January 2010

A Review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road

I have a rather ambiguous opinion of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. On one hand, it’s a beautifully phrased novel, full of powerful images and rich language. On the other hand, the plot is rather pedestrian, and the author’s defiance of writing conventions is tiresome.

There’s no doubt that McCarthy is a gifted writer. Many passages are profoundly beautiful and show McCarthy’s daunting command of language. He is a fabulous painter of words, utilizing an often inventive terminology. For example, the boy is described in an impressively figurative manner: “Knobby spine-bones. The razarous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin” (p. 218). Quite often, individual words surprise and enrich: “rasping”, “viscera”, “dentil”, “macadam”, and so on. In an age of anti-intellectualism, where so-called “big words” expose a person to abuse like glasses do in a Khmer Rouge nightmare, McCarthy’s breadth of vocabulary is impressive, perhaps even inspiring. Finally, the relationship between man and boy seems genuine and real, and moves beyond the easy nihilism for which McCarthy is often accused.

Nevertheless, there many disappointing parts to the novel. The plot is predictable and surprisingly linear: look down at a town or house; search town or house for food; discover amazingly well-preserved food stores just in time to avoid starvation; avoid grisly cannibals when necessary; climb to the top of the next hill and consider the depravity of man (or at least flat caricatures of depraved beasts); repeat sequence at least four times. The plot seems awfully amenable to a screen play, almost as if The Road was written as a novelization of a movie. McCarthy’s well-known aversion to grammar rules also grates, and I personally think it overwhelms the linguistic and emotional side of the book. I don’t really care about the lack of apostrophes or quotation marks; I get the rather bludgeoned symbolism about the artificiality and fragility of society. But the apparently random use of sentence fragments becomes incredibly annoying. I spent much of my time filling in the subject or the predicate, or both. Such undue effort led me to skip-read much of the novel, only occasionally slowing down to savour an occasional passage. Are such rules of writing really so imposing? McCarthy seems to be saying yes, but it’s a bit like arguing the colour scheme of traffic lights is fascist, when such conventionality is really about moving on to more important things. In the end, the fragments and other broken rules seem like gimmicks, and convince me that McCarthy should have spent more time on plot development rather than the arbitrary rules of grammar.

So The Road leaves me perplexed; maybe it’s his Pulitzer Prize for the novel, and maybe it’s because other people lavish such praise on his book. If Oprah loves the novel, it must be good, no? Yet for me, it has the whiff of pretentiousness. McCarthy is a great writer, no doubt, but beating up sentences and punctuation does not replace good old fashioned story telling.

Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation

Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation* argues that modern western society (and particularly American society) is moving from a relatively literate print-based culture to a post-literate technology culture. Bauerlein's specific focus is on the new realm of social technologies ("e-mails, text messages, blog-postings and comments, phone calls, tweets, feeds, photos and songs" (p. x)) that he believes overwhelm the process of maturation, attenuate cultural boundaries, and threaten the "intellectual development" of young people: “Instead of opening young Americans mind to the stores of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them” (p. 10). The Dumbest Generation is an enjoyable pro-reading, anti-technology jeremiad in the tradition of Neil Postman (to whom Bauerlein pays homage), but it's not without its limitations.

Drawing on research from a number of government sources and reputable cultural institutions, Bauerlein argues that young people in America are increasingly moving away from book reading, particularly fiction and literature. One of the best empirical studies he relies upon is a large-scale reading survey from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts that measured leisure reading rates in 1982, 1992 and 2002. The rate (based on reading a single book outside of school or work) shows a precipitous drop of 17% in 18-24 year-olds (from 59.8% to 42.8%) between 1982 and 2002. This is certainly troubling, but Bauerlain glosses over the fact that leisure reading for 25-34 year-olds also declined (from 62.1% to 47.7%), as it did for 35-44 year-olds (from 59.7% to 46.6%). Moreover, this decline in leisure reading occurred before the wholesale adoption of the social computing technologies that Bauerlein believes is at the core of today's "dumbest generation". [Indeed, one of the newest and biggest social networking fads, Facebook, is barely mentioned, whereas another fad that has already receded, MySpace, features prominently in Bauerlein's analysis.] Therefore, it appears to me that he is identifying a larger problem, one to which modern technology may contribute, but which is nevertheless deeper and longer-standing than Bauerlein contends.

