Life of Johnson: Reading

Boswell says Johnson was not a croaker, one who complains about his age in all ways. Johnson found his age very pleasing, except that "subordination is sadly broken down in this age." The Tory Telegraph still makes the same complaint, but calls it "lack of deference." Johnson does twice say that reading had declined, once in reference to lawyers' preparation and I think to doctors the other time, but it seems he only thought more training was now acquired in conversation than formerly.

In keeping with the Johnsonian spirit, I should make it clear that I would not choose any other age, all the others being poor in knowledge and menaced by torturers going by the name of physicians. Scientific advances have been an increasing proportion of each century's glories from the 16th, but this age has seen science become unearthly in its glory and beauty. Medicine has become powerful too, and it is an everyday thing for a sick man to be told, "Take up your bed and walk." My grandmother just had a knee entirely replaced, and the other will be done in a few months; she will travel to Italy this year. Johnson tried hard to get to Italy in his final year, hoping the better climate would help, but his too-helpful band of doctors could not make him well enough.

There are many other wonderful things about this age, among them that basic literacy and some degree of knowledge belong to more people than ever before. My earlier complaint is more specific: that group, never large, of people who can attain to significant knowledge and true literacy is now afflicted with the delusion that those attainments are at best private games and at worst sabotage of the efficient machines that will create heaven on Earth. Since Dewey's fools have come to the worst conclusion, the result has been that every year's births provide the raw materials for an educational system more perfectly stripped of knowledge than the year before. If you happen to be one of those industrial inputs, but are somehow so badly machined that you end up with some part of a humane education, you will find that the other inputs, having stayed on the assembly line, can no more understand your peculiarity than a BMW could see the point of a horse. People are not more stupid now than before--they may even be smarter, and many become powerful engines of science--but even with smart listeners, the whole of life cannot be conversations in the form of lectures starting at first principles.

Even highly esteemed graduate schools in the humanities have little to work with, though they do their best by drawing from overseas and from private schools. It is painful to listen to professors talk and to realize that you are witnessing the descent of man; in classics, the greatest scholars are all past retirement, and many are over 80. They have been great from their early days, as I found whenever I read their published work, though of course they have grown more learned over time. Professors of 50, unless they were educated entirely overseas, have little of the older generation's penetration, but are serviceable: hammers, not lances. Professors of 40 show astonishing gaps in their knowledge, and professors of 30 sometimes seem never to have opened a book from outside their field or this year's NYT bestsellers list. American graduate students in their mid-20s, though their native talents may be great, would have been rejected by undergraduate admissions fifty years ago for appalling unpreparedness. All of this refers to Americans educated in public schools and most private schools; the rest of the world was not so stupid as to admire Dewey.

So imagine being an American of 30 or 35 but by ill chance possessed of a mind roughly molded in the older style. As you look far ahead to those nearing death, you see scholars who utterly outstrip you; looking ever closer, you find people more and more like you, though more finely modeled; somewhere around 50, they grow more alien; when you look behind at those coming up, you realize that their principles of thought are becoming not only alien but hostile, fused with political ideology. Every year the desolation, like the Sahara, increases its borders a little more, but also adds more savages who only know the wasteland. They love the wasteland; men love the manner of life to which they are born, and resent attempts to unearth and tear up its radical errors. All this is not pleasant now; it will be intolerable in thirty years, when the wasteland covers everything and only scattered anchorites remember what was lost.

Johnson would surely not believe the extent of the collapse, but he would understand how reading might die, once learning was no longer esteemed or profitable, and other entertainment was cheap and ubiquitous:

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them. There must be an external impulse; emulation, or vanity, or avarice. The progress which the understanding makes through a book, has more pain than pleasure in it. Language is scanty, and inadequate to express the nice gradations and mixtures of our feelings. No man reads a book of science from pure inclination. The books that we do read with pleasure are light compositions, which contain a quick succession of events.