If you are one of those who looks forward to the Three Longs and Three Shorts every Sunday or any other form of reading, you should know that you are a rare and dwindling breed. The Economist follows up the FT piece we featured last week on the same subject of the decline of reading as a habit. So, this might come across as us belabouring the point a bit, not if The Economist has a slightly different take on it.
Unlike the FT piece, which lays the blame on the rise of social media, the article says it isn’t a recent phenomenon. Indeed, the article begins with an experiment: “Students of literature at two American universities were given the first paragraphs of “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens and asked to read and then explain them. In other words: some students reading English literature were asked to read some English literature from the mid-19th century. How hard could it be? Very, it turns out. The students were flummoxed by legal language and baffled by metaphor. A Dickensian description of fog left them totally fogged. They could not grasp basic vocabulary: one student thought that when a man was said to have “whiskers” it meant he was “in a room with an animal I think…A cat?” The problem was less that these students of literature were not literary and more that they were barely even literate.”
The article goes on to quote Dickens himself from the very book “Bleak House”: “Even the educated young…have “no habits of application and concentration”” suggesting this trend has been around for a while. Much longer indeed – “A big book”, said Callimachus, an ancient Greek poet, “is a big evil.” This is particularly true after lunch. You sit down to read then, as one writer noted, the sun streams in, the day feels “50 hours long”, the reader “rubs his eyes” then finally places the book “under his head and…falls into a light sleep”. Given that that particular reader was a fourth-century monk and ascetic he was probably not distracted by Snapchat.”
The author then blames the decline in ‘the zeal for personal advancement’ resulting in a decline in ‘the sheer interest for reading’ unlike back in the day:
“…In the Victorian era, self-improvement societies flourished. In the Scottish hills, shepherds “maintained a kind of circulating library”, writes Jonathan Rose in his magnificent book “The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes”. Each shepherd left books in the crannies of walls for other shepherds to read. In Victorian mill towns, workers saved up to buy books. In one Scottish locale, a boy noticed a ragman reading a book. The book—which the ragman lent him—was Thucydides. The boy was Ramsay MacDonald, who would go on to become Britain’s first Labour prime minister”
And that leads to the crux of the author’s argument:
“…decreasing literary sophistication may lead to decreasing political sophistication. Our analysis of Britain’s parliamentary speeches found that they have shrunk by a third in a decade. We also analysed almost 250 years of inaugural presidential addresses using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. George Washington’s scored 28.7, denoting postgraduate level, while Donald Trump’s came in at 9.4, the reading level of a high-schooler.
This is not inherently a bad thing. Often simple prose is good prose, and few people have ever wished politicians’ speeches to be longer. Professor Bate is more pessimistic. Lose the ability to read complex prose and he fears you may also lose the ability to develop complex ideas that “allow you to see nuance and to hold two contradictory thoughts together”. The medium is the message, and the message is currently 280 characters long. (“Bleak House”, by contrast, weighs in at around 1.9m characters.)
There will be other losses from a reading decline. Few engines of social mobility are more effective than reading: just ask the Scottish shepherds. Rich children may do it more, but reading is an egalitarian invention. No one—not your nanny, not your tutor, your friends or your posh school—can impel you to devour a book except you.”
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