I can offer no objective, measurable reasons for this post-literate society, except to say that this trend is certainly reinforced and confirmed by what I have witnessed in my 16 years as a high-school and college teacher. I see a spreading anti-intellectualism, one that is marked by young people who are often aware that they read less, and yet are indifferent or belligerently proud. (Bauerlein calls such young people bibliophobes.) Perhaps the reason lies in TV and video games, older electronics that pre-date social networking technologies, but which work in the same disastrous way: intellectually fallow screen time that crowds out reading time. [I am reminded of Postman's provocative discussion of TV's inducement of stupor-like alpha waves.] Working hand-in-hand are other potential causes: educated people having fewer kids (relatively and absolutely), a pop-culture explosion that emphasizes fun rather than satisfaction, and economic changes that remove both parents from the home (and thus create a vacuum that is easily filled by screen-based technologies).

So social technologies cannot be seen as the sole reason for concern. And, without up-to-date data that can parse the multiple challenges facing a literate culture, Bauerlein's book must therefore rest on anecdotes, persuasive arguments, and reasoning to convince us that social technologies - sometimes called Web 2.0 - are helping to lead us down a dangerous path. At this level, to be sure, I do think Bauerlein succeeds.

Bauerlein starts with a pretty familiar defence of print-based culture. Modern technologies crowd out and simply overwhelm the old methods of socialization and transmitting knowledge. At a basic level, the lack of reading is self-reinforcing: "as the occasions of reading diminish, reading becomes a harder task. The more you don’t read, the more you can’t read" (p. 59).The consequence of this is a society (or at least large portions of it) incapable of benefiting from those skills peculiar to reading. For example, habitual "readers acquire a better sense of plot and character, an eye for the structure of arguments, and an ear for style, over time recognizing the aesthetic vision of adolescent fare as, precisely, adolescent" (p. 58). To the extent the "linear, hierarchal sequential thinking solicited by books has a shaky hold on the youthful mind, and as teens and young adults read linear texts in a linear fashion less and less, the less they engage in sustained linear thinking" (p. 141). Logic and argumentation crumble: the "reading" in a Web 2.0 world is fragmentary at best. Even in the online world, in studies of teens done by the Neilson Norman Group, adolescents display "[r]eading skills, research procedures, and patience levels insufficient to navigate the Web effectively" (p. 146). Knowledge itself ultimately suffers, and Bauerlein marshals scores of studies to show that young people are indeed suffering from a decline in cultural literacy, basic numeracy and functional scientific knowledge.

One of his most interesting arguments is that modern adult society is doing a poorer and poorer job of moving young people beyond adolescence. Social technologies intensify and extend adolescence, and contribute to an increasingly narcissistic youth culture:

“Maturity comes in part, through vertical modeling, relations with older people such as teachers, employers, ministers, aunts and uncles and older siblings, along with parents, who impart adult outlooks and interests.... The Web (along with cell phones, teen sitcoms, and pop music), though, encourages more horizontal modeling, more mimicry of people the same age, and intensification of peer consciousness" (p. 136).

This horizontal modeling appears to remain for longer periods of time, according to Bauerlein, and helps closet the average teenager from any new or challenging experiences. This is where "dumbness" starts to find fertile ground:

For education to happen, people must encounter worthwhile things outside their sphere of interest and brainpower. Knowledge grows, skills improve, tastes refine, and conscience ripens only if the experiences bear a degree of unfamiliarity.... Adolescents don't [understand this process like adults do], and digital connections save them the labor of self-improvement" (p. 138).

Bauerlein's last major point is that educators have become increasingly complicit in pandering to these social technologies. Given their own progressive proclivities or ignorance, educators and academic researchers appear incapable of resisting the bandwagon. They do not ask, generally speaking, if adolescent enthusiasm necessarily leads to pedagogically desirable results:

‘Knowledge is never more than one generation away from oblivion.’ If the guardians of tradition [ie. educators] claim that the young, though ignorant, have a special perspective on the past, or if teachers prize the impulses of tenth‐graders more than the thoughts of the wise and the works of the masters, learning loses its point. The thread of intellectual inheritance snaps” (p. 186).

