Years ago I noticed that my own children lived more through the eye than I had done at their age, and that at the same time they did not lose themselves in books as I had done. It did not occur to me then that perhaps a general shift of attention was taking place. Now I am sure that what had happened in my family had also happened in thousands of others. These post-war years have shown us the results of this change. Whatever appeals first to the eye attracts immediate attention. The important art exhibitions, as we have seen, draw big crowds at once. Even the more modest shows, if they are fairly representative, are always well filled. More and more art books are published and sold, in spite of their high cost. There are more and more books in which the text is a mere excuse for the photographs. It is the popular illustrated periodicals that survive. People must have something to stare at, as the advertisers know. It is the demands of the eye that must be satisfied first. What was once chiefly the method of the kindergarten, to catch the attention of very young children, is now imitated far and wide, for every possible purpose.
— J.B. Priestley, “Another Revolution,” Essays of Five Decades
Ploosa shawnje, ploosa la memshows! Imagine the ecstasy of today’s cognoscenti if more and more people were buying expensive art books and crowding into exhibitions.
Priestley was not imagining the change he described. People really were becoming more visually oriented, just as phones and tablets have produced another genuine alteration in attention. But the passage is also evidence for a more sanguine view of cultural decay. Nearly every symptom he cites now looks, from our present position, like a sign of cultural health. The supposed “kindergarten method” was leading people into galleries and sending them home with books of art.
Human beings continue to find their way toward nourishing things, even when the route becomes longer, stranger, and more convoluted. Intelligent and thoughtful people keep appearing, reading what they can find, making what they can make, and influencing whoever is near enough to notice. Less cursing of the darkness, perhaps, and more attention to the scattered candles already burning.
There was never a time when people could look around and conclude that everyone was now sufficiently intelligent, judicious, and thoughtful, and that the work might safely be discontinued. The fight against mental and physical laziness is not a crisis peculiar to the smartphone age. It is the human condition. The mid-century reading culture was historically fortunate, perhaps even anomalous: a large literate public, relatively few competing media, cheap mass-produced books, growing leisure, and a cultural prestige still attached to being well-read. Once the surrounding conditions changed, some regression was predictable. Rather than ceasing altogether, serious reading lost a temporary monopoly on certain kinds of solitude, instruction, fantasy, and escape. Human interest does not simply slide downward from Tolstoy to TikTok and then disappear into the drain. It detours, adapts, finds niches, sometimes recovers through the very medium accused of destroying it.
Scott Weinrich sang, “Look at those around you / Find your better way.” That has always been the task: not merely to prescribe a better way, but to become evidence for it. No attention-deficient adolescent looks at a a bilious old man enraged by everything that has happened since 1963 and thinks, I want to become more like him. But he may notice the studious, thoughtful man who seems to know something different and more interesting, who possesses answers, or at least better questions, and wonder: What does he know, and how does he know it? Then the flame passes from one wick to another.