The unbearable irrelevance of reading

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2014
The Weekly Screed (#686)

The unbearable irrelevance of reading

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Nobody reads.

This is a shattering admission for a writer to make, and as of the moment, it’s a slight overstatement. Think of those two words as a mixture of prophecy and surrender — with a silver lining that will only emerge in the distant future.

The pointlessness of literacy struck me as I was reading in the Times about a school district in North Carolina struggling with third graders who’ve fallen behind in reading. The thought that came to me was: “Why bother?”

These kids don’t need to read. Most people don’t need to read. Of all the people who’ve ever lived on earth, the vast majority have thrived without literacy. I could walk out on the street here — in a university town — and rattle off the names of Homer, Aeschylus, Lady Murasaki, Fielding, Sterne, Voltaire, Cervantes, Gogol, Lawrence, Woolf, Dos Passos, Chandler, Bellow, Pasternak, Achebe, O’Neill, Salinger, Miller, Peter Drucker, the Marquis de Sade, etcetera, and yield not a flicker of recognition from nine out of ten seemingly educated passersby.

Because nobody reads. Not really. Not any more. Who needs Shakespeare or Dr. Seuss? Who needs Field and Stream? Why bother?

For most of human history, reading (preferably in Latin) was reserved to a tiny, jealous elite, led by the clergy. Johannes Gutenberg’s intrusive press made the written word accessible to everyone — although this was mightily resisted by the clerics, academics, princes and despots who understood literacy’s power. But nowadays, even though print is as important as it’s ever been to protect people from tyranny, it’s out of fashion and unlikely to recover its cachet. We’ve been readers, we’ve done that. We’re tired of it.

It’s time, again, to limit the alphabet and the grammar book, the mastery of syntax, the parsing of sentences and the pyramid of persuasion to an elect few whom we’ll trust to serve the interests of the happily ignorant. The chore of reading will eventually revert to those who need to read executive summaries, to study legal briefs and draft court decisions, to those who must illuminate the sacred texts and compose weekly sermons, to those whose words are scripted in advance and flashed on a teleprompter.

Optimists about reading are convinced that, while books might become obsolete, they’ll be seamlessly superseded by e-books, allowing people to go on reading novels, histories, romances, adventures, confessions, biographies and thrillers as eagerly and voraciously as ever they did before.

But e-books aren’t catching on as swiftly as has been twice predicted. They’re stagnant. Is this because of those studies about how people reading on-screen don’t pay attention as well as when they read on paper. No, the answer is simpler.

Nobody reads.

We don’t need to read. Anything. We have devices to deliver “content” that can, and will, spare us the ordeal (along with the joy and unfettered personal autonomy) of learning all that Dick-and-Jane, Troilus-and-Cressida crap. No longer will we face the challenge of an SAT Writing Sample. Or an SAT!

No more reading the fine print to find the sanity clause on the insurance policy. No more “i” before “e” except after “c.” No more spelling bees. No more newspapers, magazines, broadsides, bumper stickers, t-shirt slogans. And no more wondering what “riboflavin” is on the side-panel of the cereal box.

Instead, we will be fed all the information we can possibly need by knowledgeable-sounding voices on our “smartphones.” If we need fiction — human beings will probably always be suckers for storytelling — we can download anything, from the Oresteia to Fifty Shades of Grey, onto our annually updated 2,000-gig, 2,000-dollar, turbo-charged, tangerine-flake Mega-iPodPad.

Which is where writers like me — well, not like me, I’ll be dead — come in.

To satisfy the human urge for narrative, they’ll still need us. More than ever. Because the world will be carpeted with illiterates, tuned in for stimulus, cocking an ear for enlightenment and entertainment, for titillation, arousal and climax.

The ear will become, again, the pinnacle of the senses. As generations pass, and the last few books crumble to dust between Rod Taylor’s hands, it’s not inconceivable that the human eye will slowly atrophy, its corneas growing leather-hard, its lids knitting themselves together, until humans become like the lizards and cockroaches in caves — with fleshy patches were once they could see. With this evolution, of course, all our other senses will be that much keener and our ears! Well, they’ll able to hear a flea fart from a mile away.

We’ll hear everything, some of it from the actual world, but mostly through our ubiquitous devices. We’ll evolve into iHumans. We’ll come to appreciate sound and song, voice and intonation with an acuity unimaginable today. We’ll listen to the oral output of our future storytellers more intently and appreciatively than ever we heeded the rhythms of Whitman, the thousand-word sentences of Faulkner or the wry nuances of Mark Twain.

This won’t happen right away. Reading will linger. Books and e-books will trickle into our culture, sustained by the confessions of celebrities, the humiliation of heroes and the sirens of escapism. But, by and by, all prose will go straight to audio, where the voices of famous actors will make it sound so much more real, more true, more intimate. More human, even, than F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Literacy in schools will go the way of penmanship, Greek and civics. Reading will devolve inevitably, irreversibly toward irrelevance. For our myopic great grandchildren and for our sightless great great grandchildren, the brave future of knowledge, news, entertainment — the destiny and irony of media—will be:

Radio.