by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n Is Reading Good Books Over?<\/strong><\/p>\n There is great \u201ctruth and beauty\u201d in Homer\u2019s\u00a0Iliad<\/em><\/a>\u00a0[1], but I would not try to make his sale on such platitudes. Gibbon\u2019s\u00a0The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire<\/em><\/a>\u00a0[2] remains a classic. But I confess it can be hard to get through. Conrad\u2019s\u00a0Victory<\/em><\/a>\u00a0[3] or Knut Hamsun\u2019s\u00a0Growth of the Soil<\/em><\/a>\u00a0[4], if authored by writer X this year, would be trashed on Amazon.<\/p>\n So what are the reasons, in this age of the iPhone, Xbox, and PlayStation \u2014 or Fox News blondes and HBO \u2014 to sit down and read old stuff for an hour or two each week?<\/p>\n Here are a few reasons other than the usual defense of the \u201cclassics,\u201d the \u201ccanon,\u201d and the glories of \u201cWestern civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n Mental Exercise<\/strong><\/p>\n The mind is a muscle. Without exercise, it reverts to mush. Watching most TV or using the normal electronic gadgetry does not tax us much \u2014 indeed that is by design the very purpose: to eliminate effort, worry, unease, and afterthought. None of us thinks back a year ago to a great video game session. Few off-hand can recall the Super Bowl winner of 2001. I remember the scenes in a\u00a0Shane<\/em><\/a>[5]or\u00a0Casablanca<\/em><\/a>[6], but not many others in the other thousands of movies that I have watched.<\/p>\n By nature, our ways of expression and even thinking always fossilize and are withering away with age and monotony \u2014 a process accelerated by the modern electronic age and the neglect of replenishment through reading. The actual vocabulary of our present youth seems to me reduced to about 1,000 words or so. \u201cLike,\u201d \u201cwhatever,\u201d \u201cyou know,\u201d \u201ccool,\u201d and other pop culture fillers now substitute for entire phrases, a sort of modern porcine grunting. The Greeks used particles to accentuate vocabulary and guide syntax; we used them instead of vocabulary. Our syntax, both written and oral, is reverting to \u201cSpot is a dog\u201d: noun, verb, predicate \u2014 period. How did incomprehensible slang, spiced with vulgarity, become an object of emulation? I used to listen to farmers without college degrees speak wonderful English; now to listen to a member of Congress almost requires a translator.<\/p>\n Reading alone enriches our vocabulary; it teaches us that good writing requires a sense of melody as well as a command of grammar. Soon those well-read become the well-spoken.<\/p>\n A Master of Words<\/strong><\/p>\n Think for a minute: why did the Right often ignore\u00a0the contradictions of Christopher Hitchens<\/a>\u00a0[7], and the Left mostly give up most of its anger at him? He was not necessarily a classically beautiful stylist, and could be needlessly cruel. He wrote no great history, no great novel, no great single essay that we can instantly recall in the manner of an Orwell or Chesterton. But Mr. Hitchens surely was a rare and gifted writer, polemicist, and savant. To read 800 words was to learn something new in passing. Even in his most ridiculous rant, a nugget of wisdom could be uncovered. A reference to an obscure Eastern European politician might appear side-by-side a line from Wordsworth \u2014 and would make a better illustration of his argument than just showcasing his erudition. He mastered the odd, even perverse turn of phrase, the ability to juxtapose the colloquialism next to Latinate pomposity, or to write a ridiculous 10-line long sentence, stuffed with semi-cola, dashes, cola, and commas, followed by a two-word noun-verb sentence that a five-year old could produce. In short, Hitchens was a voracious consumer of texts, and the result was that he achieved what the Roman student of rhetoric, Quintilian, once called\u00a0variatio<\/em>, the ability to mix up words and sentences and not bore. He could hold, even shock, the reader or listener from sentence to sentence, moment to moment.<\/p>\n But We Are So Much More to the Point<\/strong><\/p>\n But you object that at least our current economy of expression cuts out wasted words and clauses, a sort of slimmed-down, electronic communication? Perhaps, but it also turns almost everything into instant bland hot cereal, as if we should gulp down oatmeal at every meal and survive well enough without the bother of salad, main course, and dessert. Each day our vocabulary shrinks, our thought patterns stagnate \u2014 if they are not renewed through fresh literature or intelligent conversation. Unfortunately these days, those who read are few and silent; those who don\u2019t, numerous and heard. In this drought, Dante\u2019s\u00a0Inferno<\/em><\/a>\u00a0[8]\u00a0and William Prescott\u2019s\u00a0History of the Conquest of Mexico<\/em><\/a>\u00a0[9] provide needed storms of new words, complex syntax, and fresh ideas.<\/p>\n Humility<\/strong><\/p>\n Technology has deluded the modern West. We equate widespread knowledge of how to use an iPad with collective wisdom. Because a rare, brilliantly inventive mind from Caltech or MIT can craft a device undreamed of in the age of Einstein, we assume that we all warrant a share in his genius, as if our generation has trumped Einstein\u2019s. We deserve no such kudos \u2014 unless animals at the zoo that find delight in their rote enjoyment of their hoops and bars can be credited with the architect\u2019s sophisticated zoological design.