Reading is Dying! Wisdom Isn’t

      Here is the story, perhaps you caught it, as it appeared in the New York Times this week:

Researchers from University College London and the University of Florida examined national data from 2003 to 2023 and found that the share of people who reported reading for pleasure on a given day fell to 16 percent in 2023 from a peak of 28 percent in 2004 — a drop of about 40 percent. 

      That may sound like the end of civilization as we know it. But let’s think about it a bit.

      The fact that you are reading this now is evidence that you are among the about 16 percent of Americans who are reading for pleasure today. But perhaps you are also among those many Americans who now read for pleasure less.

      I am.

      Yes, as a kid I was an eager consumer of Archie and Superman comics as well as Hardy Boys books—and, yes, I sometimes would find so much pleasure in them that I would keep reading under the covers with a flashlight.

      And, yes, I then discovered the newspapers my dad carried home under his arm, filled with stories about Mickey Mantle and then that cool Kennedy guy.

      Yes, I was gripped by Teddy White’s The Making of the President in junior high and John Barth’s Giles Goat Boy in high school and, eventually, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

       And I have been entranced, if not similarly possessed, over the decades, by hundreds of other publications and books. I even made it through the whole first volume of In Search of Lost Time.

      And as a professor I assigned plenty of books (though fewer each decade). And I’ve written some books.

      But that was then.

      I do keep up with newspapers and Substacks online. And I frequent certain podcasts, which have the virtue—unlike writings—of enlivening dishwashing time, car-driving time, jogging time.

      Still, I must admit that I have not found my way to the end of a novel in a few years. And, despite all the recommendations, I never even opened, for example, Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree.

      So, here’s the question: Are those of us who are reading less learning less? Are we getting less wise?

      People have been proclaiming a diminution in wisdom at least as far back as Socrates, who blamed it on, of all things, writing. Plato has Socrates insisting that those who presume to learn from writing—and therefore “without benefit of a teacher’s instruction”—will gain only a “semblance” of “wisdom,” not “truth,” not “real judgment.”

      Was something indeed lost when writing began substituting for “a teacher’s instruction”? Sure. But a whole lot was gained—in part because thanks to Plato’s writings even those of us who never were fortunate enough to meet Socrates could learn from him. Writing ended up spreading wisdom.

      And once it got going writing—the manipulation of words, initially often on papyrus—also created new, more analytical forms of wisdom: in the writings of Plato’s student, Aristotle, for example.

      Almost two thousand years later the printing press was seen, by Tolstoy of all people, as a wisdom diminisher: “Ignorance’s weapon” he calls it near the end of War and Peace. Tolstoy’s complaint was that a lot of engrossing crap was being published.

      And a lot of engrossing crap is still being published. But printing, once it got going, certainly helped spread wisdom. And printing too helped create new kinds of wisdom: like that in War in Peace, like that in To the Lighthouse.

      The complaints now are mostly about various engrossing forms of video—most of which are crap and all of which draw people away from books, magazines and newspapers.

      But I suspect we are going to see in coming decades the partial de-shittification of video as our Aristotles, our Virginia Woolfs migrate, along with their audiences, over to this new medium.

      I have myself even had a go at seeing what new kinds of things can be said in video. And I wrote about the tendency of new forms of communication to be dismissed but also to lead to new ways of thinking in my book, the rise of the image the fall of the word.

      Yes, people are reading a lot less nowadays. But my prediction is that some of them will, as people have always done, find their way to new media promulgating new ideas.