Good Read

In Praise of Old Books - Daniel James Sanchez - Mises Daily


You see, the modern mind has been desiccated and atrophied by the state. State-dominated schooling is so inept that most boys and girls acquire a lifelong outright aversion to reading, such that they don't read any books outside of school. And nearly all who do read, don't read books of substance.

Not only reading enthusiasm, but reading comprehension has plummeted as well. Herodotus and Livy used to be schoolboy reading. Yet now even many university students would have trouble parsing the language of those clear, direct writers, much less more challenging fare like Thucydides and Polybius.

We are now living in something of an artificial dark age. The "barbarians" responsible for this dark age did not torch our libraries. Instead, they torched our minds and our curiosity, starting with the progressive educational revolution, which began in the 19th century and culminated in the early 20th century.

For the vanishingly few who do read books that treat of important ideas, the situation is not much better (perhaps worse), because most of these books are trash, both in terms of style and content. This too is because of state-dominated schooling. As they say — garbage in, garbage out.

There has been a marked degradation in all forms of literary output during the 20th and 21st centuries. You can see it in post-World War I writing, and it gets much worse post–World War II. Take letter-writing for example. Watch Ken Burns's Civil War documentary, and pay close attention to the letters written by soldiers. The writing of a non-college-educated Civil War infantry grunt had more grace and intelligence than you'll find in just about anything written by a university graduate these days.