The most recent edition of “Atlantic” magazine featured an essay revealing today’s college students’ disturbing lack of desire and capability to read books. This revelation, in our view, is analogously equivalent in impact to a finding that bumble bees are no longer interested in flowers. The essay went on to observe that students arrive at college with an inadequate vocabulary and less understanding than in the past. It noted their difficulty in staying sufficiently focused to read a fourteen-line poem without succumbing to distraction. The author suggested that the basic cause may be inadequate; primary and secondary school education. With due respect, it is our contrary view that the problem, sadly, is symptomatic of a more, all-encompassing and retrogressive societal tragedy.
The long developmental progress of Man, from self-subsisting alone to living in society, in addition to the acquired benefits of companionship and personal security, and development of life skills, led to the vitally important development of language and social interaction. Man’s life was no longer a solitary challenge to survive and, in time, allowed Homo Sapiens to develop the societal capacity to exchange feelings and personal observations in a common language. Human interaction and inter-personal communication provided the dynamic process that ultimately afforded Early Man the consciousness of the empirical experiences of others in addition to himself, Over the many eons of earthly habitation, he developed the societally existential perception of the important presence of other residential individuals and their enlightening accounts of empirical experiences. This ultimately resulted in his inclination to thoughtful and comparative self-examination; eventuating into a contextual valuation of others. With the development of writing, he became capable of transcribing his experiences, providing the dissemination of experientially pragmatic guide to others, relative to newly developed skills and, thematically, on perceived matters of human experience.
The vital benefits of spoken and transcribed communication led to stable, interactive societies and subsequently to the conglomeration of National States, contextually enabling a more encompassing and salubrious enhancement of human life and experience. Works of literature provided the reader with aesthetic pleasure, but more vitally, enhanced his utilitarian understanding and, more broadly, the moral advancement of extant mankind by its relation to Man’s classic experience and derived conclusions, as a comparative analog to the readers’ perception of life.
Books are necessary in the development of mature perspective and substantially contribute to an understanding of the human condition. They cultivate a sophisticated sense of empathy, temporarily transferring the mind of the reader into the mind of the protagonist. Such enlargement of human understanding directs the sympathy and understanding of the reader outside himself and derivatively eventuates in a wiser understanding of the self, others, and indeed, of life itself. The countless human compendiums of enjoyable and life-enhancing literature and other aesthetic sources of wisdom and communicated perception of Man’s life on Earth are ubiquitously available for the contemplative reader and have been an invaluable instrument in the process of human advancement.
Returning to our theme, viz., the reported absence of willingness, and, perhaps capability of college students to read books, we are obliged to reprise a contextual observation, notably appearing throughout our one-thousand-plus writings, viz., the existential importance of informed societal interaction oral and written and the tragically atavistic and retrograde effects of its contemporaneous decline.
We have attributed a plethora of substantive problems to the unwise exchange of human conversational interaction (in person, by telephone, writing (letters, journals, and books) for the facile but humanistically harmful, impersonal digitally operated hand appliances (“smartphones”). As numerously observed in this blog space, deprives the individual of the experience of recognized personal contact, timely and meaningful responses, comforting, nuanced voice recognition, emotion,al expression and spontaneity viz.,the sense of personal interactive experience. Hand-held digital transmissions are cold, nonspontaneous, and broadcast in the new tech-speak, to be received at some fortuitous time and likewise, digitally responded to when received. The societal result is the sense of loneliness and the promotion of insularity, as contrasted with natural and societally salubrious, human-to-human spontaneous exchange and beneficial personal ratification.
Other such computer “advancements” have metastasized the toxic effect of loneliness by removing the essential quality of communal and interpersonal living. To cite a few illustrative examples of such impersonal and socially crippling phenomena, we might, for example, cite some such robotic services as GPS, Echo Robotics (ex, “ALEXA), carpet sweepers, car parking, virtual workplaces and conferences, referential data devices on handphones, in place of individual consultation or personal research, televised individualized instruction, purchases by computer,. online mail, ubiquitous home entertainment, rendering attendance at theaters, museums, and movie houses archaic. As opposed to natural and sustaining societal interaction, we have surrendered to the seductive desire for convenience, regrettably deleting individual life and social interaction. Life has become, by populist choice, well-supplied, solitary existence.
Accordingly and tragically, so much of the younger generation’s empirical perception of life has descended to a selfishly oriented experience. The new perception of society is impersonal and merely signified by a perceptive competition for tangible success; as opposed to a more admirable (and normalized) holistic and responsible aspiration for humanistically healthy self-fulfillment.
It is our sad observation, that, contrary to Atlantic’s attribution of causes underlying the student problem, it is our attribution to the societally unwise substitution of facile computerized “improvements” eliminating societal, existentially vital, personal interactive, humanistic interaction; that convenient, but impersonal intercommunication is proximately responsible for the students’ failure to “waste time” in reading or engagement in enlightening discourse in general, evidenced by their contextual poor performance at higher institutions of learning; one wastefully committed to the mundane and limiting goal of a future career. The latter, limited aspiration is an obscene waste of cognitive potential for the ultimate human opportunity for self-fulfillment.
-p.
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