By Michael F. Duggan
You can tell a lot about a person by their library; my library consists of several thousand books in no particular order.
A few days ago I had a discussion with some friends on the importance of books and personal libraries and why people collect books. I have several thousand books of my own because I am a generalist by nature and there are a number of areas on which I write. If I see an important work that I might possibly need to consult/refer to, I will buy it. This obviously has a problematic side; books take up space, and buying them is probably the closest thing I have to an actual addition (which is comparatively minor and less constantly distracting than the”new heroin”/”new nicotine” that are the smart technologies of our time).
But the buying and not buying of books has even deeper social/cultural/historical/political/policy implications. I would argue that young people today are on balance among the most intelligent who have ever lived. I have also sensed that because accessing raw, non-contextual information is so absurdly easy these days because of the Internet and the portable toys we use to interact with it, that some of those among the most recent generation or two have comparatively little understanding of the historical lineages and connections–the historical-conceptual context–between ideas and the people who devised/discovered them.
When research involved actually going to libraries and archives, comparatively few people did it. Now that it is ridiculously easy it is also trendy, but many of the “kids these days” have little understanding about how to evaluate the disembodied ideas and information they access. The Internet is a Wild West in which true ideas are frequently intermixed with untrue, partially true, narrowly or technically true-but-misleading, distorted/propagandistic, and incomplete information. As with the Western printing revolution of 500 years ago, the information revolution brings along with its many benefits the possibility of unprecedented social instability and conflict. This blog is a latter day incarnation of a small seventeenth or eighteenth-century press, its posts are pamphlets and broadsides .
As recently as a couple of decades ago, intelligent young people took pride in their voluminous personal collections. They knew the ideas and authors and their connections, interrelations, histories, pre-histories, subtleties, flaws and merits, weaknesses and strengths. They knew the ideas that they believed in and could back up their views with contextual understanding and evaluation. Some of this obviously still exists (especially among those of us who are over 40; for for any bibliophile with a local Friends of the Library, we are living is a Golden Age of low-cost, high-quality texts), but I believe that it is increasingly less common among the young. This is dangerous, especially as regards policy, which should be based more upon a broad and deep historical understanding of ideas than on pure theories and unselfcritical ideology.
For example, some young people I know from the courses I have taught, know more about the climate crises and the pitfalls of neoliberal globalization than most people of my own generation. Yet when you press them on solutions however, they may start rhapsodizing about the virtues of global Marxism and spontaneous, bottom-up plebiscite world socialism. When you reply “no, really, what’s your solution?” they double-down on models that either have never existed, have long records of trial and failure, or whose closest real-world analogs have never come close to working and have frequently devolved into totalitarian monstrosities.
I’m not sure what the answer is or even if there is a workable solution. The brave new world is here and you cannot unring a bell. Although we exist in the cognitive world and interact in the ideational world of which the cyber world is a hybrid, subset, multiplier, and accelerant, human beings evolved, interact, and function in the physical world. I hope that thoughtful young will appreciate the importance of physical books in the real world. Ideas are valuable and dangerous things, and some of the most pernicious concepts may also be among the most appealing on their face, the most seductive. In order for us to accentuate their value while minimizing their danger, we must know their histories and linkages. In my experience this is most effectively accomplished through the compiling of physical collections of books in addition to discussion with other people and in conjunction with the powerful technologies of recent decades. We must know how to evaluate ideas before we accept or reject them.
It seems increasingly likely that the task of saving the world from ourselves will fall on the shoulders of the current and rising generations of young people–we are all counting on them. Let us hope that they will avail themselves of all of the tools and understanding in order to do the best job possible.