Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“EMPIRE OF ILLUSION” by Chris Hedges (first published 2009); “REVUE DES DEUX MONDES” (issue of December 2016 / January 2017); “LETTRE OUVERTE AUX FUTURS ILLETTRES” by Paul Guth (first published 1980). 

 

I was going through a fund-raising book-sale at the local high school when my eye was caught by the subtitle of Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion, and I snapped the book up. The subtitle read The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. “At last”, I thought, “a book that points out how much public discourse has been corrupted and cheapened by the dominance of television and the internet.” I looked forward to a book detailing how news has been reduced to soundbites and staged events; political debate has become wholly personalised and trivialised; anything higher than purely functional literacy has declined in all developed countries; and there is a rage, even among supposed intellectuals, to ridicule, cheapen or scoff at canonical classics for their lack of cultural relevance.

That would have been my kind of book.

But actually, that was not what Hedges’ book delivered, much as I did end up agreeing with some of the points Hedges made. Hedges is, among other things, an ordained Presbyterian Minister, but he is also very much on the radical left – or at least that part of the radical left that can maintain itself in the comfort of academe.

Basically, Empire of Illusion is a diatribe against the corporatisation of America, the use of the mass media as a distraction rather than a force for education and enlightenment, and the loss of real democracy. America, in Hedges’ view, is a culture in deep decline. Reading his book, I was aware that it was written a decade ago, some of its topical references are already a little faded, and the presidency Hedges sometimes takes on, for colluding with big corporations, is the Obama presidency. In his final pages Hedges suggests that America is ripe for a fascism-tinged demagogue who will feed dreams to the disempowered American working-class, once they realise how badly they have been ripped off. My guess is that if he were writing this book now, Hedges would have much to say about Donald Trump.

In his first chapter, Hedges looks at the (then) popularity of the World Wrestling Federation. For working class males, the WWF is a marker of their frustration – they are, Hedges theorises, invited to get vicarious revenge on the possessing classes by means of the (staged and faked) rivalries of the wrestlers. From this, Hedges segues rather uneasily into the decline of real literacy in America. A linguistic analysis of speeches by successive US presidents shows that the age-level required to understand presidential oratory has declined steeply over the last 150 years. So those frustrated and disempowered working class men no longer have the linguistic abilities or conceptual skills to understand what disempowers them – and their leaders increasingly speak to them in baby-talk.

In his second chapter (necessarily a revolting one to read), Hedges looks at the massive American pornography industry, which has become increasingly based on male fantasies of violence directed against women. Pornography was always built on male dreams of dominance, but what is now “mainstream” is sadism and dehumanisation. In this, Hedges reads alienation and a perversion of the search for love. (And perhaps also reveals that he was writing before such phenomena as the #Me Too movement.)

Most cogent to the theme of literacy is the third chapter, in which Hedges speaks of the corporatisation of American universities. All of them – and perhaps especially the prestigious Ivy League ones (Harvard, Yale, Princeton etc.) – are now the recipients of huge grants from corporations. Result? The universities dance to the corporations’ tune. Business studies are privileged and the humanities (literature, languages, history) are squeezed out. In most leading American universities now, fewer than 8% of students opt for humanities. Those who take business studies are trained to be good corporation people and not to question the existing economic system.

Saddest chapter in some ways is the fourth one, called “The Illusion of Happiness” in which Hedges considers the “positive psychology” movement, whereby underpaid workers are persuaded that they are part of a “team” and are “associates” of their employers. In the absence of labour unions, this cult provides the illusion of solidarity while trying to keep workers quiescent.

Hedges rounds off with a very generalised chapter on the nationalist illusion which seeks to persuade Americans that their country is a great power when its infrastructure is crumbling, it is deeply in debt and its economy is increasingly dependent on unpayable loans. It is here that he predicts the rise of demagogues before he finishes with an unconvincing peroration on the essential decency of human nature.

Given that the book is subtitled The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, I am surprised at two major omissions from Hedges’ diatribe.

