On Not Believing What You Read

Every student should, before graduating, see the 2006 teen-comedy movie Accepted. It’s a broad satire built around some high-school misfits whom no college admissions officer in his right mind would accept, not even in this economy. So they commandeer an abandoned mental asylum and construct their own college based on Marxism (Groucho), and they do to higher education what A Night at the Opera did to Il Trovatore. To a flabbergasted visitor, the teenage president of the college recommends the school newspaper, The Rag. “There’s a great op-ed piece in there about not believing everything you read,” he explains. Like all absurdist comedy, Accepted poses that subversive question, “Who’s absurd here?” It stands upside-down all the pretenses of university life, including its most fundamental pretense, that if we spend years here reading, we will get closer to the truth. Is there, though, any necessary relation between reality and what we find on the printed page? It’s a question that has become particularly acute today, when it seems that every man is his own deconstructionist. When Paul Ricoeur coined the phrase “hermeneutic of suspicion,” he was only recommending this reading strategy to literary theorists, but his students took it quite seriously and in 1968 turned the University of Nanterre into, well, something like the campus in Accepted. And today that skepticism is thoroughly mainstream. According to the Gallup Poll, only 32 percent of Americans in 2016 have confidence in the media, down from a high of 72 percent in 1976, post-Woodward and Bernstein. Among millennials (18-to-29-year-olds), just 11 percent trust the media. In Britain, back in 1975, only about a third of tabloid readers and just 3 percent of readers of “quality” broadsheets felt that their paper “often gets its facts wrong.” But by 2012 no British daily was trusted by a majority of the public “to report fairly and accurately.” In something of a contradiction, the Sun enjoyed both the largest circulation and the lowest level of trust (just 9 percent).

Up from Middlebrow

The Chinese had a word for it—wanbao quanshu. It’s a bibliographic term, which literally means “complete compendia of myriad treasures,” but an alternate translation might be “middlebrow.” These were encyclopedic works that distilled and summarized sophisticated science, history, and politics in cheap, accessible, illustrated guidebooks. Their audience (as a 1933 survey of Shanghai bookstalls confirmed) was neither the educated elite nor the impoverished peasantry, but an intermediate semi-educated class of shop-clerks, apprentices, housewives, workers, and prostitutes. Very few readers had thoroughly mastered the Chinese vocabulary of 50,000 characters, but many more, without much difficulty, had learned 2,000 basic terms, enough to read popular newspapers and wanbao quanshu. The latter commonly ran the subtitle wanshi buqiuren (“myriad matters you won’t need to ask”), which underscored their mission: self-education. They had titles like Riyong wanshi baoku choushi bixu, which could be rendered “Treasury of all daily things necessary for social relations” or (more idiomatically) “How to win friends and influence people.” Wanbao quanshu were the contemporaneous counterparts of H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History and Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. They flourished in Republican-era China, the same time frame that Joan Shelley Rubin identified as the heyday of American middlebrow culture. In societies where a wide gap opens up between elite and pulp literature, where literacy is growing but access to higher education is still restricted, where modernizing forces arouse both optimism and anxiety, middlebrow bridges those divides and makes sense of rapid change. Those conditions certainly prevailed in China, the United States, and Great Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, but not only then. Middlebrow has a very long history: wanbao quanshu can be traced back to the seventeenth century. And how about eighteenth-century Europe? Two generations ago historians studied the High Enlightenment of Voltaire and Rousseau, one generation ago Robert Darnton discovered a Low Enlightenment of Grub-Street hacks and smut-mongers, and now a team of young scholars at Radboud University in the Netherlands are creating the database MEDIATE: Middlebrow Enlightenment: Disseminating Ideas, Authors and Texts in Europe (1665–1820).

