People Who Can Still Read Deeply Will Rule The World…Well, Maybe

    You will forgive me while I beat another dead horse, won’t you? Thanks! Best readers, ever!

    A recent essay in The Atlantic tells us what many have already figured out; reading is dead, and it’s not coming back. I weep for having to have typed that sentence…again. In this sad and disturbing essay, “The Age of Reading Is Over,” we learn that not only are fewer people reading long-form prose for pleasure, but soon will permanently lose the ability to do so. To be perfectly honest, I never once thought about it that way. The scroll, the digital cave, has trapped young brains and is atrophying their attention spans early so they will not be able to get through a serious novel later on.

    Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support (and you know how much I hate relying on Harvard), said in a recent interview that she had spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit? Anthony Burgess’ brilliant 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange. Really? It’s not like this novel was written in ancient Gaelic, or Aztec! But it seems the student used ChatGPT to ‘translate’ the book into easier language. Unbelievable. Is it that easy to get through Harvard now?

    Mass literacy is devolving into mass illiteracy…at warp speed! (Obligatory Star Trek reference. Check.) This catastrophe is being helped along by a progressive culture (and you know who you are) that has dismissed classic Western literature, the “canon,” as we used to call it—as hopelessly out of date, the work of dead white patriarchs, and no longer “relevant” to “today’s modern audiences.” Blah, blah, blah. Morons. 

    Now, having typed all of the above, how would today’s modern book readers know what they are missing, since they cannot and will not ever encounter any of these works in print? It is one thing to be short-sighted enough to find Hamlet or Huckleberry Finn or The Great Gatsby difficult and/or irrelevant, but it is quite another if you cannot comprehend prose/poetry unless it is delivered via a toddler board book or an erotic romantasy novel.

    Meanwhile, woke activists in California are trying to get “Black English” (formerly known as Ebonics) taught in preschools to improve literacy skills. They also want to classify it as a separate language so black children can be deemed “bilingual.” Teaching them how to “speak Black” is “part of a movement to challenge harmful language hierarchies and affirm Black English as a legitimate, rule-governed language rooted in Black history, culture, and community.” I would think children raised in black households would already know how to “speak Black.” And trust me, I am doing my best not to be snarky. “We talk about multilinguals, but we don’t include Black children who may be African-American English speakers,” the director of the Children’s Equity Project, Xigrid Soto-Boykin, said. I am old enough to remember when this was a hilarious scene in the classic 1980s comedy Airplane, when passenger Barbara Billingsley offered to translate for two men who could not understand English. “Excuse me, stewardess, I speak Jive.” Priceless. And do you know why that is great comedy? It is not because it is racist, which it certainly is not. It is because it aims to make fun of stupid ideas. Which is what a lot of great comedy is all about. But I digress. 

    It remains to be determined if the Black English activists will allow white children to learn and speak Black English along with their classmates. Or are some languages (or in this particular case, a pseudo-language) only reserved for certain races? But if Harvard students and San Diego preschoolers and everyone in between are not reading anymore, what does it really matter?

    At the very least, we have movies like this summer’s blockbuster Christopher Nolan epic, The Odyssey. Unfortunately, even Mr. Nolan has thrown up the white flag to the mass illiteracy epidemic. One of the lead actresses, a Yale grad, naturally, had never heard of the original The Odyssey before she was cast in Nolan’s film. Let me repeat that for those of you on the West Coast: One of the lead actresses, a YALE grad, had NEVER HEARD of The Odyssey before she was cast in Nolan’s film! C’mon! Really? Do I have to be labeled a literary snob to type, “This young women is an idiot.” Kill me now...please.

    In an effort to break down the poem’s “cultural prejudices,” Nolan wrote the script in “easy-to-access,” natural English that his illiterate cast could easily memorize—but that is totally anachronistic and jarring to the audience. For example, Odysseus’ son repeatedly refers to his father as “Dad” when speaking to the suitors who are trying to sleep with his mother while his father, Odysseus is off waging war. When asked in a press interview why he used “dad” and not “father,” Nolan said, “I want to make it feel very fresh for modern audiences and do away with cultural prejudices that aren’t based on anything logical.” How, in the name of William Shakespeare, is using the honorific “father” a cultural prejudice that is exclusively pre-modern and illogical? Ugh…

    Tom Holland, he of Spider-Man fame, who plays Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, chimes in, saying he wouldn’t have said “father” in ancient Greek, anyway. Oh, please... Tom, buddy. Remember the adage: “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

    In fact, dear reader, the ancient Greek word for “father” is literally pater, meaning father. One of the most basic Latin roots we have! Even George Lucas wasn’t this clueless, and cleverly named his villain “Darth Vader,” which literally translates as “Dark Father.” 

    But none of this may matter, because reading is, as essayist Spencer Klavan put it on X, moving from a mass activity back to the way it was centuries ago: An elite skill practiced by small groups of academics and scholars, the curious and the thoughtful. “If present trends continue, they will mark not just the end of reading but the end of mass literacy, turning books back into what they used to be; the special super-weapon of a minority class. That would mean our age of high-tech looks like the Middle Ages in this regard. Or at least that it looks the way we picture the Middle Ages, with a priestly caste wielding superior powers of focus, prediction, observation, and manipulation over a mentally reduced general public. Once again, the readers would be as gods among men.” How the hell did we get here?!

    So, here we are. Go ahead and do yourself a favor, be like a god, and read, read, read. Go ahead and hoard books, and be like the very cool medieval Irish monks who kept the flame of eternal knowledge alive for 600 years on the inhospitable remote rocks of Skellig Michael in the North Atlantic. Those men carried the fire. And so must you.

    If the illiterate AI Dark Ages are indeed coming, at least we will have our stacks of hardcovers to comfort us. And while you’re at it, make sure you print out copies of FromTheGolfRoom essays for your library, too! See what I did there?? Have a nice day. 

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com