Most Americans are enthusiastic supporters of their own civic
rights, but few bother to meet any would-be democrat's (or any
would-be republican's, if you prefer) number-one responsibility:
that of keeping oneself sufficiently literate and well informed
to be able to vote rationally and knowledgeably. Mountains of
too-long ignored evidence show that the vast majority of our
nation's citizens cannot possibly meet that responsibility --
that their functional literacies are so limited that our form of
government can't accurately be called a "democracy." The word,
rather, is "ochlocracy": government based on the uninformed
passions and whims of the mob.
In 1988, the United States Congress mandated a massive study on
adult literacy in America. Some of the nation's most highly
esteemed testing and evaluation specialists fanned out across
the country, interviewing and testing literally thousands of
citizens, young and old, rich and poor, educated and not. The
result, published in 1993 as "Adult Literacy in America," showed
that at least 96 percent of America's adults were unlikely to be
able to perform tasks that one might think preposterously
simple. Specifically, the study showed that only tiny
percentages of us can dependably do such things as (1) read and
demonstrate basic comprehension of a 1-page juror information
sheet; (2) peruse and explain essential elements presented on a
1-page printed table such as one might receive at a school board
meeting; or (3) explain how to solve a simple consumer
arithmetic problem.
Subsequent studies (such as the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development 's "Literacy in the Information
Age," published in 2000), tend to confirm the general impression
one is left with after a close reading of "Adult Literacy in
America": that we as a people simply don't have the kinds of
tool knowledge and basic skills necessary to sustain any
democracy worthy of the name. In other words, as citizens, the
vast majority of Americans are functionally illiterate.
"If you don't use it, you lose it," the saying goes, and that's
a major reason we've come to this sorry pass: we're too busy
doing other things to keep our minds from atrophying -- and one
of those "other things" overshadows all the rest as our most
villainous time thief. Let's do a little arithmetic. From the
24-hour day we all start with, we'll subtract seven hours for
the abbreviated night's sleep that most of us get. Our workdays
may be eight hours in theory, but they often go longer, and then
there's the commute, work-related errands, etc., so subtract
another nine hours. A day's meals, personal hygiene, and
household chores will consume about two more hours -- more if
meals (including preparation, consumption, and cleanup) are
permitted to last longer than 30 minutes each. A million other
unpredictables (answering emails or phone calls from friends or
family, soccer practice, car problems, surfing the Net, card
club, a talkative neighbor -- whatever) will inevitably conspire
to relieve us of a couple more. That leaves about four available
hours, give or take, per weekday.
Care to guess how much TV Americans watch, on average, every
day? Could it be ... four hours? Yep. In 1961, FCC Chairman
Newton Minnow famously called TV a "vast wasteland." Maybe it
was, maybe it is, maybe not. But let's leave questions of
quality aside for the moment. Whether one's TV viewing choices
are ridiculous or sublime, the arithmetic is the same: the vast
quantity of television Americans watch leaves virtually no time
(at least during the workweek) for anything else -- no time to
read, write, or cipher anything unrelated to our jobs or maybe a
favorite hobby or two. And so we become a nitwit nation, with
most of its citizens comfortable operating within their own
little worlds of work, family, TV, familiar social activities,
and errands, but self-deprived of the time necessary to practice
the art of thinking and acting like a citizen.
One wonders what our republic might be like if its constituents
suddenly saw fit to struggle by on only, say, three hours of TV
time per day, and gave the remaining hour to something more
enlightening. If the unthinkable were to happen and we were to
disengage from our tubes once in awhile, how might we best hone
and exercise the essential skills we need to cast responsible
ballots?
How about reading some mind-stretching books? Those who like to
sentimentalize books in general tend to gush naive nonsense, and
the old saying that it doesn't matter what you read as long as
you read something is the purest idiocy. It couldn't possibly
matter more. Americans are tremendous buyers and readers of
books (on weekends, perhaps) but the dominant varieties are
genre fiction and self-help books. Those may be fine for what
they are, but how they'll strengthen the Union -- or their
readers' basic literacies -- is beyond me.
So what "should" a citizen of the republic be reading? A little
bit of everything -- because in a democracy, one needs to know
at least a little bit about pretty much everything. We need to
read that which might make us more mentally agile and better
informed about our world, be it works of science, history,
economics, quality literature ... the choices are endless, and
we need to say yes to as many of them as possible, as often as
we possibly can. In a democracy, functional literacy demands
promiscuous reading, including but certainly not limited to
books.
Apart from the fact that books can disseminate essential
information (which TV or the Net can, arguably, do more
efficiently), there's another aspect of reading them that makes
our doing so essential to the health of the republic. Reading
well-written books, unlike watching most TV shows or cruising
through a succession of websites, demands sustained and nuanced
thought. It's easy to spend countless hours in front of the
television or on the Internet without ever having to examine an
idea of any consequence for more than a few seconds, if at all.
When democracy's working its hardest and best, it's a deeply
involved and profoundly complicated enterprise. It requires that
its practitioners focus on vexing problems, see many sides and
shadings of a given question, and a find creative and satisfying
solutions: precisely the kinds of mental processes one is led
through over the course of most well-crafted, demanding books.
Reading worthwhile books is a form of democratic calisthenics
for the mind.
Simply turning off our TVs and reading the best books we can
find won't necessarily strengthen the republic or heal the
world. But it couldn't hurt, and our continued failure to do so
is causing incalculable harm. Democracy may be what we want, but
until we as a people acquire the habit of stretching our minds a
whole lot further than we presently do, ochlocracy is most
assuredly what we shall have.
About the author:
Dan Nerhaugen is a freelance writer and Web designer who in
other lives has also been a stockbroker, English teacher,
journalist and editor. Since 1999 he's produced and sold over
5,000 articles to more than 50 Upper Midwestern newspapers, for
three of which he served as managing editor. He maintains the
website the48er.com, featuring
books, DVDs, and magazines for liberals and progressives.
|
