ALAN writes:

“Newspapers, like everything else, are subject to abuses.  Even when…restricted, their universal utility may be questioned, for one unconsciously falls into a habit of hasty reading, and this dissipates the mind, rendering it unfit for hard labor.  In old times, when the printing press was imperfect, our fathers had few books and papers; but those which they possessed were not merely skimmed over, but thoughtfully and leisurely read, so that one book developed the intellect more than months of desultory scanning of the news of the present day…..”

              — “Abuses of Newspaper Literature,” in Leaflets of Thought, published by Mrs. Eugenia Cuthbert’s Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies, St. Louis, Missouri.  April 1, 1871, p. 3.

Just as there are too many things to see nowadays [“Pieper on Learning to See,” The Thinking Housewife, Oct. 22, 2012 ], there are also too many things to read:  Too many slickly-fashioned books, magazines, and ephemeral nonsense and worse in daily newspapers.  But newspapers have now been largely supplanted by the even more numerous and more deceptive ephemera on countless Internet sites, thus compounding the problem addressed by Mrs. Cuthbert and her Faculty.  The mass communications industry has not checked the cause for their concern but worsened it.

“But more people today can read than ever before!,” it will be objected by those in the grip of the mass communications monster and the fallacy of “mass literacy.”  The proper reply to that is:  To be able to read is one thing; to understand what one reads is quite another.  Millions are able to do the first but not the second.  Literacy does not make people educated or thoughtful. 

The readiness of American magazines and newspapers to dumb down the things they publish and the form in which they publish them has been glaringly obvious to me over the past fifty years.  If it is true that more Americans today can read than ever before, then it is also true that most of their reading is superficial and that they read more lies, fallacies, and misrepresentations than previous generations could have imagined.

Let us recall Albert Jay Nock, writing in 1934:

“The average literate person being devoid of reflective power but capable of sensation, his literacy creates a demand for a large volume of printed matter addressed to sensation; and this form of literature, being the worst in circulation, fixes the value of all the rest and tends to drive it out.”  [in “The Gods’ Lookout”, 1934]

Note those words:  “…a large volume of printed matter addressed to sensation…” 

Is there a more exact description of today’s books, magazines, newspapers—and the Internet?

The cliché “So Many Books, So Little Time” should be weighed alongside the thought “So Much Junk…All the Time.”

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