When I was first preparing to teach English to incoming Freshmen (Freshpersons?!), somewhere in a university on the East coast, I came across an essay that has stayed with me to this day, and even though by now it is a bit factually dated, its message is not. The essay is entitled Reading for Survival by John MacDonald, a writer from the early twentieth century; it's written in narrative form, and suggests itself as a modern Socratic dialogue. In it, the protagonist of MacDonald’s thrillers, Travis McGee, ponders the differences between what he takes the thought processes of his friend Meyer to be, as opposed to his own, supposedly less complex, method of thought. Meyer regales McGee with his version of the tale of human evolution, but of course, from the perspective of the 1980s. Here's McGee describing what he takes to be Meyer's thought process:
“He [Meyer] has a skull like a house I read about once, where an old lady kept building on rooms because she thought if she ever stopped building she would die. It became an architectural maze, hundreds of rooms stuck on every which way. Meyer knows his way around his rooms. He knows where the libraries are, and the little laboratories, the computer rooms, the print shop, the studios. When he thinks, he wanders from room to room, looking at a book here, a pamphlet there, a specimen across the hall. His ideas are compilations of the thought and wisdom he has accumulated up until now.”
Meyer, in the best tradition of the quasi-mythical Ivory Tower, admits that he's “...taken a few liberties with accepted fact here and there.”, but he quickly reminds us that “...so do the archaeologists and the anthropologists...”. Nevertheless, the narrative he spins while educating McGee is a rousing tale whose central element is the importance of writing as a sort of artificial memory in our hugely complex world, which he insists is just as “monstrously complex” as the world of his Mog – a prehistoric man who manages to synthesize his knowledge of his own world, in order to survive... and how we, today, do not. Of course, Meyer is referring to the world as it was in the 1980s, but to his probable dismay, he might note that the situation today is far, far worse than he believed it to be then.
To be sure, the advances we've made since MacDonald’s time have been great, even coming tantalizingly close to fruition in some cases, as when he references “...the probable future medical skill of controlling genetic heritage...”, though there are negative outcomes we must acknowledge as well, as when he reminds us of “...the present ability of science to prolong life beyond the point where it has any meaning left...”. Apropos of this last, you and I, dear reader, might differ as to the effects of, for example, the legalization of euthanasia, though it's pretty clear that neither of us could deny the modern relevance of discussing it, no?
It should come as no surprise to anyone that a writer should recommend reading, but it isn't just reading, and it isn't just “active” reading, or “reading a lot”. It's reading with a care borne of knowing how important it is to understand what the world actually is, and how it actually works, especially in the current media environment of mis and disinformation. It's reading without an over reliance on, pundits, politicians, so called “experts”, or even “AI” to do the work for us. It is reading as one would imagine a scientist conducts research. It's reading as if your life depended on it... Because it might. Certainly, the future of our species does.
It would be impossible in a short essay such as this to do justice to the jaunt Meyer and McGee go on in Reading for Survival, and I wholeheartedly suggest to one and all that they read it themselves. It is available online at the Internet Archive, or through a simple google search, and quite honestly provides a brief respite from the usual offerings. Like Meyer, I recommend reading far and wide. Science. Religion. Philosophy. History. Like Meyer, I aver thusly:
“The man who can read and remember and ponder the big realities is a man keyed to survival of the species. These big realities are the history of nations, cultures, religions, politics, and the total history of man —from biology to technology. He does not have to read everything. That's an asinine concept. He should have access to everything, but have enough education to differentiate between slanted tracts and balanced studies, between hysterical preachings and carefully researched data.”
In the age of Grammerly, “social” media, algorithms, and AI, any attempt to encourage people to read more (and to do so in genres they may not have a terribly strong affinity for) is perhaps impossible, a fool's errand, even. It is almost certainly the case that I am not the man to carry that banner, or encourage that course of action. The problem is that I see few fools attempting to encourage this. Still, some segment of the human population desperately needs to embrace something resembling a liberal arts education, as Meyer urges:
“I would expect that in his reading —which should be wide ranging, fiction, history, poetry, political science —he would acquire the equivalent of a liberal arts education and acquire also what I think of as the educated climate of mind, a climate characterized by skepticism, irony, doubt, hope, and a passion to learn more and remember more."
The present media environment definitely doesn't lend itself to dying on this particular hill. The advent of the internet at the end of the last century, as well as advances like AI, it could be argued, militate against such broad ranging reading, learning and understanding, as opposed to our modern focus on hyper-specialization, but I would caution that if we acquiesce to our modern global backsliding in reading and our understanding of the world as a fait accompli, not only are we failing to see the forest for the trees, but we're also abdicating our responsibility to future generations, and in the process, dooming ourselves, perhaps even to extinction.