Close to Home: Lament of an educated boomer

I recently rearranged and removed some books from my home library. A small paperback missed the re-shelving process and somehow landed on my kitchen table. I picked it up and opened it. It is somewhat of a classic, written by the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, called 'An Essay on Man.' I have nothing to say here about what Cassirer is theorizing in the book, only about the book's structure, and form.

I squinted to see black ink marks emerge from a white background. The marks became phonetic when I recognized sounds that I was familiar with, and slowly they became morphemes when I finally recognized some familiar meanings. Still, I struggled to find something on the page that I could wrap my mind around.

The whole process of reading this book was neither straightforward nor simple, and my mind, made summery by the season, longed for something more accessible and unassuming. The print was tiny and there were many hundreds of words on a single page (and hundreds of pages in the book). If the words on the page meant something, if they meant anything at all, they did so only as a long interconnected set that had to be read carefully, from beginning to end. That is, whole sentences had to be read together, whole paragraphs even, or maybe several pages at a time! Certainly some ideas would gel only in the context of a whole chapter!

For some reason, perhaps because I am a college professor with classes often full of incoming freshmen, I found myself looking at the page through the eyes of my next new batch of students. What I saw through this lens shocked me. My mind reeled when asked to ingest ideas like, 'the difference between actuality and possibility is not metaphysical but epistemological.' Like Alice after falling into a rabbit hole, I lost all sense of proportion, at least by the standards of today's intellectual culture.

Unassuming and straightforward is what one might expect from a text message, or a tweet. Even an email may contain hidden innuendo that a text or a tweet winnows out to streamline impact.

How could my students possibly read this? How will they find the motivation to read something so demanding of their attention, and laced with complex meaning? How can they be expected to pick up other books like this, that require so much patience to unravel, with just so, so many words? No pictures on the page promised to convey a thousand words of meaning in a single glance. Hours of quiet reflection would be required, with distractions kept to an absolute minimum. I began to wonder if collectively, as a culture, we are losing patience with books such as these.

I shiver to think that this may be so, that such changes are really afoot. Do books have a new 'shelf life' (excuse the pun) that is newly constrained by (young?) people's growing reluctance to read, and by their lack of motivation to do intellectual gymnastics, even as the Summer Olympics showcases young people's unflagging resolve to push themselves to the pinnacle of physical flexibility and fitness?

Books are filled with smart ideas and difficult intellectual moves that take time and practice to master. Picking up this 'Essay on Man' just reminded me of the painful possibility that a dumbing down of our culture is a real possibility.

Tom Shaw is a professor at the Hutchins Institute for Public Policy Studies and Community Action and the Department of Geography and Global Studies at Sonoma State University.