<\/p>\n Pumps Are Not Water<\/strong><\/p>\n Technological progress is no guarantee of collective wisdom \u2014 other than an acknowledgement that there is a brilliant scientific elite that we foster and don\u2019t kill off in exchange for the good stuff that they give us. Our California public schools rate about 48th or 49th these days in nationwide testing, while most of the state seems to have their heads permanently transfixed to iPhones. Do we believe then that the population is smarter because we know \u201capps\u201d or because there is an Apple or Google headquarters full of engineers living in the cocoon of Silicon Valley?<\/p>\n There is an arrogance of an age that comes with access always to better stuff. New technology prompts an assumption that there are always better things to come. Not true. Life was far better in Rome in AD 25 than in AD 425. Would you like to buy a house in Detroit today or in 1940? Me? I would rather drive down the central section of 101 in 1970 than tomorrow. Regress \u2014 material, intellectual, and moral \u2014 can be as common as progress, if each new generation proves a poor custodian of the laws, behavior, knowledge, and learning inherited from those now gone.<\/p>\n We Are Not Alone<\/strong><\/p>\n No one in my town ripped out copper wire from the street lights in 1963 as they commonly do now; my grandfather contended with swarms of vine-hoppers and spider mites, not, as I do, with thieves who destroy pumps to scavenge conduit wire. I know that this will not be a problem in 2080 \u2014 either because such crime that threatens society must cease, or society as we know it will cease. Can we see these as symptoms, as something also beyond our present anguish, as challenges shared by Athenians, Romans, and Byzantines? We can \u2014 if we have some guide that turns the nonsense of today into the sense of the ages.<\/p>\n Not a poet in America today could match Virgil. Few, if any, of us historians could write with the flair and judgment of a Tacitus. But how would we know that \u2014 or care \u2014 if we did not read?<\/p>\n Without some awareness that ideas are old and somewhat finite, and that we are young and ignorant, we assume that each new adventure must be novel because we alone \u2014 right now! \u2014 are experiencing it. If Barack Obama would read\u00a0Procopius<\/em><\/a>[10], he would learn the wages of his huge inefficient bureaucracy. Jerry Brown, the self-described Jesuit sage, should return to his\u00a0St. Jerome<\/em><\/a>\u00a0[11], because the latter\u2019s descriptions of an eroding Rome could just as well describe a drive down California\u2019s 99. (Before a crumbling society can borrow billions for a high-speed rail to nowhere it might better bring out the dusty maps and charts of a dead generation of engineers that once bequeathed to us plans about how to finish a three-lane freeway without cross traffic.)<\/p>\n Ourselves and Our Archetypes<\/strong><\/p>\n Reading literature endows us not just with a model of expression and thought, but also with a body of ideas \u2014 and the names, facts, and dates that we can draw on to elucidate them. When I used to follow the career of the brilliantly destructive Bill Clinton, he seemed to be Alcibiades reborn \u2014 and thus was surely bound to share the same fate of those with enormous talent who are consumed by their own huge and unrepressed appetites.<\/p>\n Richard Nixon jumped out of the pages Sophocles, another gifted Oedipus whose innate and unaddressed flaws were waiting dormant \u2014 for just the right occasion to explode him, for Nemesis to take him from the King of Thebes to itinerant blind beggar.<\/p>\n Obama? He came on the scene as arrogant and self-righteous as young Pentheus or Hippolytus and he is now learning firsthand the effects of his Euripidean smugness on others. Nothing that we experience has not happened before; the truly ignorant miss that, hypnotized by sophisticated technology into believing that human nature has been reinvented in their own image.<\/p>\n Transcendence<\/strong><\/p>\n We all wish to live beyond the confines of our pathetic flesh and the limitations of the material world. I am here not just talking of religion, but rather of how shared ideas and learning trump age, race, class, gender, all the supposed barriers that only government alone can trample down.<\/p>\n At Fresno I used to teach works like Xenophon\u2019s\u00a0Hellenica<\/em>\u00a0or Aeschylus\u2019sPrometheus Bound<\/em>\u00a0in advanced Greek classes, usually to about 10 students. Some were 60 years old and retired. Some were physically disabled and rolled in on wheel chairs. Some were Mexican-American; some women; some Asian. Often an epileptic retiree, who took every Greek course offered, would have a seizure in class. Most were poor or of middle means; but I recall there were one or two millionaires as well.<\/p>\n The Point of Such \u201cDiversity\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n There was no diversity.<\/p>\n When they translated or sounded off about Prometheus\u2019s pontifications or nearly wept at poor Theramenes (who perhaps deserved his fate for his triangulation) being dragged off to his death, all \u201cdifference\u201d disappeared. What we had in common vastly outweighed our class, gender, and racial distinctions. Thucydides could belong to an immigrant from Oaxaca as much as it did to me \u2014 or even more so.