What Good Are Books?

Globe and Mail columnist Rick Salutin decided to wrap up the decade by unburdening himself of “some year-end thoughts on… change in the realm of reading” (“In praise of words, not books,” G&M, Dec. 29, 2009). His big thought turns out to be that he thinks we could do with a lot less book reading.

But before he gets to that thought, Salutin starts off uncontroversially enough with remarks on the current anxiety about reading in electronic form versus reading books, or the “printed codex” as books are sometimes too cutely referred to these days. He points out that it’s not a big deal, which it isn’t. It’s a matter of habit and preference. Some people like to turn pages, other people like to click buttons or swipe touch-screens with their fingertips.

Though Salutin doesn’t mention it, we might add that while there’s no great objection to e-books, there’s also no pressing need for them, in the sense that Amazon Kindles or Sony Readers don’t offer any particular advantages over now-traditional paperbacks. By contrast, one can at least claim that cellphones, iPods, and Blackberries are technologies that do some things more conveniently, entertainingly and efficiently than older communication, entertainment and information devices. Electronic reading machines seem to have more to do with marketing technologies, fashionable accoutrements, and the state of capitalist economies than with usefulness.

I tend to view the whole anxious discussion about electronic versus print reading as pretty much a red herring. As a writer, I don’t care much whether you’re reading this sentence on a screen or on a page; I do care that you’re reading this. Insofar as the electronic/print reading debate fuzzifies the real issue, it’s merely a distraction.

At which point, columnist Salutin turns to the real issue. “Now let’s gaze into the abyss,” he says. “What if these changes lead to a decline in reading? Would it really be such a bad thing?” Salutin’s boldly going where Star Trekkers fear to tread is contained in his sly hint that a decline in reading wouldn’t “really be such a bad thing.” He then goes on to offer a sort of argument about why it wouldn’t be the end of the world as we know it.

Before we get to that argument “in praise of words, not books,” as Salutin puts it, let’s note that the decline of reading, especially book reading, is not a “what if” question. As far as I know, both by observation of students in the classrooms where I teach and from reading the stats, it’s a fact. (The stats, in case you’re interested, can be found in Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, 2008.)

But the decline in book reading is not simply a result of technological change. It’s a result, especially for young people, of widespread cultural change and consumerism. The junk culture dumped on them (and on most of the rest of us), whether it’s end-of-the-world videogames, Mixed Martial Arts, You Tube, Twitter tid-bits, or the phony “friending” of Facebook, has the effect of discouraging book reading and dumbing them down. Salutin, oddly, doesn’t mention any of this, and yet it’s the enveloping context in which the decline of book reading occurs.

Naturally, junk culture doesn’t necessarily have to produce “knowledge deficits.” As the technoboosters like to say, “There’s good stuff on the net, you just have to know where to look.” True, but if you’re blasting aliens on Modern Warfare while tuning in Lady Gaga on your iPod, texting your favourite vampire from your cellphone, and downloading/uploading YouTube/YouPorn moments, often all at once, it’s a little hard to read Naomi Klein’s The  Shock Doctrine, or anything else.  

Instead of a discussion of the conditions and consequences of current culture, Salutin offers a strange argument that quirkily counterposes words to books. It’s an argument meant, I think, to suggest that the loss of book reading isn’t a big deal. As I said before, whether you read electronically or on the page isn’t, I agree, a big deal; whether or not people read (books) is.

Salutin points out that words don’t equal books, and that’s not a bad thing. “Words actually belong to speech, which is the real human specific,” he says. “They preceded writing by millennia,” Salutin notes, then adds that writing “was a dumbed-down version of speech’s richness.” Oh? In his potted one-paragraph history of the relation between speech and writing, Salutin claims that the fruitful coexistence and balance between the two was destroyed by print 500 years ago. “Literacy became the sign of ‘civilization’; those without it were ‘primitive’.” Is Salutin going where I think he’s going? Namely: philistinism in the name of anti-elitism? Cranky uncle fulminations against “book-larnin’”?

Salutin assures us that “Canada’s greatest thinker,” Harold Innis, “felt that… the triumph of reading over speech led to the excesses of nationalism, world wars and other barbarities of the 20th century.” One can only hope that this idea wasn’t “Canada’s greatest thinker’s” greatest thought. Because it’s pretty dopey.

“How could books engender such cruelty?” asks Salutin. Good question. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a good answer. Salutin dances around this absurdity for a bit before settling on the punchline: “In my experience, there’s no correlation between being well-read and being an empathetic, kind person. Often enough, it’s the reverse.”

This is such muddle-headed musing — and that puts it mercifully — from the Globe’s main “progressive” columnist, that one can only wish him a comfy cave for his winter’s hibernation, and better things come spring. Since the ideological sub-text beneath these year-end thoughts remains invisible, it’s hard to know what Salutin is getting at.

