It’s just not for me.

I must disagree with the idea that cultural illiteracy is the natural condition of human society. My wife and I lived in Germany for a few years. Our Germany neighbors and friends were well read and well informed. Our American obsession with low culture of pleasure encourages technology to focus on self-pleasure. Our society’s focus on wealth demands a sacrifice of time for greed’s sake. Both leaves little room for a well-rounded education and sitting around in Beer Gardens discussing philosophy and international politics.

Very few Americans know that the Federal Chancellor of the Germany is Angela Merkel … a woman. Nearly every German is aware of the candidates for the US president let alone who the current president is. That isn’t because the US is so important. The typical German also knows who the important leaders are in France, England, Italy, Russia, Japan, etc, etc, etc.

The difference? They are a culture that prizes education and culture. They WANT to understand the difference between Kant and Kierkegaard, Bach and Brahms, Hawking and Heisenberg, Dickens and Dostoevsky, Hillary and Huckabee. They make continuing education cheap and available (Volksschule) to allow adults to study culture, history, philosophy, languages, etc. Our continuing education options are expensive and they focus on money-earning technological talents. We prize money and pleasure.

We are a greedy pleasure bound people. Why?

If you look back at the original post from Huenemann, the concern was with a loss of “cultural literacy”. As the conversation developed, reading came up (or the lack of reading) as one possible cause of this growing cultural illiteracy (along with the general “automation” of our lives).

Anyway, let me backtrack to that point. I don’t have any fancy studies to back up my position, this is just my sense of things. Most of my students are culturally illiterate. They have not read, or even been exposed to, most of the great books that make up our tradition. They look at me blankly when I mention Homer, Chaucer, even Twain. I asked one of my classes just the other day how many had read one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. The answer: less than 15% of the class. I find this shocking (how could they have graduated high school?) and depressing.

There are, I would think, a whole host of causes for this phenomenon of estrangement from our tradition. A fascination with the new (and the attending sneer about anything old). A culture of individualism and “originality” that always asks for how individuals “feel” rather than how others might have thought. We could go on and on. But I think it is naive to think that a diminishment of reading (whether it be newspapers, novels, or philosophy) does not have something to do with it. I don’t think this is a good thing, but isn’t it obvious that reading is being edged out by other media (television, iPod, web, etc)?

My point would just be this: cultural literacy is important, and we won’t have a culturally literate population unless almost everyone starts to read more. I mean more both in terms of higher quantity but also higher quality (why does the Da Vinci Code, as exciting as it was, pass for substantive theological reflection?). At least some of time our students spend on the web is reading, but aren’t they mostly just reading crap there?

So this is not an attack on reading – it is a call for the cultural necessity of raising both the quantity and quality of the books we read.

And this is not an attack on libraries. (Disclaimer, I know next to nothing about library science). That said, I often wonder if libraries are really attending to this problem. In my humble opinion, libraries these days seem far more concerned with having the latest and greatest technologies than with really growing an interest in reading. (Educators often make this same mistake, thinking that a fancier power point presentation makes their class better). In our USU library, the first thing you see when you walk in is not a book, it is a computer, and the computer labs are trafficked far more than the reading rooms. The upstairs reading lounge is almost always empty. The same is true of the Logan library, video and other electronic media are front and center.

I am not blaming libraries (though I don’t think they are blameless either). We all have a hand in creating the problem, and in working toward a solution. Secondary ed curriculum need to be totally overhauled. Profs need to assign reading and come up with better ways of encouraging it. Parents need to model reading in the home. Profs and librarians need to teach students the largely lost traditional research skills (searching and reading traditional journals, etc).

Here is a review:

http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2005/06/02/Louv/index.html

Something that relates to the disconnect is what Kleiner pointed out early on. Technology has made the media so portable, to easy to acquire that almost no thought is put into it anymore. Since no one really has to play an instrument to ‘make music’ anymore, with the advent of computer programming, it seems to have become a crutch and an excuse to not take music, or art, seriously. While most composers probably cannot play their best work, they still understand the process of sound, of musical language and of ‘listening’ as Heidegger might say. Now anyone can talk over random chords and it will sell, or at least be downloaded like crazy, not because it is quality but because it is ‘cute’ ‘punk’ or ‘has a great beat!’ As a result the discipline and skill that even drove musical eugenics for centuries has fallen, and even the strong art of the few is swallowed up by trash. However, the ipod isn’t entirely to blame, since the attitude of ‘its all music man!’ has been around for quite some time, and exacerbated during the Napster trials.
Speaking of walking without headphones, I would prefer to have great music over the mindless chatter of the kiddie horde, but I would even more prefer to hear the wind, the trees, the bell chimes of Old Main. It is the romantic in me, but I enjoy letting my senses absorb the world around and compute the ambiance. It is an old human survival skill, to detect surroundings and the environment, that in some has evolved to a transcendent beauty, but for most has vanished or become annoying. To survive is to listen, to take in, to pay attention, and the iGeneration seems to have suspended that or tried to push it away, perhaps because they want the one dimensional connection, and to pay attention is to be forced to join in, to respond, to truly interact rather than dominate.
In fact this reminds me of the electronic ab flexer machine that I saw a commercial for. The people want the positive and attractive results, all the control, without the effort or sacrificing, without ‘earning’ it.