assumptions

Sam Kahn:

That is the real existential dread of our age, that the stable value of the book is breaking down and the continuity between eras is dependent largely on whether Apple chooses to keep updating the Cloud or whether posterity is able to play an mp3. For people who are serious writers or creators, that’s really the question at the moment — who are they writing for or trying to transmit to? — since the assumption, a safe assumption for a couple of thousand years, that the people of the future would be readers, is no longer so reliable.

Is that what Virgil assumed? And Augustine? And Dante? — That “the people of the future would be readers”? If Kahn had said “there would be readers in the future” he’d have been on safer ground. Since they lived in societies in which perhaps one percent of the adult population were sufficiently literate to read a long treatise or poem, none of them expected wide readership: serious literacy had never been common and there was absolutely no reason to think it ever would become so. (One percent is probably a high estimate.)  Milton’s hope, for “fit audience though few,” was the hope of every major writer until the 19th century.

N.B. Through much of the history of writing, “literacy” has been defined primarily as the ability to sign one’s name — something worth remembering when people talk about historical literacy rates. Take a look at this chart and try to figure out how it defines “literacy.”

Kahn is one of many people who talk about our “post-literate age,” which is kind of funny when you reflect that right now literacy is more widespread than it has been at any point in human history. Just think about how many people in the global South who as recently as fifty years ago would have been illiterate agricultural laborers now read and write every day. And it wasn’t that long ago that many Americans were, generally speaking, only barely literate. During the Second World War, the U.S. armed forces had trouble finding enough recruits who met their basic literacy standards. The history here is illuminating. (Those of us who teach might find it noteworthy that the U. S. Army embarked on a kind of literacy boot camp that got 95% of the illiterate recruits up to speed in two months.)

No, when people talk about living in a “post-literate society,” what they mean is this: Today a smaller percentage of Americans read books than did so in the two or three decades following the Second World War, when the G. I. Bill made high levels of literacy possible for millions of Americans who previously would have had no access to higher education. This is one of my old themes. I mean, going way back. And more recently too.

Even in a period of relative decline in serious reading ability — and we do indeed live in such a time — writers have access to a larger audience, proportionally and not just absolutely larger, than any great writer of the distant past would’ve dared to dream of. And that’s something worth remembering.

P.S. It would be a shame, wouldn’t it, if I didn’t point to something else Kahn says that I want to disagree with. He writes, “One can only imagine how much smoother poor Robert Caro’s life would have been if he could have started with the presidency of his subject as opposed to spending forty years chasing down the truth of Lyndon Johnson’s student council experiences and then waiting until his 80s to write down the meat of his project.” Assumptions again: Kahn assumes that Johnson’s term as President is the “meat of [Caro’s] project.” But surely anyone who has read the books knows that it isn’t so. What fascinates Caro is that a young man, indeed a boy, from one of the most backward and poverty-stricken parts of America desperately wanted great power, believed he could achieve it, and somehow did achieve it, becoming the most powerful person in the world. How this happened — starting with Johnson’s becoming a mover and shaker in the schools he attended, since that is where he learned how to manipulate people without needing to be liked by them — is the real meat of the story, and his experiences as President make for little more than a coda. If Caro never finishes the final volume I’ll be sad, but I won’t feel that I’ve missed anything truly vital.