But let’s assume he’s getting at what he says he’s getting at: Would a decline in reading “really be such a bad thing”? Or, more bluntly: What good are books? The answer to the first question is: Yes, a decline in book reading would really be a bad thing, and since the decline in book reading is already occuring, we can say, It’s already a bad thing. The reason a decline in book reading is a bad thing is because it leaves people more ignorant. And an ignorant populace is not the best way to run a democracy. Substituting Fox TV-style shouting and propaganda is not a good replacement for the kind of thinking that books are best at providing. 

The answer to the second question, What good are books?, is slightly more complicated. I take that question seriously not only to remedy Salutin’s mindlessness, but because I think it’s a question that is on the minds of a lot of my students. The corollary question on their minds — or at least the one I ran into last semester — is, Can we make judgments about art, or anything else, beyond our obvious subjective responses? (I’ll save the corollary question for another occasion, and stick to books here.) First, though, let’s clear away the obfuscating underbrush:

There’s no war between words-as-speech and words-as-writing. It’s a false dichotomy. Where I work, we use both. I’m one of the disappearing breed of classroom teachers who engages in what’s known (a little self-flatteringly) as “the Socratic method.” Instead of lectures, we have conversation, arguments, back-and-forth exchanges — in short, words. So, even though I’m a proponent of books, I’ve got nothing against speech. However, it’s also the case that I have a reading list in the courses I teach, and I expect the students to read the books on the list. (And, mirabile dictu, sometimes they do.)

What’s the point of them reading the books? Well, if pressed, I’d say, So, they’ll know something. The aim is not the therapeutic one of turning them into more empathetic persons, though, who knows, that might happen, too. In any case, their problem is not lack of empathy, it’s ignorance.

Let’s get down to cases. One of the books on the reading list last semester was Gabor Mate’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (2008). Mate is a medical doctor who worked with drug-addicted patients in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside neighbourhood for a decade. His book is an account of the people who live there, a self-examination of addiction in contemporary society, a survey of what science knows about drugs and brain development, a critique of the politics of drug laws, and some sensible meditations on human compassion and spirituality.

There are lots of ways for students to get to know something about this sphere of life, from on-site fieldtrips, to up-close-and-personal interviews, to classroom conversation. They all work. So does reading Mate’s Realm of Hungry Ghosts. The latter has the advantage of providing readers with a sustained engagement with the subject over the time it takes to read the book, in my view, probably a deeper, more wide-ranging engagement than most other representational and inter-personal forms provide. The book is better than a newspaper column,  magazine article, TV report, or even a documentary film. It’s denser and more intense than a superficial field trip. The book, as the students occasionally say, makes you  think.

I could cite a thousand other instances, from the students’ reading and my own. And while speech may be, as Salutin claims, “the real human specific,” often enough speech is just words, or worse. Books, when they’re good, do something that other forms of engagement don’t do. As a writer friend of mine and I noticed long ago, books are smarter than their authors. That is, the book as a sustained thought or investigation that’s revised, re-shaped, and re-thought in the company of readers, editors, friends, etc., is something more than even inspired speech.

One can say about books, as the cultural critic Edward Said remarked about the novel, it’s “the Western aesthetic form that offers the largest and most complex image of ourselves that we have.” Or, as the philosopher Richard Rorty says in Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007), “The point of reading a great many books is to become aware of a great number of alternative purposes, and the point of that is to become an autonomous self.”   

So, as Canada’s greatest thinker might have said, “Talk all you want, baby, but then let’s… read.”

Vancouver, January 3, 2010

Decline and Distraction

Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Knopf Canada, 232 pages, 2009)

 

One recent end-of-the-semester morning, while taking attendance in the “philosophy and literature” course I teach at Capilano University, I checked off the name of a student who had missed the previous class. “Where were you last week?” I asked. Since attendance-taking is a desultory ritual, I try to liven it up with some low-level banter. But this time, instead of the equally desultory dog-ate-my-homework excuse, there was something new.

“Modern warfare was released at midnight,” he said.

It took me a nano-second of mental double-take to realize that he wasn’t announcing an apocalyptic event that had been forecast by Nostradamus or the biblical Book of Revelations. In that same micro-instant I saw that I needed to make an orthographic tweak to his sentence to understand what he was saying. I had to italicize the subject of the remark: it wasn’t “modern warfare,” but instead “Modern Warfare.” Actually, Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty 6, accompanied by its ubiquitous “TM” trademark logo.

But he didn’t have to say all that because it was common knowledge. As I could tell from the collective chuckle, almost everyone in class got the picture immediately or, like me, an imperceptible nano-second later. Modern Warfare is a popular series of videogames and a new version of it had been recently released. Like Harry Potter novels, vampire movies, or certain musical/video releases, part of the marketing strategy is to begin selling them at midnight, giving early customers a more vivid prestige-enhancing sense of being the first one on their block to own one.

So, my student had dutifully lined up outside the mall emporium, purchased a copy of the game ($59.95 a pop, according to Amazon.ca) in the middle of the night, went home and blasted away until the wee hours, and was of course fast asleep by the time morning classtime rolled around. He wasn’t the only one. In the initial marketing surge (or should that be, these days, “surge”?), 4 million-plus copies were sold, according to the Modern Warfare 2 website, and the company has to date raked in about a half billion dollars in sales. So, this is not merely an anecdote about the latest cute excuse for missing class.

