Opinion: Do you adore podcasts? If so, great. The venue seems right for long commutes, walks, or filling mental space while on the treadmill and otherwise. Friends often tell me about this or that great series on history, philosophy, arts, and religion. To have this option to legacy media is valuable, even essential. I have no doubt that some are brilliantly produced.
That said, I’ve been stung too many times by bad ones to have too great an interest in the general medium. I don’t even use the default podcast app on my phone. I’m sure it’s my failing, but there is one feature of many of them that I’ve found depressing. It’s not the content or the outlook as such. It’s the lack of erudition, the slang, the vulgarity, the prattle, the meaningless babble, the tonal inflections that rely on vocal fry and habitual filler language of “like” and “you know.”
In other words, too many podcasts to which I’ve been exposed feed my greatest single fear these days. What is it?
I worry that we have plunged into a new era of mass language collapse and illiteracy. It’s not just that people have stopped reading, which is likely true. It’s the loss of a common literature of understanding. Somehow a basic core curriculum that once defined the very meaning of literacy seems to have bypassed large swaths of several generations.
A rich and developed culture of orality is a glorious thing—the dominant pattern from the beginning of time until the age of printing—when people learn mainly from listening and sharing. That’s not what seems to be emerging. It’s a post-literate society that lacks the skills cultivated in an organically emerged oral culture.
Here we are in the years following two in which many students were locked out of schools and forced onto social media full-time. I’m still in a state of disbelief that this actually happened. The data from every study of student competence in language, reading, math, and science is simply terrible. Some post-Lockdown studies document the largest single-year drop in reading scores in 30 years.
Is this an anomaly or a foreshadowing of a future without books and literacy? I wonder.
Even aside from this generation, the sheer lack of literacy in the public square is what is so disturbing. Why should it matter if we default to a purely oral culture? People who read often and deeply tend to speak more clearly and precisely. They have broader vocabularies. Reading trains in eloquence. It also feeds broader and more profound content.
In other words, reading trains the capacity for speech and skill at reasoning to be dramatically improved.
What happens when reading declines and even stops? We have a major problem. This problem is everywhere in evidence.
It’s not just that anyone can start a podcast and so the average level of eloquence will be predictably lower than what you would get in past times. There is more going on here. We seem really to have plunged into a new era in which people have stopped even trying to correct for ignorance or aspire to know more and speak more clearly.
Think back to 150 years ago when books for the common person and every classroom became more affordable and available. It was a new age of publishing and distributing. Average households began to imagine that they too could have a home library of the sort available only to the rich.
Records from the 1880s document parents who were gravely concerned that their kids were neglecting their chores and outdoor play while sitting idly reading book after book. The problem was not so much Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, though the maturity of the themes in these books worried parents. The problem was a proliferation of dime-store romances.
Yes, parents were concerned that kids were reading far too much. Books were the technology available to everyone, often serialized in periodicals that were flooding the land too. And they were not entirely welcome to everyone.
A generation later, however, social reformers imagined a new possibility. What if every student could be thoroughly educated in a canon of wonderful books in every field? New encyclopedias flourished. Every home wanted a set so that every child had the best advantage. By the 1920s, this was a near-universal ambition: a thoroughly educated populace, with no classes left behind.
The Harvard Classics came out in 1910. It was 50 carefully selected books selected for a well-rounded education. It was considered the minimum knowledge base of a civilized man.
A short list among the writers includes Franklin, Plato, Epictetus, Aurelius, Bacon, Milton, Emerson, Augustine, à Kempis, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Cicero, Pliny, Smith, Darwin, Plutarch, Virgil, Cervantes, Bunyan, Aesop, Grimm, Dryden, Shelley, Browning, Byron, Goethe, Schiller, Dante, Homer, Burke, Mill, Carlyle, Racine, Molière, Lessing, Macaulay, Thoreau, Huxley, Montaigne, Renan, Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hobbes, Machiavelli, More, Luther, Locke, Hume, Lister, Pasteur, Wordsworth, Chaucer, Blake, Confucius, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Johnson, Webster, and Pascal.
If you recognize half of those names, I would speculate that you are in the top 5 percent of the educated people in the United States today. You are also likely to be older than 60 years. If you have a working knowledge of the ideas of them, that makes you even more erudite, perhaps among the 1 percent.
For my own part, I can only wish I had an education that gave me a fully operational knowledge of all of them. That’s the kind of mental apparatus that makes for an extremely rich understanding of literature and life. A high school kid today who could discuss the whole of this literature would be considered a genius.
These books appeared not just as a commercial product. Their publication was aspirational. It reflected a hope that an entire citizenry would have a commonly held broadness of mind. The public schools, rather new on a national basis, did in fact aspire to give all students not only basic tools but a full experience of the greatest of the great literature.
School attendance even before it became compulsory was increasingly universal. We are not just talking about the basics. High school attendance rose from 18 percent in 1910 to 51 percent in 1930, and these were serious schools with higher standards than college today. After World War II, college too was democratized. Even in the 1980s, a middle-class kid could work his way through paying tuition and books and expect a solid education and a good career.
More recently, I’ve interacted with PhD students in the social sciences who are working on dissertations. I’ve been genuinely alarmed at the inability of so many of them to think, write, and even speak clearly, to say nothing of thinking with an independence of mind. They have mostly been trained as automatons, compliant cynics who train only to fit in and get through.
Few of the graduate students I’ve known could tell you anything at all about more than a few thinkers on the list above. This is not the education of the Western mind. And keep in mind that we are talking about the elite in today’s society. The advance of woke ideology and politicized trends in every discipline has not only replaced wisdom with dogma but also replaced erudition with pop propaganda.
How to resist this? The Harvard Classics of 1910 and following are available for free download from multiple sources. Even better, physical editions are available at very low prices in the used book market. Parents: get a set for the household. Even better, make them the basis of a solid education.
The old reformers from a century ago were correct. It is possible to have an educated population. It is only a matter of renewing the commitment. My fear is that the state of literacy in America is worse than any of us knows. Let’s fix that before it is too late.
The problem is not so much book banning but reading neglect: no patience, no incentive, and always something to do that is more instantly gratifying. I’m sorry, but podcasts by hipsters and political provocateurs are no substitute. When reading dies, civilization sleepwalks into tyranny.
About the author: Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. This column first appeared in The Epoch Times and is reprinted here with permission of the author. You may also read his work on Substack here.