Tradition asunder

This is probably common knowledge by now, but Doris Lessing received the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. What I’ve only just learned is that the acceptance speech she wrote to accept in proxy was absolutely killer.

She repines that the privileged peoples of the world are squandering their time and resources on those most banal of activities, those pertaining to the internet.

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”

Her cautionary word here obviously got the anthropologist in me salivating.

I completely agree that these paradigm shifts have forever altered human thought, but as a cultural relativist by trade, I cannot believe that these changes are for the worse. Are kids reading less Faulkner these days? Sure they are. Are they spending a bizarre amount of time on YouTube instead? Yeah, you could say that. Are we doomed? Of course not.

Remember that Plato decried the use of writing, as he said it fostered a weak mind. Yet without writing, Plato would not occupy the so highly esteemed pedestal in the Western canon he does. In like stride, Google a while ago implemented Shakespeare Book Search, which lets the user read all of Shakespeare’s plays by sifting through PDFs of scanned library books. Users can of course search through the plays for memorable quotes, contextualizing them, making lines like “Let slip the dogs of war” resonate with brutal vengeance, or properly puncturing a line like “And laugh at gilded butterflies” with horrible, sharp sorrow.

Does the introduction of these ease-of-use tools in a society lower the level of appreciation and understanding people have of great authors? Perhaps the tomes would be better off on a dusty shelf somewhere, clad in cobwebs, suffocating in their own hope of being wrested from the shelf and dashed against a table, their guarded store of millennia-old lore spilling out across the wood to be lapped up by the minds around them, skull by precious, ravenous skull.

I don’t believe that Lessing wants the great works relegated to libraries, but it’s hard to ignore the profusion of classic works all over the internet. She’d be wise to make a case for copyright reform, as that happens to be what’s locking contemporary cultural capital away from the masses. Instead, Lessing paints these technological (and thus psychological) developments in a manner that’s a bit overly portentous, in my opinion, albeit redeemingly replete with moving, commercial-publishing-contract-worthy imagery.

We are a jaded lot, we in our world - our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.

We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come up on it. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.

We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.

That’s a breathtaking perspective on the state of the world we live in, but I can’t shake the feeling that Lessing is perhaps looking in the wrong places.

Doors are opening everywhere, and the internet is a big place—bigger than a library, even. So I can’t blame her for missing the new things.

About this entry

You’re currently reading “Tradition asunder,” an entry on Im Voraus

Published:
12.16.07 / 6pm
Category:
musings