Naturally, I took the opportunity of the occasion to deliver a medium-level rant about the vacuity, shallowness, and dopey nature of the pop culture foisted on young people today, although I soften the blow by pointing out that their consumption of such junk isn’t entirely their fault. Since attendance-taking is generally agreed to be a desultory chore, the students are prepared to put up with these diverting rants as long as I don’t go on too long and turn it into nagging.

Anyway, fulminating about the state of the culture is a legitimate sub-theme of the philosophy and literature class, and such jeremiads can be counted as a form of classroom entertainment. Soon, we were back to our discussion of Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar, Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End, Julian Barnes’ Nothing to be Frightened Of, and Jose Saramago’s Death with Interruptions, the four books that make up “Endings,” the last thematic of this semester’s course. But in the back of my mind, I was aware that Calvino et al.’s ideas about death were hardly a patch on the colourful blow’m-up-good version offered by Modern Warfare.

I offer this little story of cultural catastrophe in support of Chris Hedges’ critique of American culture, politics and economics, Empire of Illusion. However, I have to admit that I view such scenes with a bit more wry amusement than Mr. Hedges, who tends to be rather grim-lipped about the whole thing. Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for The New York Times who subsequently turned into a political radical, and is currently a senior fellow of the leftist Nation Institute, a columnist for Truthdig.com, and the author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002). He begins his account of the “triumph of spectacle” with a protracted description of “entertainment” wrestling (as contrasted to the sport found in schools and Olympic contests).

It’s a ghoulishly fascinating 15-page portrait of the larger-than-life superheroes and lower-than-snakes villains of WWE, the World Wrestling Entertainment tour, one of the spectacles of U.S. cultural life. I’m not one of the 7.7 million monthly visitors to WWE’s website, so I found Hedges’ saga of the soap-opera-like fake wrestling world a bit confusing. Instead of old-fashioned half-nelsons and body slams, WWE is apparently more about bizarre storylines involving provocative taunting, cuckolding, and derogatory genealogies (as in, “Y tu mama tambien”). But Hedges’ main point is that the popular culture in which the masses, as they used to be known, are immersed, willingly or otherwise, is trivial, salacious, distracting, intellectually mind-numbing and, above all, a terrible illusion that signals the decline and fall of the Empire.

Subsequent vignettes in the opening chapter about celebrity culture include a visit to a “celebrity cemetery,” beauty makeover shows, “reality” TV fare like American Idol, Survivor, and Big Brother, and “humiliation” programs of the Jerry Springer type, where sub-proletarians duke it out over paternity DNA and who slept with whom. All of it serves to drive home Hedges’ message about the mindlessness of “mass-cult.”

Eventually, Hedges moves from the ring to Plato’s cave and spells it out. “We are chained,” he says, “to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism and pop psychology.” This is not exactly news, as Hedges readily admits. Not news then, but apparently more distortions of reality than ever, and perhaps some usefulness in pointing them out. Though shudder-inducing in places, Hedges’ book is strangely unsatisfying, and it’s not immediately clear why. Maybe it’s the tone of what my students would identify as “nagging.” But no, it’s more than tone.

In an opening chapter called “The Illusion of Literacy,” (and in a book partly sub-titled “The End of Literacy”), Hedges has surprisingly little to say about the subject, almost as if he’s not particularly interested in the possibility of literacy as a remedy for cultural mindlessness. There’s a scant couple of paragraphs citing an approximately 40 per cent functional illiteracy rate in North America, but nothing about the decline of book reading, especially among young people, nor anything about other “knowledge deficits” in history, geography, science and civics, and really not much about how the Internet is actually used by its consumers (9 out of 10 of young people’s most visited sites are devoted to “social networking”). For that sort of information you have to go to books like Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason or Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur.

The paucity of literacy discussion in a book that advertises itself as being about that topic is only part of a larger problem. The “illusion of literacy” chapter is followed by others that explore the “illusions” of love, wisdom, happiness, and America itself. There’s a lot about porn, the pretensions of higher education, pop psychology, and the dismaying condition of a pseudo-democracy. Most of what Hedges says is factually true, yet I found myself periodically surfacing from the account of cultural and political sludge to mumble, “Yes, yes, but this isn’t what all of life is about or how I experience it.” At least in some monastic corners of the world, the kid who’s playing Modern Warfare is also reading Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. That Hedges thinks bleak catastrophe is indeed the whole of contemporary life appears to be Hedges’ own illusion.

It’s never quite clear who Hedges is writing for nor what he wants his readers to do. Certainly, his unrelieved polemical essay is not aimed at the benighted masses watching Ultimate Fighting Challenge and poker on TV, clicking onto YouTube or YouPorn, “friending” strangers on Facebook, or blowing up imaginary worlds on Grand Theft Auto and Modern Warfare videogames. It’s not for them, since they’re not reading at all.