<\/p>\n It was almost as if the mind lived without a body or perhaps despite it. In his treatise on old age and again in the\u00a0Pro Archia<\/em>, Cicero made the argument that learning gives us a common bond. (omnes arts quae ad humanities pertinent habent quoddam commune vinclum et quasi cognatione quadam inter se continentur<\/em>.)<\/p>\n Old? Hardly<\/strong><\/p>\n Literature and history become bulwarks from the cruel assaults of old age. I used to hike in the Attic hills with a group led by the septuagenarian, the legendary classical Greek scholar and topographer Eugene Vanderpool. He was to the eye almost decrepit \u2014 with few teeth (from the effects of malnourishment after internment in a German prisoner of war camp during the Nazi occupation of Athens) and recovering from a stroke. He reminded me of David\u2019s 18th-century painting of an elderly Belisarius asking for alms outside the Hippodrome.<\/p>\n But as we hiked each Saturday he quietly pointed out the pass where Mardonius retreated back to Boeotia in spring 479 BC before being obliterated with his Persians at the subsequent battle of Plataea. \u201cHanson,\u201d he once whispered, \u201cdid you realize you just stepped on the Attic Orchid; can I tell you a little about this vanishing flower that you crushed?\u201d Someone kicked up a clay loom weight. He smiled shyly at it, and in muffled voice muttered, \u201cHmmm, about 400 BC; there must be a classical farmhouse about here somewhere.\u201d We walked right by blank rocks; he asked, \u201cDid anyone see back there that\u00a0horos<\/em>\u00a0inscription? It was a boundary marker, Hellenistic I imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n Ageless Man<\/strong><\/p>\n When we got to the mountains overlooking the coast, he would rattle off the various armadas \u2014 Persian to nineteenth-century European \u2014 that had once docked below us. At 24, I felt like he was Napoleon addressing the Grand Army before the Pyramids. The result was that Mr. Vanderpool magically turned into 20-something like the rest of us, as if material existence were a bothersome afterthought. Our initial shock at his withered body vanished. He became almost an Apollo. I expected him to show up back at Athens at a Saturday night midnight disco bash to discourse on the Bee Gees as he had on the origins of ostracism.<\/p>\n Certificates of What?<\/strong><\/p>\n We don\u2019t need more technocrats who fool us that their Ivy League law degrees are synonymous with wisdom. They can be, but now are more likely not much more than tickets that allow an Eric Holder or Timothy Geithner into the first-class seating. I am not calling for us to be academics or scholastics with our noses in books or our heads up our posteriors; but to match physicality and pragmatism with occasional abstraction and reflection from the voices of the past \u2014 just a little, now and then, to remind us that Twitter or Facebook speed up communication, but can slow down thought.<\/p>\n Literature and history belong to us all. The recollection of ideas and thoughts can turn drudgery into something at least a little better. I once read\u00a0Les Miserables<\/em>\u00a0and the memoirs of U.S. Grant simultaneously each night, and by day sprayed pre-emergent herbicide (in those pre-green days, per acre: \u00bd pound of Simazine, \u00bd pound of Karmex, washed down with spreader and some Parquat) all day long. Gradually the leaks, the toxicity, and the monotony of one sprayed row after another vanished. My head had gone underground into 1832 Paris and then came out again to the tricky siege of Vicksburg. That trance could mean the herbicide might once or twice miss the berm (and we would not recommend that 757 pilots dip into their Tolstoy during autopilot sessions), but for a time I was no longer cold and wet.<\/p>\n Links in the Chain<\/strong><\/p>\n Somehow we must convince this new wired generation that speaking and writing well are not just the DSL lines of modern civilization, but also the keys to self-mastery, a sort of code that one takes on \u2014 in addition to others, moral and legal \u2014 to uphold standards of culture itself, to keep the work and ideas alive of our long gone betters for one more generation \u2014 as if to say, \u201cI did my part according to my time and station.\u201d Nothing more, nothing less.<\/p>\n URLs in this post: \u00a92012 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Is Reading Good Books Over? There is great \u201ctruth and beauty\u201d in Homer\u2019s\u00a0Iliad\u00a0[1], but I would not try to make his sale on such platitudes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[79,86,194],"tags":[176,221,258,106,417,107,1028,1067,5,426,298],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-h2","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6679,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-launch-of-the-freedom-academy\/","url_meta":{"origin":1056,"position":0},"title":"The Launch of the Freedom Academy","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 29, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media\u00a0 Today launches\u00a0the Freedom Academy\u00ae, a project some 18 months in the making. In the present age, we need a meeting place where people can rediscover what freedom entails and appreciate the origins and role of liberty. The majority of Americans yearn for a rebirth\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Civilization"","block_context":{"text":"Civilization","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/civilization\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":859,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-do-societies-give-up\/","url_meta":{"origin":1056,"position":1},"title":"Why Do Societies Give Up?","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 21, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline? Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, as historians\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Civilization"","block_context":{"text":"Civilization","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/civilization\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11549,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/victor-davis-hanson-on-contemporary-american-society\/","url_meta":{"origin":1056,"position":2},"title":"Victor Davis Hanson On Contemporary American Society","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 3, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Hoover Institution Traditional values, whether manifested in public policy or contemporary culture, are besieged in today\u2019s America but can still be found in the right places, says\u00a0Victor Davis Hanson. Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the\u00a0Hoover Institution. His focus is on classics\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12764,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/defenders-of-civilization\/","url_meta":{"origin":1056,"position":3},"title":"Defenders of Civilization?","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 7, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness The year 2020 witnessed a long series of writs lodged against an America beset with plague, quarantine, recessions, riot and arson, and the most contested election since 1876. What was strange was not so much the anarchist Left\u2019s efforts in the present to wipe\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6952,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-death-of-the-humanities\/","url_meta":{"origin":1056,"position":4},"title":"The Death of the Humanities","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 29, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"A liberal arts education was once a gateway to wisdom; now it can breed ignorance and arrogance. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0Defining Ideas\u00a0 The humanities are in their latest periodic crisis. Though the causes of the ongoing decline may be debated, everyone accepts the dismal news about eroding university enrollments,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1049,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/civilization-in-reverse\/","url_meta":{"origin":1056,"position":5},"title":"Civilization in Reverse","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 24, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services In Greek mythology, the prophetess Cassandra was doomed both to tell the truth and to be ignored. Our modern version is a bankrupt Greece that we seem to discount. News accounts abound now of impoverished Athens residents scrounging pharmacies for scarce aspirin \u2014\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1056"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1057,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1056\/revisions\/1057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n[1] Iliad:\u00a0http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0140275363\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=pjmedia-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0140275363<\/a>
\n[2] The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0140437649\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=pjmedia-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0140437649<\/a>
\n[3] Victory:\u00a0http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B004QZ9URY\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=pajamasmedia-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B004QZ9URY<\/a>
\n[4] Growth of the Soil:http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0486476006\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=pjmedia-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0486476006<\/a>
\n[5] Shane :\u00a0http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0792163710\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=pjmedia-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0792163710<\/a>
\n[6] Casablanca:http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B002VWNIAY\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=pjmedia-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002VWNIAY<\/a>
\n[7] the contradictions of Christopher Hitchens:http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/articles\/286976\/goodbye-mr-hitchens-victor-davis-hanson<\/a>
\n[8] Inferno:\u00a0http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/1463532229\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=pjmedia-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1463532229<\/a>
\n[9] History of the Conquest of Mexico:http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0217254462\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=pjmedia-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0217254462<\/a>
\n[10] Procopius:\u00a0http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Procopius<\/a>
\n[11] St. Jerome:\u00a0http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/St._Jerome<\/a>
\n[12] Shutterstock.com:\u00a0http:\/\/www.shutterstock.com<\/a><\/p>\n