Death to Gradgrind

There has always been a “reading crisis,” at least for the last two hundred years. Up to the end of the nineteenth century critics fretted over the spread of mass literacy, which (they anticipated) would degrade the quality of literature. And then, at various points over the twentieth century, critics warned that the Book-of-the-Month Club, or middlebrow literature, or paperbacks, or the Great Books of the Western World, or Oprah Winfrey would mean the end of serious reading. As documented here, none of these irrational fears had any basis in reality. But even if others frequently cried wolf in the past, there are real and present threats to reading, and often (ironically) they come from the very quarters that warn that reading is in a crisis that must be addressed. Perhaps the most deeply troubling development on the reading instruction front is Common Core, a set of educational standards that promises “career and college readiness.” It has been adopted by most of the fifty states in the US, though several are having second thoughts and pulling back. The Gates Foundation has heavily promoted Common Core, donating a total of $150 million to teachers’ unions, universities, foundations, state departments of education, and think tanks that support the program. What Bill Gates prefers to call “ philanthropy” was in this case more like an investment, given that the Common Core would require much greater use of computers in classrooms. Likewise, publishing giant Pearson stood ready to corral a huge and largely captive market for textbooks oriented to Common Core. (Historians of textbooks know that, because they are usually sold to a government monopsony, opportunities for corruption are enormous.) Championed as well by Education Secretary Arne Duncan and many state governors, Common Core thus involves the takeover of school reading instruction not by capitalism, but by crony capitalism, cutting out both teachers and parents in shaping educational policy. Pearson was awarded contracts that effectively ensured that the company would be the only qualified bidder. In a 28 February 2014 meeting, Pearson CEO John Fallon and CFO Robin Freestone discussed the company’s long-term profitability with eight market analysts.

Dreamers of the Ghetto

This chapter does not pretend to offer a complete history of the African-American common reader. It only sketches in a few outlines of a much bigger story. But when that history is written, it will inevitably have to confront this painful contradiction. The woman who did more than any contemporary American to promote reading was raised by a mother who hated books. For an explanation, we might begin by looking to Frederick Douglass’s classic autobiography. Once he realized that most slave-owners feared black literacy, “I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom,” and determined, “at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.” He developed strategies to acquire literacy surreptitiously, offering bread to poor white boys in return for reading lessons. And in The Columbian Orator, an anthology of great speeches, he found inspirational literature that spoke directly to his condition, in particular Sheridan’s philippics for Catholic emancipation. However, later he fell into the hands of a more brutal master, who completely (but temporarily) broke his desire to read: “My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!” In another slave narrative, Leonard Black testified that when he bought something to read, his master “made me sick of books by beating me like a dog . . . He whipped me so very severely that he overcame my thirst for knowledge, and I relinquished its pursuit,” at least until he escaped from bondage. So there were two possible and polar opposite responses to the terror campaign against black readers. One was to acquire literacy at all costs and by any means necessary. “I do begrudge your education,” admitted a black steamboat steward as he served lunch to a white college student. “I would steal your learning if I could.”4 But others internalized the whippings and developed a fear of and aversion to books. These are both legacies of slavery, and they both survived far beyond the slave era.

Wrestling with the Author

Even if the Old Testament is the word of God, many of the characters in that story had an exasperating fondness for arguing with the author—and winning. Abraham sharply questions His plan to destroy Sodom, and makes Him promise to spare the city if fifty righteous men can be found, eventually bargaining Him down to ten. When God instructs Moses to liberate His people, Moses at first pleads a lack of eloquence, but evidently he’s a good enough talker to persuade the Boss to assign him Aaron as an assistant. And Job quite rightly questions why he should be the innocent victim of what seems an incredibly cruel wager. Jacob wrestles with an angel, who turns out to be the Deity undercover. In spite of a dislocated hip, Jacob wins both the match and a new title: God renames him Israel, which literally means “He who struggles with God.” (That explains a lot about Israel today.) This orneriness carried over to the Talmud, which carries on interminable and detailed debates over the interpretation of reading matter. The Bar Mitzvah likewise requires offering a new and original take on a classic text, an excellent preparation for careers in academia, the law, or revolutionary movements. You can trace this kind of damnably independent reading at least as far back as the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, a key figure in the transition to rabbinic Judaism, was celebrated in the Babylonian Talmud for his omnivorous reading, which was by no means limited to theology: “Scripture, Mishna, Talmud, Halacha, Aggadah, Biblical grammar, scribal traditions, deductive logic, linguistic connections, astronomical calculations, gematriot [numerology], incantations for angels, incantations for demons, incantations to palm trees, proverbs of washerwomen, proverbs of foxes,” not to mention legal treatises and chariot-repair manuals. The premise behind his reading—polymathic, multidisciplinary, ranging freely across high to low culture—is that all of it had educational value that could be shared with other readers: “That I may cause those that love me to inherit substance, and that I may fill their treasuries.”