So, it’s a book about rather than for the unwashed but shampooed masses whose minds are inundated by junk culture. Hedges must be writing for the rest of us, the — let’s be generous — 10 or 20 per cent of us who read books, participate in politics and civic culture, and who keep a worried eye on the CO2 counts in the atmosphere. But most progressive middle-class intellectuals already know most of this stuff, and some of them have even read theoreticians like Guy Debord on “situationism” and Jean Baudrillard on “simulacra” (neither of whom is mentioned by Hedges), both of whom early on spotted “the triumph of spectacle.” Moreover, Hedges’ intended intellectual audience, while dimly aware of most of the phenomena Hedges excoriates, live lives that only peripherally partake of mass popular culture. Given that his readers likely pay only corner-of-their-eye attention to the details, maybe Hedges’ intention is to present mass culture to us as a form of at-home exotica.

The chapter on the “illusion of love,” which is entirely devoted to a journalistic visit to a pornmakers convention in Las Vegas, is characteristic of Hedges’ perspective. Beginning with an epigraph that offers a lurid passage from the late Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Hedges hews to her particular version of feminism, presenting an Inferno-esque, “graphic” account of heterosexual commercial porn that emphasizes its increasing violence and degradation of women. Interviews with porn performers, peddlars, and recovering porn actors reiterate the sadistic nature of this particular illusion, and in case we’re unfamiliar with its contents, Hedges provides extended vile snatches of porn video dialogue and detailed descriptions of how tab A is slotted into inserts B, C, etc., in such productions. After a few pages of this, you realize Hedges isn’t planning to go beyond the confines of the commercial sex industry, and you idly wonder why the chapter isn’t billed “the illusion of sex,” since it doesn’t seem to have much to do with love or any similar affectional state.

This cinema verite presentation builds to the climactic message that “porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society. This is a society that does not blink when the industrial slaughter unleashed by the United States and its allies kills hundreds of civilians in Gaza or hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Mr. Hedges goes on (and on). Porn is soon linked to the plight of  the mentally ill and the unfairly imprisoned, as well as the dangers of gun ownership, obnoxious nationalism and “rapacious corporate capitalism.” Predictably enough, porn is eventually equated to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and we’re assured that “torture and pornography inevitably converge.”

I’m puzzled by the rhetorical overkill, both here and throughout Hedges’ tract. While it’s reasonable to sharply criticize both the content of hetero porn and the conditions under which it’s made, it’s not immediately clear what the purpose is of a hyperbole that insistently ties porn to all of the world’s assorted ills. It’s as if, in the name of some form of radicalism, Hedges’ intent is to crush all possible discourse about the subject. In this leftist vision of liberation, one can sense the mirthless commissars just over the horizon.

In any case, Hedges’ edicts about the meaning of porn seem designed to render any further discussion of sexual representation either trivial or irresponsible, or both. A question like, “Momentarily leaving aside the egregious conditions and content of contemporary pornography, is there a moral objection to the representation of sex between people and the viewing of such representations by other people?”, becomes irrelevant or even blasphemously incorrect. Why would one want to ask such a question?

Well, for one thing, the question challenges some North American attitudes about sex. While porn may represent commercial views about sex, a dominant religious attitude among Christian fundamentalists (and perhaps the view is held more broadly than merely as a religious tenet) is that sex ought to be strictly regulated — preferably, within heterosexual marriage and utilized primarily for procreational purposes. The debate about attitudes toward, and practices of, sex had a lot to do with both feminist and homosexual political struggles in the last half century. None of that will be found in Hedges’ Empire. Nor, when it comes to cruelty and wanton killing, will readers find anything about porn-deprived jihadis, who manage a good deal of slaughter and torture without the aid of salacious imagery.

Maybe Hedges just isn’t a very good sociological writer. In service to agitprop, Hedges excises anything that complicates his “correct line.” In my experience of gay porn, while it’s true you can find niches for everything from S&M to foot fetishism, mainstream homo porn is overwhelmingly focused on the vanilla sex of “twinks” (18-21-year-old, more or less clean-cut, late-teen beauties). While one can probably criticize the conditions these boys endure while making porn, and can cite the ways in which porn sex distorts ordinary real sex, the behaviour of the boys is generally friendly and non-violent, there’s lots of kissing and gestures of affection, they use condoms in the name of “safer sex,” and the sex, apart from being hot (if you’re inclined to find such sex hot) is pretty inoffensive unless you find the whole thing offensive. I’m not offering a brief intended to mitigate the sexist horrors of heterosexual porn, I’m just suggesting that the world is more various and complicated than Hedges, in the grip of an ideology, allows.

