Monday’s Atlantic has an interesting (paywalled) piece about the increasing pure inability of American university and college undergraduates to read a book, an entire big book from front to back. Rose Horowitch’s admittedly anecdotal survey of professors, many of them teaching at elite schools, shows that students are now arriving in higher education simply unable to process the volume of text that would have been taken for granted in 1910 or 1990.
It’s not that they’re unwilling to work hard, or that their cognitive apparatus is compromised, or even that they lack information. “High-achieving students at exclusive schools … can decode words and sentences,” Horowitch writes. “But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.” The attention spans of young people have new, unfamiliar upper bounds, and public high schools have made it possible to graduate with good grades without ever having been required to read an entire book. The quality of undergraduate writing, Horowitch notes as a virtual afterthought, may also be in decline — hard as that is for me to fathom, as someone who was tutoring undergraduates in the early 1990s.
There is obviously a legitimate and frightening problem here, although it is somewhat ill-defined. Humanities professors coping with attention-span attenuation are shifting their curricula away from the novel, and perhaps the long technical treatise, toward short stories, excerpts and articles. That may place Crime and Punishment or Mansfield Park, to say nothing of multi-volume historical or philosophical works, altogether out of the reach of the ordinary educated reader. The classic novel, long taken for granted (rightly or wrongly!) as the supreme species of literary art, may before our very eyes be becoming a niche taste on the order of opera or ballet.
I say “may,” but I’m personally convinced this is exactly what is happening. The Atlantic’s Horowitch isn’t totally sure where to point an accusing finger: maybe smartphones, maybe standardized testing, maybe grade inflation, maybe bad educational theories. I’d be tempted to save some blame for the publishing business itself, which used to flood the world with cheap paperbacks and actually compete on price with other forms of entertainment, but you probably can’t fault a trade for obeying the writing on the wall. I believe in the McLuhan principle that changes in our media environment change our neurology, in irreversible and unpredictable ways.
I.e., banning or restricting the smartphone isn’t going to save the book. Neither of these objects is sacred, and neither was handed down to us by God: I speak this heresy as someone whose family religion involves no God and extreme reverence for books. McLuhan foretold, knowing nothing of the internet or artificial intelligence, that we were marching pretty briskly toward a post-literate civilization — mostly in the “people literally can’t read big books anymore” sense of “post-literate.”
It took courage for him to accept this conclusion, and he advanced it amidst a social panic over broadcast television that now seems quaint. If not forgotten outright. (The people who screech about “screen time” seem to have no idea whatsoever of how much time they themselves spent in childhood watching cartoons, on a screen, passively, to the point of stupefaction.)
McLuhan didn’t like the idea of post-literacy any more than you would expect an English professor to. Or any more than I do. As a young journalist I used to make a bleak declinist joke that there’d be no super-literate rivals younger than me as I advanced in my career. I never thought this would be literally true, and it’s not — your National Post is oozing with young talent — but having a classic newspaper job does seem more or more like telling people you’re a town crier, or a repairman of horse-drawn landaus and cabriolets.
One of the things I learned from lifelong consumption of big, heavy, difficult books is that the novel is a quite recent innovation, and that lively, accomplished, dynamic civilizations existed before anyone was writing novels. Dante and Erasmus and Shakespeare, after all, never heard of nor imagined them. There is some comfort to be taken from this, even if I can’t help being shocked at the thought of a world where Crime and Punishment is an esoteric object of study for a high-IQ remnant, the social equivalent of a cantata, instead of the absorbing popular entertainment it originally was.
At the end of her piece Horowitch warns that the loss of the novel will injure our capacity for true sympathy, and she even hints that the predatory identity politics of our times — perhaps one should say “the new theology” — is filling a vacuum left behind by the tidal retreat of Moby-Dick and Little Women and Journey to the End of the Night. I hadn’t thought of this myself but I don’t doubt it. Civilization will probably have to find a way to outlast the capital-b Book, and, no, it won’t be the same. You just gotta hope it is recognizable as civilization.
National Post