There is reason to believe that the number of people in the U.S. who read (outside of work) is declining. Anecdotally, as an educator of young adults, I can tell you that their readings skills are not improving. And there are fewer and fewer literature majors every second.
It might be logical to put this decline on the rise of social media, streaming services, videogames, etc. However, Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post cites an NEA study that suggests that “reading has been on the wane since at least the 1980s, well before the advent of Facebook and Fortnite.” The 1980s, though, does coincide with the emergence of another phenomenon: neoliberalism. The term “neoliberalism” can be confusing for people in the English-speaking world, who think of the twentieth-century meaning of “liberalism,” with its emphasis on social programs & government regulation. But back in the early 19th c., liberalism meant the right of the individual to be free (Lat. liber), free from infringements upon individual rights by government, in particular (think American colonists vs. King George of England). The argument has been made (more than once) that the meaning of “liberalism” flipped to its opposite over the course of 100 years, between the early 19th & early 20th centuries. It’s the original meaning of liberalism (sometimes called “classical” liberalism) that “neo-liberalism” aims to bring back, with a vengeance. Persons (including “artificial persons,” such as corporations) are not to have their liberties infringed upon one iota more than is absolutely necessary to protect private property; taxes should be as low as possible; business should be unregulated; capital and products (but not people) should be able to cross borders freely and seamlessly; the welfare state should be expunged. In other words, the regnant political philosophy from the time of Reagan and Thatcher to the present. Along with reducing or eliminating taxation – progressive taxation, especially – a prime tenet of neoliberalism is privatization, i.e., that resources and enterprises currently run by governments using tax money should be sold to private enterprise to be run at a profit for paying customers & shareholders. To the extent that government should run anything, say the neoliberals, that thing should be marketized – that is, run like a business, with a pay-for-play, citizen-as-customer model. This is why public universities continue raising tuition, laying off employees, using a more “flexible” workforce (short-term contracts, no benefits) – and why they receive shrinking contributions from governments. Primary and secondary education, in the neoliberal regime, are either being farmed out to private contractors or allowed to atrophy for lack of monetary support. And that’s where literature comes in: that same NEA study cited above also shows a clear correlation between level of education and time spent reading literature. And my anecdotal observation suggests that the quality of that education is also directly correlated: the middle-class & rich kids who went to private school, who don’t have to work as many hours as their working-class, first-generation counterparts, tend to do better than them, academically. And in the U.S., there also tends to be a correlation between class and race, so that’s another aspect of educational inequity. The primary reason for this is that rich people and corporations don’t want to pay taxes. If you try to tax them, they simply relocate to a jurisdiction that will not. So, “shrinking” public education – which tends to be a high-ticket item in any state or national budget – makes eminent sense, for that class of persons. Moreover, the more educated people are, the more their political views tend to drift leftward; so eliminating public education has an added political benefit, from the point of view of the pro-business, global neoliberal elite. OK, but where does climate crisis figure into this? Well, most of the CO2 in our atmosphere was put there since – you guessed it, the 1980s. The “liberalization” of regulation and taxation allowed for more industries to pollute more in more places – which generated a few economic boom-times, but also generated a lot of coal-fired electricity and petroleum-fueled transport of goods (from, say, China to the U.S.). Any governmental incentives to switch to renewables or limit use of carbon fuels have been quashed, by and large. So, neoliberalism allowed corporations to do whatever they wanted and shift the cost to the non-hyper-rich. They didn’t want to pay for schools (or hence, reading & books); but they did want to pay for fossil fuels. And the less educated people become, the less likely to read books, to think critically, or even to have any idea what’s going on. As Donald Trump says, “we love the poorly educated!” (by “we” he means “I”). In other words, the decline of reading and literature has the same root cause as the climate catastrophe, and both are accelerating, despite the fact that more reading and critical thought might just help (or have helped) alleviate or slow the damage. Likewise, in order for literary culture to effloresce and for the climate to eventually arrive at homeostasis, neoliberal globalized capitalism would have to die. But the way things are going, the people and other species will go first. And the books.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |