There was a time – long before the advent of radio, television, and the internet – when the average working vocabulary of english speaking people ranged between 22,000 and 30,000 words. Today the average working vocabulary of North Americans hovers between 5,000 and 8,000 words. We are losing our ability to communicate. Why? We no longer read like we once did.
There was a time when reading books was our main source of entertainment and discovery. The written word was enchanting, well cobbled sentences carried a magic that took us from our own lives and thrust us into others. We read constantly; we read on our own; parents read bedtime stories to their children; families took turns reading a book aloud in the evenings. Bookstores thrived and libraries were busy places, books were placed on hold and looked forward to with the same anticipation as block-buster movies today.
Through reading we expanded our vocabulary, populating our lexicon with multiple options to properly shade emotions, describe colours, assert beliefs. Because as we read or were read to we developed an imagination to envision the pictures that those strings of words described, passions that others held, perspectives of how others saw the human condition.
Through reading we learned about and came to appreciate other peoples, other cultures, other belief systems, and by doing so we learned to accept others, not as foreign and untrustworthy, but simply as different.
With the coming of radio, television, and now social media, not only is our vocabulary shrinking, so is our appreciation of diversity, and our imaginations. We now struggle to understand the perspective of others, and in too many cases, we don’t even try.
Reasoned debate is almost a thing of the past, now replaced by single statement shouting matches that often end with violence or the threat of it. Because too many grow easily frustrated when confronted with a belief system foreign to their own, they become confused, threatened, and enraged.
Gone are free and thoughtful debates; the defence of political or religious positions immediately run to logical fallacies, the two principal ones being ‘argumentum ad hominem’; attacking the person instead of their position, and ‘argumentum ad populum’; if enough of us believe it, then it must be true.
We live in a world of ‘alternative facts’ – a more insidious concept I cannot imagine – when someone’s uneducated opinion carries the same weight as that of a learned scientist. As the most immediate problem I give you the wailings of the ignorant disavowing climate scientists’ warnings for the last four decades about human caused global climate change. Trees in the middle-east are now spontaneously bursting into flames because of record breaking heatwaves.
Gone is acceptance of those different from us, and even tolerance is being eroded. Every week in the USA another school shooting is committed by someone who was ‘quiet’ and ‘kept to himself’, not because he was introspective, but because he lacked the ability to express his pain to those who would refuse to hear him.
As a teen I learned about the struggles in Spain and Cuba from Earnest Hemingway, about the great depression from John Steinbeck, of the madness of a lonely mind from Shirley Jackson, bigotry and honour from Harper Lee.
Having graduated from Hardy Boys novels and opening my first adult novel at the age of 11 years, my horizons became endless and a day has not gone by in the intervening 53 years without my having a book on the go. I can’t imagine a life without literature, and a world where it is becoming a rarity saddens me.
I am disappointed that Canada is 35th on the world literacy scale, and horrified that the United States is 125th, just edging out Syria and far below Libya and Botswana. Think about that; the US possesses the most deadly arsenal on the planet and has a literacy rate lower than some third-world countries. It’s like giving a machine gun to a cranky toddler.
So, I beseech you; when searching out the next gift for someone you value, choose a book. It can’t help but change their life, and if enough of us do it, it may change society and ultimately save the world.
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