Subsequent chapters on higher education and positive psychology are similarly uneven. Hedges opens his chapter on the “illusion of wisdom” by saying, “The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredding  of Constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the door of institutions that produce and sustain our educated elite. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford,  Cambridge, the University of Toronto and the Paris Institute of Political Studies… do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question and think. They focus instead… on creating hordes of competent systems managers… The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry… They organize learning around specialized disciplines… [they] have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement, and information systems are the only things that matter.” Naturally, Hedges doesn’t want to lay at the door of those elite universities such things as the end of slavery, free speech, civil rights, notions of ethnic and gender equality, sexual orientation, or even the attempt to reform health care in the U.S.

But if elite universities are that bad, it makes me almost glad to be teaching in a non-elite, marginal, backwater university where we’re still allowed to read Italo Calvino and modestly rant about the mindless culture foisted on the young by the capitalist Axis of Evil that manufactures those Modern Warfare videogames. Since I’m likely to be accused of frivolity anyway, I might as well confess upfront that at the end-of-the-semester “Goodbye Class” in ethics, where one of the students, Veronika, provided us all with cupcakes that she’d stayed up baking the previous night, we spent a rollicking hour discussing the morality of David Levy’s Love and Sex with Robots (2007), a review of which was the subject of Veronika’s final essay of the semester. Having debated the ethics of everything from abortion to vampires, it was fun to imagine “sexbots” at the end. The class and I found the discussion pretty hilarious, even educational. Mr. Hedges would perhaps think otherwise.

If Hedges can offer sweeping, half-true, generalizations about elite education, he’s also capable of astutely pointing out that in our “deteriorated educational landscape,” it’s the case that “there has been a concerted assault on all forms of learning that are not brutally utilitarian. The Modern Language Association’s end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature and foreign languages dropped 21 per cent for 2008-09 from the previous year, the biggest decline in 34 years. The humanities’ share of college degrees is less than half of what it was during the mid-to-late ’60s… Only 8 per cent of college graduates, about 110,000, now receive degrees in the humanities.” There have been precipitous declines in all fields, from English to mathematics to social sciences. “Bachelor’s degrees in business, which promise to teach students how to accumulate wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970-71 have risen from 13.6 per cent of the graduating population to 21.7 per cent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 per cent to 8.2 per cent, as the most popular major.” All true, too true, but this isn’t the place for a full-scale dissertation on the plight of the shaping of the educated mind.

Hedges is much better when he gets to the “illusion of happiness.” That’s where he skewers self-help gurus peddling “positive thinking” and punctures the intellectual pretensions of various psychology departments to put “Positive Psychology” on a scientific footing. Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009) does a more extensive and thorough job on the topic, but Hedges’ acerbic view of the matter ought to be enough to get you to stash your “Smiley” buttons and shelve your copy of Rhona Byrne’s The Secret.

The worst is saved for last. It’s Hedges’ chapter on the “illusion of America,” and clearly the one he was most itching to write. As is his wont, the screed is unrelieved, but tinged with bitter affection for a land that once was. “The country I live in today uses the same civic, patriotic, and historical language to describe itself… but only the shell remains,” Hedges laments. “The America we celebrate is an illusion. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father’s father and his father’s father… is so diminished as to be unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return.”

In place of the recognizable America, “our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of the moneyed interests… During this plundering we remained passive, mesmerized by the enticing shadows on the wall, assured our tickets to success, prosperity, and happiness were waiting just around the corner.”

Hedges makes it clear that Barack Obama and the “bankrupt Democratic Party” are not the “hope” he “can believe in.” About the only closing-line relief Hedges can offer is “love,” whose power is greater than the power of death. “Love will endure,” Hedges asserts, “even if it appears darkness has swallowed us all, to triumph over the wreckage that remains.” Hmm, bleak stuff.

Somewhere in the  course of Hedges’ final sermon (he was trained, he remarks in passing, as a seminarian), I think I figured out who he’s writing for. The intended readership, I suspect, is left liberals and social democrats, and Hedges’ polemic is designed to persuade moderate progressives that they don’t fully understand the gravity of the situation. In failing to understand the situation, the moderate leftists become, in Hedges’ view, the real enemy, more culpable than the right wing conservatives, because they prop up the shell of the system, even when they should know better. If that’s what’s going on here, it echoes the 1920s Communist Party’s verbal and physical assault on social democrats as “social fascists,” and at least some of us remember where that revolutionary strategy led.

Hedges’ Empire of Illusion is a difficult book to deal with because much of it contains more than a grain of truth. Even if he could persuade left liberals and social democrats to repent and see the light, I’m not sure what he wants them to do. Become cadres in the true Revolutionary Party and set off to free the masses from their illusions? I don’t recall that working the last time it was tried.

It might be more helpful to see the situation as one of a divided polity, a divided culture in the midst of “culture wars,” in which there are left-of-centre Democrats and social democrats, Obama included, and right-wing Republicans and angry anti-government libertarians and self-proclaimed “independents.” That perspective at least makes possible an answer to the question, “What is to be done?” What we should do is continue to teach people to read books and to criticize the gadgets and content of capitalist pop culture. We should continue to try to reform health care, regulate and restrain capitalism, and attempt to save the planet. We should do the little things in our neighbourhoods, and we should join political parties and other organizations and try, as we used to say, to change the world.

