The National Endowment for the Arts has a new report out telling us about a previously unheralded national crisis -- Americans don't read very much, and in particular they don't read literature. Let's not wonder what constitutes "literature" in the opinion of a federal bureaucracy, and instead turn to a man of some real literary attainments, Albert Jay Nock, for his thoughts, from Memoirs of a Superfluous Man:
One might assume that as the level of literacy rose, the level of general intelligence would rise with it, and consequently that the economic demand for good literature would also rise. This, roughly, was Mr. Jefferson's idea, and indeed it has always been at the root of our system of free public instruction for everyone. It has, however, somehow failed to work out according to expectation. The level of literarcy has been pushed up very nearly to the practiable limit, but the level of general intelligence seems not to have risen appreciably, and the economic demand for good literature is apparently no greater in relation to the population of a hundred and thirty million than it was to one that was going on for sixty million; in fact, one would say it is much less. The reason for this is plain enough; there is nothing recondite about it. In his view of literacy, Mr. Jefferson was only half right. He was obviously right in premising that no illiterate person can read; but he was guilty of a thundering non distributio medii in his tacit conclusion that any literate person can read. On the contrary, as I discovered as long ago as my undergraduate days, very few literate persons are able to read, very few indeed. This can be proven by observation and experiment of the simplest kind. I do not mean that the great majority are unable to read inteligently; I mean that they are unable to read at all -- unable, that is, to carry away from a piece of printed matter anythign like a correct idea of its content. They are more or less adept at passing printed matter though their minds, after a fashion, especially such matter as it addressed to mere senation, (and knowledge of this fact is nine-tenths of a propagandist's equpiment), but this is not reading. Reading implies a use of the reflective faculty, and very few have that faculty developed much beyond the anthropoid stage, let alone possessing it at a statge of development which makes reading practicable.
Nock also treated the matter in a 1933 essay for the Atlantic, "Thoughts From Abroad" (and in a few other places as well):
In the eighteenth century, before Western society had been penetrated by the minor commonplaces of republicanism, Bishop Butler -- almost a contemporary of Mr. Jefferson -- remarked that the great majority of people are far more handy at passing things through their minds than they are at thinking about them, and therefore, considering the kind of thing they usually read, very little of their time is more idly spent than the time spent in reading. The fact is more noticable now by far than it was in Bishop Bulter's day; and ... it is bound to make one wonder what, precisely, this particular absolute of our repulicanism amounts to. ... Does the indiscriminate spread of literacy encounter an unsuspected moral equivalent of Gresham's law, that "bad money drives out good"? Does it encounter a moral equivalent of the law of diminishing returns?
All of this is unlikely to dissuade the National Endowment for the Arts from trying to foist its idea of literacy upon people who would be better off playing their X-boxes and listening to Howard Stern. But I do have a suggestion for Dana Gioia, the poet-cum-commissar who heads the endowment. Why not test your ideas of uplift on one representative individual, and if you can make a Shakespeare-reading, Coleridge-quoting literary man out of him, you can try it with everyone else? I suggest for our test subject government employee who shows no particular aptitude for reading or retaining knowledge, a fellow named George W. Bush.
