Ed West’s excellent Substack had a very distressing essay about the broad, almost universal decline of reading. He talked about how distressing it was that people in positions of power are more often distressingly ignorant of history and literature that allow us not only to situate ourselves in a larger frame of reference but help us to understand and anticipate the actions of others — a rather necessary trait.
This essay occasions many dark thoughts. Isn’t the hyper-ideological approach of governing elites partly a symptom of their lack of education? And isn’t that approach and their all-too-apparent mediocrity in light of history exactly the sort of thing that summons populist revolt from below? And similarly, if our elite is unread, isn’t there going to be a temptation to try to replace their functions with LLM-style artificial intelligence, precisely because it has done the reading that they haven’t — and theoretically, because AI might “align” more easily with broad social aims than would a leadership class that has such poor moral and intellectual formation?
My worry about the decline of reading is personal — I write for a living. And it’s obvious that book-buying is in very serious decline.
But what most worries me is that in an area like this, decline is functionally close enough to total collapse. After all, becoming supremely literate in languages, history, art and literature is a massive, decades long- really life-long effort. One of the primary rewards of this effort, traditionally, is entry into “rarefied air,” being welcomed into other rooms full of people similarly well-read who are themselves very stimulating company.
Once there are fewer people even entering such a room- or when those rooms, which still exist, are populated by a functional “idiotariat” (to borrow from Patrick Deneen), a great liberal arts education becomes a thing that simply alienates you from others, while not allowing you entry into any other company. Who will want to draw fresh analogies to Hamlet, if the room you are conducted into is full of PhD’s who have been formed by a vulgarized post-modernism that teaches them that Shakespeare is racist, and that functionally, an academic specialty in comic books is superior because some of them also contain popularizations of fashionable opinion. A true liberal education was supposed to free you from the prejudices of your day. Now, it threatens to liberate you into thin air. Hardly anyone will bother. It would be like pursuing a Nobel Prize in a functional Idiocracy. You would not esteem whatever honors your work did bring.