 In his third chapter, when he considers the corporatisation of universities, Hedges takes a brief swipe at the impenetrable goobledegook which now passes for discourse in some humanities departments. This he diagnoses as a code designed to protect a power elite. Yet he nowhere mentions the scourge of postmodernism, which, more than anything else in humanities departments, has reduced intellectual discourse to a sterile linguistic game and has stripped such discourse of any moral content. As Hedges is big on lamenting the lack of morality in public life, it is odd that he has not noted a movement which denies any concepts of right and wrong. I looked carefully, but I am sure that the word “postmodernism” appears nowhere in this text. And I saw no analysis of the weakening of the humanities themselves as students more often took modish courses such a Communication Studies, Film Studies, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies etc rather than the study of canonical literature.

Most howlingly obvious, of course, is Hedges’ failure to mention Hollywood and its propaganda machine. (When I use the term “Hollywood” I mean the whole film-and-TV nexus.) Surely any book which purports to take on “illusion” in America has to take on this major entertainment-and-distraction force. I think there is a political reason for this. On a few occasions, Hedges notes that both Democrat and Republican parties are corporatised, beholden to powerful lobbyists and have lost the essential concept of real public service. But his deepest ire is saved for the Right. It would therefore be deeply embarrassing for him to discuss Hollywood, which essentially votes Democrat and pushes propaganda issues that the Right eschew.

Without any consideration of postmodernism and Hollywood, any book aspiring to chronicle “the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle” in the USA is severely defective. Empire of Illusion has many interesting and illuminating anecdotes, but does ultimately become a rave disconnected from any theoretical anchor.

            After reading this book, I went on line to find reviews of it. They divide evenly between those who accept Hedges’ argument uncritically (the type who give “Five Star” ratings in those thumbnail “reviews” that follow publicity blurbs); and those who point out the severe defects in Hedges’ analysis. Many note Hedges’ tendency to recycle – and quote in detail – the arguments of similar Jeremiads. The more astute decried Hedges for assuming (falsely) that there was once a golden age of liberal discourse in the USA. The reality is that there never was any such thing – and the proportion of the population that read or discussed “seriously” was always about the same size that it now is... but the decline of more-than-functional literacy in what were once the "reading classes" is still a reality.

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            So Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion was not quite the book I was looking for. It does not tackle the general loss of more-than-functional literacy. By chance, I found something nearer the mark in two French publications.

            Is there a crisis of literacy in the Western world? Many people think so. Never before have more people been functionally literate in the Western world, but the habit of reading and studying in detail, as a matter of course, challenging books or literary classics is dying, regardless of the number of book clubs there are.

            In France in January 2017, I bought a copy of the Revue des Deux Mondes to read on a railway journey. The Revue des Deux Mondes, a book-sized monthly magazine, is one of France’s longest-established literary and cultural publications, founded the best part of two hundred years ago (in 1829 to be precise). Its current politics could best be described as centrist – pro-European, pro-Republic, anti-populist, but also wary of the extreme left  - although its chief mission is a cultural one, and this involves a long defence of French literary culture. To make a very loose comparison, the type of French people who read the Revue des Deux Mondes (or Le Figaro Litteraire) would be the same sort of literati who would read the Times Lit.Sup. or the New York Review of Books in English-speaking countries. The issue I picked up was devoted to a reassessment of Alexis de Tocqueville, which is very appropriate for this magazine on two counts: first, because de Tocqueville was one of the magazine’s most distinguished contributors in the mid-19^th century; and second, because de Tocqueville’s defending democracy, while also providing a reasoned critique of democracy’s flaws, is the general stance that the current Revue des Deux Mondes still maintains.

