The Decline of Reeding

As authors, many in my blog audience tend to focus on mundane issues like how to sell books or how to write good ones. Natural fodder given our choice of vocation, or avocation, as the case may be.

Rarely do I see commentary on how the inexorable decline in popular literacy affects society as a whole – most of the time my blog, and the vast majority of others, focus on commercial, marketing, or craft issues rather than more macro ones addressing literacy. While I can appreciate that burning questions like how to improve one’s chances of selling more books are popular with authors, I’ll invite everyone to consider the ramifications of a population that is increasingly illiterate, and which communicates in text message bursts and abbreviations instead of in English as I know it (although I’ll freely admit I see the same thing with Spanish here in Mexico – there’s an entire generation for whom spelling and whole words are unknown; a casualty of texting and tweeting).

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NOTE: All of the comments were wiped out on this blog due to a server change issue by the hosting company. I have recreated them thanks to Alexander, who is both a gentleman and a scholar.

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America prides itself on being a classless society – that’s the essence of the American dream, after all, poor boy makes good and builds himself an empire, or at least a decent home with a nuclear family replete with leased cars and mountains of credit card debt. But that classlessness is an illusion (probably has always been, when one considers the history of the land, wherein the more successful merchants and financiers became moguls and industrialists, but that’s beside the point) as a growing chasm separates the haves from the have-nots. And it’s not strictly financial, although that is certainly where the divide is most easily observed. It’s a divide in basic literacy. In our comfort with the language, and being able to read and write well enough to convey ideas more complex than “let’s eat” or “that feels good.”

I recently reread a number of pulp novels from the sixties and seventies (with an occasional eighties and nineties thrown in for fun) – not literary fiction by any means, just thrillers the likes of which I grew up reading. What immediately struck me is how erudite the books were compared to modern fare. They were written at a much higher grade level than current popular fiction, because, bluntly, the average person was more literate, and the assumption was that folks wanted a little intellectual stimulation with their car chases and explosions – that words with more than a couple of syllables could be salted through a tome without fearing a slew of one star reviews written in Pidgin English bemoaning that the author was trying too hard or must have once seen a thesaurus.

It seems to be that somewhere over the last 20 or 30 years the level of remedial literacy possessed by the average person has declined to a state where most are comfortable reading at a level I associate with Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys, which is to say at an adolescent level, at best. The average literacy has slid, declined to a point where many readers have no idea what the difference between their, they’re or there is, much less the difference between shuddered and shuttered or breaches and breeches.

Why does that matter? Because as a society loses its basic grasp of literacy, the ability to impart important concepts, its very ability to reason, is lost. Ignorance of one’s mother tongue, much less other tongues, is a terrible thing, and isn’t to be celebrated. It creates a class-based system as surely as share cropping or indentured servitude does. The elite go to the best schools, are literate and capable of grasping and expressing complex ideas (either in writing or through oration), whereas the rank and file are relegated to simple-minded communications, short attention spans, and a sense of apathy that an inability to understand, much less participate in, the discussion, banishes them to. Illiteracy is exclusionary. It is a huge step backwards, to where the only ones who can read are the cognoscenti: academics, priests, and the ruling class.

If you read the Federalist Papers, or anything by the founding fathers, these were people with tremendous powers of not only persuasion, but an incredible facility with and grasp of the importance of language. Literacy was prized as the force that could move you from bondage to freedom, be it racial inequality, or social. Go watch some Youtube clips of MLK or Malcolm X if you want to see erudite arguments for social change from the sixties from men who understood the importance of the effective use of language.