This modest program is admittedly less spectacular than Hedges’ despairing vision of spectacle and decline. But what’s the alternative? I saw an ad on TV the other day advertising the latest apocalyptic movies and games, the screen filled edge to edge in high definition exploding objects. The voice-over punchline said, “The end of the world never looked so good.”

 

Vancouver, Dec. 19, 2009.

Is Mark Kingwell Getting Dumber?

University of Toronto philosophy professor Mark Kingwell was sitting in his office last week. It was the end of term, graduation time at post-secondary institutions across the country and he was thinking about how perople at this time of year are always asking him, “Are the kids getting dumber? Can they even write?”

The media-ubiquitous philosopher suddenly had an inspiration for a clever op-ed squib that he could dash off and post to the Globe and Mail’s opinion pages. Kingwell’s thinking went something like this: people are always dopily worrying about whether the kids are getting dumber. Rather than argue the question, how about cleverly challenging it instead? Instead of worrying about kids getting dumber, maybe we should be worrying about whether we’ve become too smart for our own good by our over-emphasis on smarts and intelligence.

After all, smartness, whether of the book larnin’ or tech twittering variety, not only ensures human survival, it also produces problems. Problems like “environmental degradation, weapons of mass destruction, hedge funds, sophisticated forms of torture and the justification thereof.” Perhaps the net good effects of intelligence are being outweighed by the bad. What if we’ve made a cultural evolutionary mistake by emphasising smart over dumb, and thus reducing our chances of survival?

Then, still in his inspired state, Kingwell recalled Jonathan Swift’s satiric pamphlet of 1729, “A Modest Proposal,” in which the ironic Dean Swift proposed that a lot of problems could be solved in Ireland by eating Irish children as an upscale food delicacy. Swift was protesting England’s oppression of Ireland, and the empire’s creation of conditions of overpopulation and poverty such that a savage “modest proposal” of eating children might be amusingly but chillingly plausible for a moment. Swift was also sending up the can-do climate of the times in which over-clever bureaucrats and consultants regularly came up with preposterous but perfectly logical schemes.

So, Kingwell amused himself by coming up with a “modest proposal” of his own. Instead of “selecting” for smartness, maybe we could solve our problems by selecting for dumbness, and thus produce a generation of young people who wouldn’t be smart enough to think up “smart” bombs, SUVs, tar sands oil, “American Idol,” and the like. Perhaps, he suggested, tongue in cheek, “we will breed our way out of this mess and back into a simpler age.” Then, when Kingwell’s academic successors are asked if the kids are getting dumber, they can enthusiastically reply, “Yes. It’s working.” We’re making them dumber.

Kingwell’s modest proposal, under the heading, “Too Smart for our Own Good” duly appeared in the op-ed pages and screens of our national newspaper (May 29, 2009). Perfectly harmless, mildly amusing filler for a readership wondering if, in The Who’s legendary phrase, “The Kids Are Alright.” Except for one tiny, little problem.

Before Kingwell can get to his humour-piece punchline, he has to dispose of the questions at the top of his piece: “Are the kids getting dumber? Can they even write?” You notice that Kingwell has put a little blurriness into the question by asking two questions. What’s more, they may not be equivalent.

One way to get rid of the question is to say it’s unanswerable, and probably irrelevant, like arguing about the designated hitter rule in baseball. “The answer says more about you than about the state of play,” says Kingwell. “Answer yes and you brand yourself a bookish curmudgeon, a fogey no matter what your age. Answer no and you align with new cognitive models, social networking websites, early gadget adoption and freewheeling music download. In other words, it’s cool versus uncool.” See? No real question there at all.

In fact, according to Kingwell, “the more you look, the more it becomes clear that the dispute is about apples and oranges. If smart means clear writing, linear thought and sustained self-organization, then yes, those skills are in short supply; if it means quick-witted talent for hyperlinking, multitasking and other compound gerunds of the screen age, then no, there is no evidence of cognitive deficit — on the contrary.” Since the argument is unresolvable, “this is the point where the dispute typically hares off into a hand wringing discussion of what universities are for and whether they’re any good at doing whatever that is. Socialization machine or crucible of citizenship? Job training centre or gateway to wisdom?” Since those hand wringing questions are also hopeless, “let’s ask a different question: What is intelligence for?”

With that, Kingwell is off the hook and also off to a bit of fun with modest proposals.

Alas, it’s all too-clever-by-half, even for a prof with time on his hands while waiting for this year’s grads to adjust their robes, flip the tassels on their mortarboard hats, and get in step for the first strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.” Since he noted in his brush off of the are-the-kids-getting-dumber question that “there are even duelling books on the subject,” he might have spent his time more usefully and less glibly by looking at them once more.

The “duelling books” Kingwell is referring to but doesn’t name are Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation (2008), Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason (2008), Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values (2007) versus business and education consultant Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital (2008), an update of his 1999 book, Growing Up Digital. (By the by, Tapscott’s titles, wittingly or not, play on Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, 1960, an education book about how the conditions of American society then were making it particularly difficult for young people to know anything or to do meaningful work.)