I am reminded of Sydney J. Harris' dictum that the "whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows." Put another way, we as educators owe it to our students to teach them what is irrelevant to narrow little lives dominated by social minutiae. We need to screw our courage to the sticking place and fight for what broadens their horizons, rather than what is trendy and innovative - yet intellectually arid.

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* Bauerlein, Mark. The Dumbest Generation (Tarcher/Penguin, Toronto), 2009.

An Exchange on Multiculturalism

I pulled myself into a discussion of multiculturalism and had a surprisingly civil discussion with another respondent. I say "surprising" because it was in the online discussion forum for Maclean's magazine, a place I normally avoid. [The extremism of the current editorial board has really taken its toll on a once venerable institution.] I suppose I was fascinated with this person's belief that multiculturalism (and especially his rather relativistic notion of it) is the dominant political value in Canadian politics, an increasingly common belief that nevertheless goes against any serious reading of Canadian politics and history.

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[The other person] ... Canada is more influenced by America than any non-Christian groups. Shall we start expelling them?

And just look at what the Internet has done to free expression and the invasion of foreign ideas. I don't think people realize that Muslim's use the Internet. Is it time to start filtering foreign websites?

Are Francophones to be skimmed off? Atheists and agnostics too? Increasing godless Ontario?

As Canadians we can only define our culture by what it is not. We are a country of immigrants that has changed significantly decade-over-decade, generation-over-generation and if you think asking immigrants to accept our culture will stem the tides of change, you are being very naive.

[My first response] I couldn't disagree more. Canada is a liberal democracy, and that entails many substantive traditions and obligations. There are many things that we ARE. The Charter is a good place to start, though by no means the only point of reference. At Canada's core is a moral and legal injunction to respect individual freedom and autonomy. We are also a society that is said to respect the rule of law and equality before the law. Thus, multiculturalism is not the core of Canadianism; indeed, it was an afterthought in the Charter process, and its position in Sec. 27 has a lexical ranking clearly below the individual freedoms and legal entitlements that come in the sections before it.

If newcomers, like both of my parents, can live within these obligations, then there is no problem. If they can't, then Canada is not a place for them. And if we can't ask for newcomers to respect these boundaries, then we are a society for which there is little to defend. And to think this is acceptable is what I think is naive.

[The other person] Fair enough. We can apply some cultural definition through our adaptations of British (and French) basis of law and sense of social contract, but socially speaking we are a society constantly in flux, which is why we went from excommunicating homosexuals from many aspects of society 50 years ago to allowing them to marry today, for example.

You say multiculturalism isn't a core of Canadianism, ranking below individual freedoms and legal entitlements, but I would say that such freedoms and entitlements inevitably lead to multiculturalism by their very nature because it provides in law protection to minority groups from the rule of the majority (J.S. Mill would like it I am sure), resting heavily on the most important word in the Charter; 'reasonable.'

The point I was making was against the rather disgusting bigotry directed towards a group of people who for the overwhelming part meet our societal obligations the best they can, with each generation meeting them better than the one before.

[My second response] I'd argue that Canadian multiculturalism is a fairly recent phenomenon that has its roots in the rise of "identity politics", changing post-war immigration patterns and the struggle by many non-Brits and Francophones (including Ukranian and German Canadians) to battle the arrogance of "biculturalism".

On the other hand, the liberal democratic principles I mentioned earlier have been around much longer, and many scholars argue that the Charter is just an extension and codification of long-held principles and beliefs (much of them inherent in British common law). As such, the changes in recognition that you rightly point out do not represent a fundamental change in our society, but a long overdue and logical extension of the universal promise inherent in liberal democratic societies and constitutions.

I do agree that bigots are never far from view, and often target those who have met or surpassed the "bar". However, bigotry can work both ways. When I see certain Muslim families arrive on an annual basis to register their kids in our public distance ed. school, I am overwhelmed. The mothers (I think) arrive in a full burqa, they walk in the back, and they are mute [and thus moot]. The fathers control the registration. And I almost never see daughters.

It is obscene. It is the worst form of bigotry I can imagine. Unlike head coverings and religious symbols, which do not block interaction, the burqa is a portable wall of separation.

What is worse is that nobody says a word (out loud). I would lose my job if I objected.

And while I'm sure some would argue this is a "choice", I recall those lines from Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" - perhaps the best promulgation of Western values in the last 50 years:

... Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?...