Shakespeare in Prison

There are any number of inspirational accounts of prison reading (such as Malcolm X), so let’s begin with what doesn’t work. Larry E. Sullivan, the leading scholar of this small but enthralling literary subfield, has concluded that probably the favorite author behind bars is Friedrich Nietzsche, and most frequently quoted sentence, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” Convicts also devour crime and escapist literature, but few read Plato, Boethius, Bunyan, or Dostoevsky. And the reason should be obvious. Typically, prison systems work relentlessly to crush the individuality of their inmates. Physical resistance only brings ever-more brutal punishment, so prisoners resort to the one form of rebellion they can get away with, which is to read the most extreme forms of antisocial philosophy: Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche. If you are caged like an animal, these ideologies offer some psychological compensation: you can imagine yourself radically free, infinitely superior to your jailers in terms of intelligence, courage, and authenticity. It all sounds romantically transgressive, but that’s a very costly illusion, because it locks the prisoner into a battle with authority that he cannot win, and amplifies the behavior that got him incarcerated in the first place. Among black female inmates, the counterpart to Nietzsche is “urban fiction,” a new genre where the ubermenschen are inner-city crime lords, as wealthy as they are sadistic. Their women are consistently beautiful, expensively dressed, and obscenely abused. The demand for these novels knows no limit, and they are smuggled in faster than wardens can confiscate them. Their fans want to know why these black-authored books are banned while the equally gruesome thrillers of James Patterson are allowed in, and they have a point. But whereas Patterson is clearly on the side of law and order, urban fiction glamorizes drugs and thugs—and all too many readers admit that they fall for it: . . . “It excites me to read them. I look at all this money they’re making. I can’t wait to see the dollar signs . . . I like how they’re hustlers. How they con someone. It gives me a feeling of oh man, is it that easy? I coulda tried that!” . . .

Fayned News

When my students ask me, “What will be the next big thing in historical studies?,” I tell them to watch out for the history of public relations. The University of Bournemouth in the UK has a fairly new center devoted to the subject, Baruch College in Manhattan has just set up a Museum of Public Relations, and I think that’s just the beginning. Yes, plenty of work has been done on the history of advertising and propaganda, but PR is different: Dan Draper and Joseph Goebbels were perfectly upfront about what they were doing, but PR is a medium that commonly and deliberately disguises its own authorship. Let me state at the outset that everyone today uses publicists, and much of their work is entirely ethical. For publishers, they write up promotional material, send out review copies, arrange author interviews, and extract blurbs from reviews of their books—this one, for instance. But the main focus of this chapter is the kind of PR that surreptitiously plants stories in various media. It works only insofar as readers don’t recognize it, and therefore distrust of the media is in large measure a function of reader recognition of PR. The standard narrative holds that public relations was invented by Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays in the early twentieth century, but the basic concept of publicity can be traced back as far as Socrates’s Phaedrus, who observed that “an orator does not need to know what is really just, but what would seem just to the multitude who are to pass judgment, and not what is really good or noble, but what will seem to be so; for they say that persuasion comes from what seems to be true, not from the truth” (260a). One of the most brilliant PR agents of the pre-newspaper era was working before Shakespeare staged his first play.

Student Power

In 1916 Columbia University dropped its Latin requirement for admissions, effectively opening its doors to the striving sons of immigrants. Thus (in a word) it became the first Ivy League school to deal with the issue of diversity. In the same year, Professor John Erskine proposed what became the General Honors course, Columbia’s celebrated core curriculum of Great Books. Much later that program would come under fire for not including enough female and non-Western authors—but measured against the standards of its time, it was strikingly democratic, inclusive, and anti-authoritarian. The students who were now entering, educated at public schools, lacked the common classical training of prep-school boys, so Erskine aimed to teach them a shared body of literature that was far more broad and accessible. It took the Classics Department a year to get through Herodotus in the original: General Honors covered him (in translation) in a week. And Erskine’s definition of “Great Book” was clearly flexible: he envisioned that the reading list would be revised from year to year, and at first it was. The aim was not to follow a rigid canon, but to create the basis for a common conversation. And so it did: the early cohort of students included young men who would go on to shape intellectual discourse in mid-century America: Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, Clifton Fadiman, Whittaker Chambers, Joseph Mankiewicz (future screenwriter and director), and Leon Keyserling (later Harry Truman’s top economic advisor), with Mark Van Doren and Mortimer Adler serving as instructors. Early in his teaching career, Erksine explained his liberation pedagogy: . . . A college course in literature should provide for two things—the direct contact of the student’s mind with as many books as possible, and the filling in of any gaps in his sympathy with what he reads. Almost all the great books were intended for the average man, and the author contemplated an immediate relation with his audience. There is room for the annotator or teacher only when time has made the subject remote or strange, or when the reader’s imagination is unable to grasp the recorded experience . . . If the student’s task is to read great books constantly, the teacher’s part [is] to connect the reading with the pupil’s experience . . . . . .