Are We Becoming Non-literate?

Jay Caspian Kang’s article in the online New Yorker this week reminded me of the early days at the Toads, when the “Reading Crisis” first appeared. The argument, at the time somewhat famously mentioned in the The Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” and in a couple of Caleb Crain articles in The New Yorker, including “Twilight of the Books,” was formally discussed in the Congressional Quarterly Researcher. Kang’s article is titled “If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?”

Never mind false dichotomies, not to mention the embedded claim that reading books is somehow superior to spending time on social media, it’s a worthwhile, as refreshing as the changing seasons, question. I tried just the other day to quit the blog; would I read more books? That resolve lasted not even a week. The habit of writing almost daily for 18 years (the blog, 8 books, plus stuff for various jobs) was harder to kick than I had anticipated.

Last year (as usual late to the book club), I read Kang’s book “The Dead Do Not Improve” (2012), which I enjoyed for its San Francisco setting and its surfing theme, but I’m not sure I learned anything from it, other than Kang’s a good writer, by which I mean his book accomplished its objectives. But I did not read it to learn anything, but for pleasure, but I’m still not too pleased with the title, but I get it: there are no tidy endings in a random world.

That reading anything in any amount suggests being or becoming smarter is already a tired bias held by, well, those purportedly who read the most. But Kang, in the article, admits to trading book time for phone time, and he’s concerned reading skills might be atrophying, and that he’s wasting time on social media even while facing a deadline for a new book that he, well, will want others to put their phones down and read.

But what we do learn from reading, or should learn, though it’s sometimes intuited, such that we might not even realize we’re getting it, is rhetoric, by which we mean the art of persuasion, and, of course, rhetoric can be misused, and only by reading extensively will we come to recognize rhetorical devices being used and their effects on us. Still, as for reading making us better people, there have been and still are well read people who are arguably not the best examples of humanity, but even that doesn’t mean we should give up reading as a way to improve our minds, our spirits, our conversations: as Becket said, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (Worstward Ho, 1983).

There are many activities that keep us from reading: playing a musical instrument, watching a movie or listening to a baseball game on the radio, playing cards, attending church, talking – not to mention work: waitressing, plumbing, nursing, gardening. Does it follow that if we abandon any of these activities we’ll read more?

But if we are reading fewer books, are we becoming more illiterate or non-literate? There’s a difference. It’s impossible to be illiterate in a non-literate culture, as McLuhan showed. And people in non-literate cultures have never been and are not now stupid; on the contrary.