There is no going back.
Are we reading less because of television, films, video games and the internet? Two articles in today’s Washington Post, one by Susan Jacoby, and the other by Howard Gardner, come down on either side of the debate. Jacoby says yes, we are definitely reading less, becoming a less literate people. Gardner doesn’t say no. Rather he says it’s more complicated than that, that we need to change the terms of the debate.
Jacoby, confirming her conservative credentials, bemoans what’s happening to our young, their often cited fall into an image and video dominated present, from the much to be preferred book and word dominated past of their parents. The Dumbing of America she calls it.
Gardner on the other hand displays a liberal tolerance to change, a much greater willingness to accept the new, and to even look for the good in what is happening. He sees the brave new digital world, the same one that frightens Jacoby, as being pretty neat, not something we should bemoan, but rather something that is going to be with us, regardless of what we might like or do, and that we might best try to understand.
Gardner would probably say that what is happening to our young is no more within our power to stop or change than it was in our ancestors’ power to alter at any point in time the course of humanity’s, that is our "progress" through some 100,000 years of history and prehistory, right up until today.
Gardner, along with the liberal in us, is saying that what will be will be, and we had best live with it and enjoy it. Jacoby, along with the conservative in us, seems to be saying that what was is better and we should protect and preserve the old or what was, and resist the new (and what is). Not possible of course.
Holding onto the past, and especially a particular version of the past such as that of Susan Jacoby, is never possible, whether it’s the past of our childhood, which for many of us may still be an age of gold, or the distant past of our African forbears now totally buried in the rock formations of the Rift Valley.
Actually, the real struggle is always to free ourselves from the past, to get on with it, to get on with the new. For change will be. And the new digital media are here in force. Books will no longer be, no matter how much we may protest, and as they may very well have been in our childhood, central to our growing up. Nor will they be for some few of us who still read central even to how we now experience the world.
The liberal, in this instance, Howard Gardner, by accepting what is happening is the realist. Susan Jacoby, the conservative, by resisting the new digital media and promoting a book lined past, is the idealist. She ought to have known that what is will always trump what would, or even what should be.
February 20, 2008 at 9:28 am
So, do you know Gardner; a good meeting I guess, hum?