            But what does this have to do with a crisis of literacy? Well my attention was immediately taken by what opened the issue of the Revue des Deux Mondes that I bought. It was a 14-page-long interview with the centrist politician (and former Minister of Education) Francois Bayrou. He begins by saying that he has always been an avid reader and goes on at some length to condemn what he sees as the dumbing-down of current French lycee (high school) education in the humanities. He is appalled that “un gouvernement dit de gauche” (“a so-called leftist government”) has “supprime les humanites classiques en France” (“suppressed the classic humanities in France”). He points to the removal of Latin and Greek from any high-school syllabus, arguing that these studies have been condemned as “elitist”. The reality, he says, is that knowledge of true Classical literature was the backbone of the French literary tradition, a means of learning structure, order, clarity and reason in writing. He points to figures in French literature and politics, in no way reactionaries, who benefitted from, and praised, such a Classical humanities education: Leon Blum, Jean Jaures, Victor Hugo, Voltaire, many humanists etc. He also says that the state high-school he attended as an adolescent took in pupils from all social classes, was in no way elitist, and encouraged in all students the ability to think and write well by having instruction in the Classical humanities.

            This may sound like a very specialised (and French) concern where literacy is concerned. But it is part of the current trend - certainly prevalent in New Zealand schools – to turn students away from really demanding books, or books that do not have an immediate “relevance”. Apart from worthy adolescent fare (usually American – The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird etc.), how many schools now never introduce pupils to genuinely canonical works? As a high-school teacher of English for thirty years, I was sometimes able to get senior pupils to study the likes of Great Expectations, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Vanity Fair, Sons and Lovers and Dubliners – but most often I was surrounded by teachers who thought we should always study only shorter and snappier stuff so as not to alienate pupils from reading itself. I myself also often taught the shorter and snappier stuff, but I doubt that this approach ever really encouraged young minds to look for anything more challenging.

            The second French text on looming cultural illiteracy, which I bought on an earlier trip to Paris, was Paul Guth’s Lettre ouverte aux futurs illettres (Open Letter to Future Illiterate Ages). I will make it clear at once that this text, published in 1980, takes a more conservative and nationalist view of the looming threat of illiteracy than does Francois Bayrou’s interview in the Revue des Deux Mondes. You might be alarmed that at one point the author quotes with approval a statement by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Nevertheless, the book is not extremist and it makes many good points.

            Paul Guth (1910-1997) was a well-known French humourist, columnist, sometime novelist, and frequent recipient of awards from the Academie Francaise who had also been a high-school teacher for many years. His approach is made clear in the book’s blurb: “En les privant de l’etude des classiques, du latin, de l’histoire de France, des ennemis de la liberte s’efforcent de defranciser les jeunes Francais. Par un veritable lavage de cerveau, ils les amputent de la memoire collective, sans laquelle une nation ne peut subsister.” (“By not allowing them to study the classics, Latin, and the history of France, the enemies of freedom force young French people to become less French. By real brain-washing, they cut them off from our collective memory, without which a nation cannot endure.”) As you can see, this complaint has as much to do with national identity as with the loss of literacy itself.

            Lettre ouverte aux futurs illettres is organised as a series of ten (long) letters addressed to “Jacques”, a fictitious young student who is idealistic, but alienated from the school system and unsure how worthwhile his studies are anyway. Guth begins by saying he resembles many students he met in his teaching career.

            In his ten letters, Guth condemns the current lack of patriotism; the politicisation of teaching and the syllabus; the displacement, in the popular mind, of classic texts by TV shows; and the exclusion of Latin from the syllabus.

            Two chapters are longer than the others.

            One of these is called “Le Laxi”, which is apparently a French term for excessive inclusiveness, whereby any old tripe is held up by teachers as if it were a text worthy of study, as opposed to canonical literature. In this chapter Guth says basically what part of the Francois Bayrou interview says – that very left-wing leaders like Leon Blum in the 1930s were also certain that canonical literature was essential.

            The other longest chapter condemns the newly prescribed teaching of French history, which removes all colour from history and makes it a series of dull and loaded sociological statements. What Guth is arguing for here is a return to “narrative” history, which is far more memorable to young minds and which provides a solid chronological basis on which to build further, more scholarly, studies in history. 

            Having read my summary, you are probably now ready to condemn the late Paul Guth as a reactionary nationalist, out of touch with modern pedagogy. But my own conclusion would be that he is more aware of what really interests students than many who think they have found better ways to teach literature and history.