Andrew Hagen

The National Endowment for the Arts has detected a literary crisis in America. Our reading of literature has dropped off the cliff. (*) It may be just an assertion, but I believe one of the culprits is multiculturalism. Multiculturalism infects recent prose and poems. Every sub-group needs to get its homage. Multiculturalism also infects the reader’s sensibility. It is less socially advantageous today to have read Herman Melville or F Scott Fitzgerald than it was a few years ago. Today, for maximum social utility, you need to have read something that is diverse instead of something that is good. While some readers do pick up Ellison’s Invisible Man or a Toni Morrison novel or another book of worth, too many seekers of diverse literature find unrewarding trash that can leave them feeling discouraged, feeling that reading is generally not worth their time. It’s not just America. It’s everywhere.

We watch movies and television, and fill our minds with the mindless wretchedness of those forms. Radio is no alternative, in my opinion, as commercials seemingly fill up every available on-air minute, even on public radio.

We read things on the Internet, but they are temporal and often useless. Online writing is closer kin to chicken scratching than literature. It’s good for politics, but bad as art.

In the end, we have a dumbed-down culture, because we try to appeal to the broadest, most diverse group possible. The broader the appeal must be, the lower the common denominator.

As our country’s population soars above the 300 million point, and cities become choked with humanity, social chaos and misery become the norms for most Americans. In our sprawling urban nightmare, fewer and fewer have time to read a book.

What is to be done? Bolt down the bookshelves and hold on. Teach our kids well that which is good and to disdain pop culture. In a few generations the population of America and of the world will begin to decrease, and things will start to get easier. Order and sanity will return. Until then, the stupefying mass culture will continue to arrogate to itself the office of the leading cultural signifier, the phallogocentric core to the civilized, increasingly irrelevant periphery. Irrationality wlil spasmodically break out into violence, as on 9/11. Meanwhile, humble, small, intelligent things like books and paintings will continue to suffer.

There will be morning for human culture once again, but not for some time.

Here is one example of someone who is just trying to hold on. Lynne Truss is a clear voice against the epidemic of misspelling. (†) I have to confess to my share of misspelling, but I seek to correct my errors.

Like Lynne Truss, we have to just hold on to our culture and pass it down, for otherwise it go extinct. Our task requires of us those ancient virtues like versatility, courage, and love, but living up to them is within our power.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 18th, 2004 at 00:03 and is filed under Humanities, Multiculturalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.