In the Hands of America’s Readers

With all there is to worry about, the dulled hammer of protest is no bother. The core nature of protest is not to create the effect of a spectacle more than an exercise in free speech. Though the constitution does consider wearing a symbol or putting on some absurd show as free, it is only the message, in the form of language, that gives traction for discourse. Yet what good is free speech-from any generation-if it is all going to be skewed, excused as treason by televised punditry, forced into news cycles and relegated into the unconscious portion of our bloated psyche?

One solution is to bite through the distraction of the screen and get to free speech at its true medium. Before speech there is thought. Books of most any type, fiction or non-fiction, give us things to talk about, things to agree on, and projects to complete.

But America has lost confidence, so readily comparing its students to those of other countries as if we are in an educational arms race, as if the global economy may become ours to pump like a well if we only had more majors in math and in science.

Same old story: the sacrifice of literature, history, philosophy, and the humanities in general will lead to a culture so broken that the word “economy” will mean nothing, since language skills will be sacrificed not for progressive scientific discovery or the maintenance of social good, but for an almost tyrannical attempt at innovation. To what end? We will make faster computers, more efficient depictions of violence on more addictive video game systems. There will be reality shows and other humiliating contests-to be seen on more and more screens.

Through the “screen”, we see a separate American Reality. Some have mistaken it to be “our” culture. This culture of the screen has constantly been watching itself. The medium itself is a convex mirror, reflecting an already developed conventional wisdom. Our culture has become self-conscious, unwilling to learn more-hardening into an effigy of false knowledge.

In most liberal arts institutions, Graeber’s older generation of altruists distribute culture to us so that we can become used to the notion of truth before exercising free speech. We become used to speaking without hoping for something new, and learn that individualistic thought, and anything new, comes through writing.

The late associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., called a word “…the skin of a living thought…” To think and speak freely, a relationship to language must be re-established. Neither violent or non-violent civil disobedience will fix this fundamental problem in the control panel of our culture. The old say it is the death of Western Civilization at its dawn, and we the young like to think that it is out of our hands.

For Generation Next, the Great War has to do with how we see ourselves, and what words we use to declare truth. Maintaining expandable and mobile nature of culture has less to do with the willingness and courage of just one Generation. It has to do with the growth of readership, for culture may survive once it understands its neurosis on the page.