Those who don’t read books never gain an overview of the forces that shape their lives

In the winter of 2021, the Washington-based Pew Research Center conducted a survey of adults in the United States wanting to know who among them had read a book in the past year — or even part of one.

The country had been in complete lockdown the previous year and it was thought the great hiatus from social life had offered folks a chance to catch up on the Danielle Steel or James Patterson collecting dust on their end table.

The survey revealed that a quarter of those interviewed said they never saw a dust jacket, never mind read a chapter or two of a book: 23 percent to be exact.

And when the researchers looked at how education affected who did what, they saw only one in 10 with a high school diploma or less education, had read a book. Those with a college degree or grad school were four times more likely to have done so.

Jimmy Kimmel — host of the late-night television show, whom authoritarian executives (political and corporate) kicked off the air for saying the federal government under Donald Trump had turned fascist — thought Pew’s data were skewed, saying fewer people had read a book than was reported.

He sent a video team onto the street in front of the studio to ask passersby whether they had read a book or part of a book in the past year seeking to verify Pew’s data.

Three years earlier, in 2018, he did the same when he had his crew ask passersby: “Name a book, any book.” People could have said the Bible and been done with it, but the dozen or so interviewed could not come up with a single title.

In Kimmel’s 2021 survey, one man said he had not read a book “not even in my college life, ever.” Amazed, the interviewer said, “You went through college not reading a single book?” He said, “Yes.”

Ask any college professor about how hard it is to get students to read these days and they will describe forms of outright resistance.

Such willfulness is one of the reasons the United States has become a nation of lumpenproles, to bring Marx and Engel into the mix — the two who coined lumpenproletariat to describe the dispossessed in a society.

But dispossessed is my word. In 1848, Karl and Friedrich in their “Manifesto of the Communist Party” said lumpenproles were ragged people, scoundrels, knaves, the unwashed, alienated freeloaders, people who feed on the social capital of the society but never chip in.

The same can be said of those who don’t read books — forget studying — who, like the lumpen, never gain an overview of the forces that shape the society they live in, and thus never grasp how such forces shape their own life: how good they feel, the kind of work they do; whether they’re free from enough worry to catch a moment’s peace of mind.

Not-reading is not just a refusal to engage in personal development, it confounds the critical relationship that exists between how much social capital a society has to distribute to its citizenry and how happy its people are; the Social Happiness Quotient Factor (SHQF) of a society rises and falls according to how well collectively-owned resources are distributed to all — and without resentment.

Social capital — as discussed in these pages before — refers to the relationships, the networks, the connections people have that foster their personal happiness while supporting the health of their society’s institutions: schools, hospitals, churches, synagogues, even families.

Social capital is a glue, a cohesiveness, a connectedness that makes people feel good about who they are, where they live, the work they do, the relationships they have at all levels of the social ladder. It might derive from something as simple as the camaraderie felt at a summer picnic held at the Elks lodge.

Reading contributes to social capital because the reader gains an overview of: (1) how existing social, political, and economic conditions affect his everyday life, whether they free or constrain his behavior, dismiss his dreams; and (2) how the social institutions of the society — when they are compassionate — promote the psychological health of everyone up and down the social ladder: and the more informed a person is on such matters, the less likely he is to make mistakes that drain the community’s collective resources.

Author Rudine Sims Bishop, an emerita at Ohio State University, says in her 1990 essay “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” that books can change people on a number of levels.

On the most basic, she says, the book can serve as a mirror in which the reader can see himself as he is, can assess his happiness, the degree to which he found, and is living out, his purpose in life, what he was called to do. Some books have strong self-reflection-producing powers.

Those who succeed at this level, Bishop says, soon see the mirror become a window that displays the political, economic, and social forces out there in the world, allowing the viewer to measure to which extent those forces support or diminish his (and his society’s) well-being.

After that, the book can become a glass sliding door through which the seer can still see the world out there, but is given a chance to turn the handle and walk out into that world to be a person doing good.

This might include the revolutionary hope that the needs of all — especially the dispossessed — will be taken into account when life-supporting resources are distributed — something as simple as a few food stamps to tide the family over until better days arrive.

Such consciousness knows that happiness is not a scarce commodity, that there’s far more than enough for everyone to receive a just share — and how one defines who is and who is not worthy of such a share is a measure of that person’s moral depth.

But now, as fewer and fewer people read, we see the conceptual framework of what constitutes the common good — dissolve proportionately: the weak, the uneducated, the lumpenproles, the dispossessed — call them what you will — keep falling to the fringes of society, making them prone to buy the sales pitch of authoritarian magnates who promise security by offering to take over the victim’s thinking as well as moral choices.

The great late American poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) tackled this issue in her 1978 collection of poems “The Dream of a Common Language.”

As a lesbian, Rich said her love as a human being was disvalued so she and others like her were treated as aliens in their own country, barred from contributing to (never mind receiving) social capital at all levels of relationship — society, community, neighborhood — except for their family of outsiders huddled together for mutual support.

A common language are words that make understanding other persons and groups who do not share a native (same) language possible; it’s a third language, a bridge language, a lingua franca.

It’s a language of economics because the needs of all tongues, all competing parties, are taken into account; those with ears to hear are given strong support to walk through the sliding door and help distribute life-preserving resources to all, especially the dispossessed.

History says those who refuse to learn and practice the common language are prone to become “part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue” as Marx and Engel put it.

Which is the case in America today as the lumperproletariat have become the bribed tool of intrigue of a fascist dictator and why Jimmy Kimmel said in his Christmas message to the UK: here “tyranny is booming.”

In his column in last week’s Financial Times, Ed Luce agreed, asserting that “America’s barbarians [are now] inside the gates,” which requires inverting what former President Gerald Ford said in his inauguration address on Aug. 9, 1974, that is: our long nightmare is not over.

Requiescamus in pace, those of us who still consider ourselves American citizens.