The Bastard Muses

     Way back in 1985, noted scholar  Cleanth Brooks despaired of the state of learning in America. He cited studies showing that 40% of 17-year-olds could not comprehend ordinary documents, and only 20% could write a coherent essay.  He concluded that we are an  illiterate nation, with a large section of our population who cannot read and many who can read do not read books. He believed that literature was valuable in that it focuses attention on the purposes of mankind, and on the values for which men and women lived and died. He was dismayed about the debasement of humanities, and the resultant devaluation of humankind's yearning for song, story and drama.

   When the true muses are no more, what he  calls the bastard muses are ready to take over. And those bastard muses, Propaganda, Sentimentality and Pornography, fed by trash literature, are bent on debasing and distorting the human dimension. 

   Bastard Muse  Propaganda  pleads  for a special agenda at the expense of the truth. 

Bastard Muse Pornography focuses on one powerful human drive at the expense of the total human persona. 

Bastard Muse Sentimentality works up emotional responses unwarranted by the occasion or event.

I suspect that if Scholar Brooks could witness today's society, in comparison to that of 1985, when he commented on the above, he would be totally disillusioned by what he'd evidently predicted or at least projected. 

As for the lack of book reading, we know that today's libraries still have books, but mostly cannot survive on books alone. Therefore, the internet and community activities and programs comprise the bulk of their offerings. I wonder how frequently the revered classics are read. How many of today's young adult generation have read Dickens, or Irving, or Austen or scores of others. Literature in high school may be a Shakespeare play, stretched out over weeks because it's realized reading would not occur outside class. Other readings consist of novelettes or short novels. Why else would Catcher in the Rye or To Kill A Mockingbird be almost universally the high school literature of choice. 

   As for the brilliance we so admire in Jeopardy contestants, we should realize most of their winning answers are accumulated facts, memorized by rote from the massive accumulations of questions, answers, and categories acquired online in condensed form, not by their own experiences in reading and comprehending the physical texts.  For example, when a contestant gives  an answer of Robert Frost instead of Walt Whitman, it's obvious he/she/they  lack /lacks even basic familiarity with either. Moreover, the measure of their  success, and the fame that follows, is based on the amount of money they've won, not by their mastery of knowledge. So much for the perpetuation of the values of mankind.

  So long-winded---I'll deal with the bastards later. Stay tuned. Hah.

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Part 11  Bastard Propaganda  Muse. As scholar Brooks noted that if Thomas Jefferson were alive today ( 1985),  he may well  be delighted by the machinery but dismayed by the neglect of literature and writing. It seems that Brooks would undergo the same feelings about the state of American learning, only compounded  many times over. For the machinery of today allows lightning fast dissemination of information, which also means disinformation, or blatant lies. The glory and value of education is its ability to focus attention on mankind's purpose, and upon the values for which many have lived and died. He thought, maybe too optimistically, that these human values could not be eliminated, but could be debased. Since there have been way too many examples of propaganda flooding  today's society, only 2 examples of how the search for knowledge and understanding  can be debased will be noted here.

   The first debasement of the value literature has of opening minds to the culture of the humanities and the value literature has of developing and expanding thoughts:  One who, aspiring to gain a position of national leadership, publicly announces that he wants the citizens to believe not what they see with their own eyes, or hear with their own ears, but to depend on him to tell them what to believe. "And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made." 

 And a columnist for an area newspaper, who apparently attempted to avoid most  controversy in his folksy column, cited as one of the reasons for ending his newspaper column was that he sensed a change in the mindset of his readership, that being that many of his readers, the outspoken ones,  only wanted to read the words that they agreed with. 

   In the past, nations who were under the leadership of demagoguery fought to the death for freedom. Could scholar Brooks have foreseen that the "functional illiteracy" he referenced is indeed putting our  independence on the line.