If you read, say, Bauerlein’s account of the present generation, you learn that reading, especially book reading, is in decline, and that there are substantial knowledge deficits when it comes to knowing about history, geography, civics, and just about everything else except the trivia of youth culture and celebrity gossip. Despite the title of the book, Bauerlein doesn’t deal with whether young people are becoming “dumber.” Rather, he shows that they’re not becoming measurably more knowledgeable, despite the available high-tech accoutrements. In fact, the use of the word “dumb” is misleading, both in the title of Bauerlein’s book and in Kingwell’s question. The word that should be used is “ignorant.” Kids (and lots of adults) are ignorant of history, geography, civics, etc., and one of the tools by which they might remedy that ignorance, book reading, is in declining usage.

The question is not do we over- or under-value intelligence but, What should we know? Which leads to the question, What should we know in order to do what? Which leads to the further question, What are universities for? Though Kingwell wants to throw up his hands rather than wring them, I think the question remains, and that it’s not hopeless.

Rather than ragging poor Professor Kingwell, who is after all just trying to get out of the office and onto summer holidays, let me answer the questions. If we want a democratic society in which people are capable of critical thought, are cultured, and are citizens, then we want to dispel young people’s ignorance about history, geography, civics, science, art, literature and book-reading and, yes, we also want them to learn some things that will help them get jobs. These are not unanswerable questions, though there’s no denying that they’re debatable.

But they’re on the net, reply the techno proponents, such as Tapscott, when faced with claims of ignorance. Yes, young people (and older ones, too) are on the net, but the evidence suggests that most of their net time is twittered away on social networking sites, music downloading, YouTubing, porn(ing), and buying and selling, frequently all at once (the famous “multitasking”). The facts, as best we can know them, are in Bauerlein’s, Jacoby’s and Keen’s books. The picture is not all black and white, and some of the claims about knowledge deficits, unreason, and the destruction of society are overblown, and overhyped. But while there may be “duelling books,” we might also remember that not all duels end in a draw. Some of the books are better than others.

As for “smarts,” and “intelligence,” pace Kingwell, it shouldn’t mean merely “clear writing, linear thought and sustained self-organization” (whatever the latter murky phrase means), nor should it mean “quick-witted talent for hyperlinking” and “multitasking.” The problem is not “intelligence”; there’s a sufficient amount of whatever it really is to go around, simply by virtue of the kind of evolutionary animal we are. The question is development of intelligence, and to discuss that you can’t divorce the content of a developed intelligence from its techniques. The content of a developed intelligence brings us back to the questions of, What do we need to know, for what purposes, and thus, how should we organize our educations?

Professor Kingwell needs some summer beach time. As for the kids, while The Who thought they were alright, their successors, The Offspring, argue in their counter-tune that “The Kids Aren’t Alright,” and they lament, “Chances blown, nothing’s free.” As for the rest of us, whether fearful of being tagged fogeys or not, we had better figure out what to do to dispel ignorance, or else Kingwell’s modest proposal will become more than a tongue-in-cheek quip at graduation time.

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Berlin, May 31, 2009

Letter from Berlin: The Twilight of the Gods

Berlin — Springtime Berlin has been plastered with election posters for the last month. But what a strange electoral contest: religion versus ethics!

Under balmy skies, and amid blossoming chestnut trees and lilac bushes, the German capital has been embroiled in a bitter debate about education, theology, and civic values that was only settled in a citywide referendum last Sunday, April 26.

It was strange to see every lamppost along every major thoroughfare festooned with competing signs urging such abstruse thoughts as “Vote yes, because free choice is my ethics,” or “Vote no, ethics lessons for everyone,” or the always suspicious invocation of “For the sake of our children.” Strangers were scratching their heads, in need of some background information about this debate in a city that features such philosophical traffic intersections as Kant Strasse and Leibniz Strasse, and is known as “the atheist capital of Europe,” given that less than forty per cent of the multicultural population claims any religious affiliation.

It all began three years ago in the wake of an “honour killing”  murder of a young Turkish woman by her brother because he objected to her Western lifestyle. That’s when the city government, a leftist coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Left Party, headed by Mayor Klaus Wowereit, decided to introduce a required ethics course into the school curriculum for all students in the 7th grade and above.

Previously, the city’s schools offered voluntary religious instruction classes (known as “reli”), with Catholics, Muslims and Protestants taught separately. In other parts of Germany, religious studies are compulsory, but in Berlin they were optional and attendance was declining. Civic leaders decided that whether or not some students attended “reli,” all students should have a course that examined society’s shared social values in the name of integrating school age children from a variety of ethnic and faith backgrounds. The idea was that such teaching would discourage atrocities such as “honour killings” and buttress the values that hold a secular, especially multicultural, society together. Religion classes would still be available on a voluntary basis, although it was likely attendance would decline even further.

