There's a great editorial piece in the NYTimes this morning by the author of the book "The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression," Andrew Solomon. It discusses this week's report regarding the ongoing downturn in America, focusing on the consequences for this downturn.
The Closing of the American Bookhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/10/opinion/10SOLO.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1089468186-K4RsE+yiFa7zDdA6oNjoUgAn excerpt:
"The survey, by the National Endowment for the Arts, also indicates that people who read for pleasure are many times more likely than those who don't to visit museums and attend musical performances, almost three times as likely to perform volunteer and charity work, and almost twice as likely to attend sporting events. Readers, in other words, are active, while nonreaders — more than half the population — have settled into apathy. There is a basic social divide between those for whom life is an accrual of fresh experience and knowledge, and those for whom maturity is a process of mental atrophy. The shift toward the latter category is frightening.
Reading is not an active expression like writing, but it is not a passive experience either. It requires effort, concentration, attention. In exchange, it offers the stimulus to and the fruit of thought and feeling. Kafka said, "A book must be an ice ax to break the seas frozen inside our soul." The metaphoric quality of writing — the fact that so much can be expressed through the rearrangement of 26 shapes on a piece of paper — is as exciting as the idea of a complete genetic code made up of four bases: man's work on a par with nature's. Discerning the patterns of those arrangements is the essence of civilization.
The electronic media, on the other hand, tend to be torpid. Despite the existence of good television, fine writing on the Internet, and video games that test logic, the electronic media by and large invite inert reception. One selects channels, but then the information comes out preprocessed. Most people use television as a means of turning their minds off, not on. Many readers watch television without peril; but for those for whom television replaces reading, the consequences are far-reaching.----------
Note: Mr. Solomon's suggestion that the possible consequences for a lack of reading may include an increased likelihood of developing depression and Alzheimer's, for those disposed to those disorders, coincides with some of my own questions regarding the sources of increasing levels of mental health diagnoses. I have often wondered if the increase in children diagnosed with true ADHD (we can talk about those given the diagnosis hastily, without a full assessment as another issue) was not partially a result of environmental factors such as this. After all, our current understanding of the brain and its disorders leads us to believe that -- while individuals may be predisposed to certain disorders via genetics -- environment plays a role in how those genetic tendencies play out. For some reason, few professionals even ask this question about ADHD, focusing almost solely on biology.
OK. Blah. Blah. Blah. I could go on, discussing how fewer and fewer Americans seem capable of holding disparate ideas in the hands of their mind, of actually discussing them openly, comparing their actual positives and negatives, rather than repeating what some talking head recently said, usually out of context, without attempting to offer true analysis, but, rather, attempting to sell a philosophy as if it were a product -- turning political, philosophical, religious discussion into a competition of advertisements. The apparent loss in many of our fellow citizens, of all philosophies and creeds, of striving for Pascal's definition of greatness ("A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once."), may very well possess, at least partly, an environmental etiology. Or so I say, or at least wonder.
-HuckleB
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