I have to think that the dumbing down of the population serves no good purpose, and is divisive as any racism or bigotry. A population that can’t read at above a second grade level likely can’t reason at more than a first or second grade level, which leaves it entirely unable to grapple with the important issues of its time. It can’t inform itself because it doesn’t or can’t read – any idea beyond that second grade level is lost on it as it tunes out, preferring something more accessible, more facile to grasp. The internet certainly doesn’t help, given that it encourages the assimilation of information in small chunks – only the most cursory treatments. Television doesn’t help, either. The problem being that nuance, that complete and meaningful answers to important questions, explorations of ethical or moral of philosophical or social issues generally require more than whatever can comfortably be contained in a paragraph or two, or the equivalent of a sixty second sound bite, or a text that reads something like, “OMG, he’s so ttly fine, LOL. C U Soon!”

So we wind up with a pool of voters who don’t understand the issues they are deciding, don’t understand basic logical reasoning, don’t understand much of anything – a pool that requires their menus to be presented in pictures, their cash registers to be labeled with icons, their dialogue to be whatever can be contained in a Dr. Seuss-level discussion. That results in an erosion of society over time, as it makes it far easier for dogma to be substituted for reason, and authoritarianism to serve in the place of rational persuasion. It’s a recipe for inequality and fascism, for injustice, for the exploitation of the many for the direct benefit of the few. It creates rulers, who have knowledge and all that goes with it, and the ruled, who are largely ignorant.

I find this trend particularly appalling as a writer, because as far as I’m concerned there’s nothing more powerful than language. It can convince, scold, motivate, embarrass, enrichen, impoverish. It can cause parents to cheerfully send their children to war, to bomb innocents out of existence in order to free them, to force our next generations to foot the bill for our wastefulness by arguing we can spend our way out of debt. Language defines our perception of reality, and he who can most skillfully use language can convince the masses his way is best. It can also excuse the most horrendous of acts through rhetorical sleight of hand, where stealing becomes liberating, where killing innocents becomes collateral damage, where cheating a nation out of its financial legacy becomes equality or redistribution of wealth. Words, and our ability to use them, define how we think about things.

The less comfort we have with words, the less command we have of them, the less we can think in a meaningful manner. We lack the terms, the basic vocabulary, with which to frame the narrative or debate. We can’t reason, use logic, because we don’t understand its basic concepts and rules. We don’t understand what argument from authority or post hoc reasoning or any of the other logical fallacies are because we don’t understand the concepts or the words used to define them, so we make poor decisions or are easily deceived. Again and again. Like a smoker who makes the poor decision to light up a cigarette 20 or 30 times a day, and who ultimately winds up with respiratory problems or worse, we as a society make poor decisions on a daily basis that result in an unhealthy host, a diseased culture riddled with morbidity.

Where am I going with this?

I dislike the trend in popular fiction towards dumbing down. I understand the trend. We want to sell, and if what sells are monosyllabic screeds with the complexity of a comic, then that’s what we’ll write. But one has to ask whether there’s not a better way. A way to raise the bar some, to not pander to the lowest common denominator, and still sell well?

As custodians of the written word, of language, do we want to be the equivalent of pop songs that come and go in popularity every week, or shoot for something more substantial? Is it possible to be relevant and entertaining and popular without being slack-jawed and mouth-breathing?

Look, I write action thrillers and mysteries. I’ll be doing a foray into romance soon. So I’m not saying we should all be aspiring to be Harper Lee, or be trying to write the next Lord of the Flies. I get that we need to balance popular taste with our creativity, and produce products people want to buy. What I’m saying is that, given that the majority of the nation either doesn’t or can’t read, are we not better served trying to raise the bar a little in our offerings for those that still can?

I’m not sure I have a point here. Just more of my ramblings. But as I said, I was struck by how intelligently so many of the books from forty and fifty years ago were written – popular books, too – compared to what’s passes for pop fiction these days.

Call me a curmudgeony old man, I suppose. (Shakes fist. “You whippersnappers have no idea what it was like! The end is nigh!”) And so on. I’m sure I’m just railing against that which I can’t change. All I can do is continue to try to write well, and hope that my audience grows, however that happens.

Hrmph. Humbug.

Now go buy some of my crap. Please. You could do worse than with JET – Ops Files.