That’s what worried the people who coalesced into what became known as the “Pro-Reli” side. A coalition of Catholics,  Muslims, Jews, and some Protestants joined forces with conservative political parties and leaders (including German chancellor Angela Merkel, who heads the country’s Christian Democratic-SPD coalition government), and launched a successful, well-financed bid to hold a civic referendum on the subject.

The “Pro-Reli” side proposed that instead of required ethics classes, students (and their parents) should be “free to choose” between reli and ethics. Pro-Ethics supporters argued that casting the issue as one of “free choice” was deceptive, designed to mask an attempt to strengthen religious teaching in the schools. German novelist and jurist Bernhard Schlink, author of The Reader, whose film version was an Oscar-contender last year, bluntly called the “free choice” claims “a campaign of lies.” The Pro-Ethics opponents of the referendum, for their part, made the case that there should be “ethics lessons for everyone,” but that the schools would continue to support “both religion and ethics.” The large Turkish community of Berlin was divided between Pro-Reli Muslims and more secular minded members.

Given that Pro-Reli had seized the “free choice” high ground (who could be against free choice?); had enlisted the support of church officials, prominent politicians and even well-known entertainers (one popular TV game show host weighed in on behalf of faith-based education); and were outspending and out-postering their secular opponents by a margin of at least three to one, the Pro-Ethics side had cause to worry. Public opinion polling showed an almost even split on the referendum question.

But the campaign for a tolerant, secular society had two things going for it in addition to intellectuals like Schlink: the referendum requirements and the famous civic attitude that is described by some local wags as a combination of “BerlinDifference/BerlIndifference.” The hurdles for passing a referendum are high enough to discourage political frivolity. In addition to gathering a sizeable number of petition signatures to put a referendum on the ballot, the pro-side has to not only win the referendum but to secure the support of at least 25 per cent of the city’s eligible 2.45 million voters. So, a referendum can fail if it’s outright defeated or it can fail if it doesn’t get enough people out to support it. Held on a sunny 23 degree spring Sunday when much of the population was wandering in the woods, sailing on the lakes, or locked in traffic on the autobahns, the Pro-Reli side had not only to overcome the “Berlin difference” (non-religious, secular attitudes), but also “Berlin indifference.”

And the envelope, please: the “pro-religion” referendum was soundly defeated on both counts. Amen. It lost the straight-up vote, 51.5 per cent to 48.5 per cent. And it lost the referendum requirement battle, since only 29 per cent of voters participated, and Pro-Reli garnered a mere 14 per cent of eligible Berlin voters, far short of the required 25 per cent. Voters split largely along geographic lines: while the Pro-Reli side picked up most of its votes from the part of the city that was formerly West Berlin, voters in the former East Berlin went heavily against the referendum.

When it was over, disappointed Pro-Reli leaders consoled themselves by declaring that they had at least sparked an important public discussion. Mayor Wowereit, a fierce opponent of the referendum, was dismissive: “This shows that those in ‘Pro-Reli’ who were portraying this as a ‘freedom’ issue — as if the Russians were about to invade — are out of touch with the real situation in Berlin.” Given the current gloomy recession, high unemployment in the region, and a burgeoning civic debt, “Vovie,” as he’s locally known, probably had a point about reality.

The longer-term argument about what’s real and what’s divine will play out in classrooms across the city over a number of years. There are a couple of reflections that might be gleaned from the referendum debate. One is that Berlin, which prides itself on being a “city of tolerance,” is something of a leading-edge experiment in cultural integration in Germany. A once largely ethnically homogenous population of over 80 million people has in recent decades became far more variegated. In addition to a Turkish community of more than 2 million people, the country, and especially Berlin, has taken in immigrants from all parts of a far more mobile European Union since 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. Not only has there been a sizeable influx of different faiths, particularly Muslims, but of different national cultures, especially from the former Eastern European countries, Russia and Asia. So, cultural integration in Berlin and parts of the rest of Germany is not just an abstract issue (a matter that Canadian readers can easily appreciate).

Further, there’s the broader question of what to teach young people. Germany comes to such problems with the advantage of being a famously “serious” culture, able to address fundamental (and fundamentalist) topics without embarrassment. It also suffers less from the widespread decline of reading than, say, cultures in North America. Finally, it’s the European country that has most had to come to terms with its historical past and, interestingly, it’s done so, in part thanks to writers like Schlink, and its most famous living philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, who has argued on behalf of a democratic public space for several decades. So, Berlin schools at least have a chance to develop an ethics curriculum that might actually work, though its effectiveness won’t be known for some time. It probably won’t heal the wounds of the world, but it might increase the possibility of civility.

In  the meantime, the seasons continue, and as one scriptural book famously noted, there’s a time for referendum voting and there’s a time for waking up to the birds and the bees.

Ah, springtime! It’s when a young man’s or woman’s thoughts turn to love — and in Berlin, also to musings about the twilight of the Gods and secular philosophy. Only in Deutschland, the home of philosophers Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Habermas — and don’t forget Nietszche, who declared the death of divinity.

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Berlin, Apr. 27, 2009.