much, much later) into literature. Two things have to happen for literature to work: your reading self has to grow strong enough and patient enough to enjoy it, and your life experience has to be sufficient to appreciate the work. There is no circumstance I can envision in which my 22 year-old self could have tackled anything like Proust and enjoyed it.
Proust is a trophy read and that’s the danger. One may read it to get the medal, like having the 26.2 sticker on your car. And that would be a terrible, terrible misstep, because Proust’s work is also beautiful. And much of the beauty is hidden in tedious passages, which is part of what makes it such a strange, great work.
A final example: I’ve neglected deeply reading verse poetry for most of my life. Finally undertook it in October. I’ve started recording my thoughts as I go. This would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago. And still reading junk novels when I feel like it.
I got into verse too just a few years ago after many years of avoiding it. That really is the final frontier, no?
Yes, yes it is. A lot more to meter than I realized.
Yes I agree. Puzzling times.
I don't read much because I like it too much. Once I get into a book I'm enjoying I find it hard to focus on or do anything else, and end up skipping important work and chores because I'm reading. So I try to avoid finding new books, and get my reading fix from blog posts instead
Incidentally, there are many popular video games that involve an astonishing amount of reading. For example, Metal Gear Solid, released in 1998, sold over seven million copies worldwide - and its English script is about 340,000 words, twice as long as "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire".
Source: https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_longest_video_game_scripts#Video_games
"Reading bad books is good; reading better books is better. I think that’s basically the opinion everyone has...."
There's a bold claim! Where I live (south China), everything is hysterically speeded up, so I get to witness an awful lot of people who don't hold anything like that opinion. But I suspect there's a lot of variation in opinion everywhere.
When my wife was in school (1980s/90s), reading of novels was punished. There are acknowledged classic novels here, but even having those in your desk, rather than textbooks, would get you rapped knuckles.
Fast forward to 2024, and my project to get my kids reading encounters a lot of resistance from parents. Anything that isn't syllabus-required is looked on with extreme suspicion. My last Shakespeare class ended in failure because one of the teenagers refused to attend, and their parent apologetically explained: We can't make him go to class because we can't really understand what you're teaching. Why are you making them actually read all the words? All they need for the exam is to be able to write the essay...
I just had to vent about these little frustrations. But the broader point is - I'm not sure that your belief in a consensus around the value of reading will hold, or even that it does hold today. Reading certainly isn't going to die out, but it could become as niche as, I dunno, improv. Handball. Trainspotting.
Does it look at dyslexia? Or if audiobook readers have different outcomes?