Doris Lessing's Nobel Lecture On not winning the Nobel Prize
What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging.
via Rainy Day
She compares the thirst for books and reading that she found in Zimbabwe where everyone begs for books and some learn to read from the labels on jam jars and a privileged school in North London where a lot of boys never read at all and the library is only half-used.
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
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Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education, and owe respect to our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning, but it is on record that working men and women longed for books, and this is evidenced by the working men's libraries, institutes, colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries.
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We are a jaded lot, we in our world – our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.
We have a treasure-house – a treasure – of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come on it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.
There are so many things in her "lecture" that simply cry out to be taken to task, there is no way to hit every one of them in a mere comment or even a post. But let me point out a few.
Obviously she has been paying no attention to any sort of wailing and gnashing of teeth over popular culture for the past... oh hundred years or so. No matter the medium that grabs the popular attention (be it radio, phonograph, movies, television, popular music...) there is always someone bemoaning the fact that "people today simply don't appreciate the written word, intelligence is falling at an alarming level..." yada, yada, yada. Read a book by Angela Thirkell from the 1940's or 50's - you'll see the lament over the ever prevalent wireless, read magazines from the 1960's onward and see the terrible toll that television is taking...
Let me take one more: "...where everyone begs for books..."
As I always asked my kids who spouted the "everyone" statement. Who is everyone? I'm sure there are many who would love to have books and learn - the fact that they are not available means that they must ASK for them maybe even BEG for them.
You don't find that happening in developed countries because the books are available. People who want them can get at them - either through stores or libraries or schools. They don't have to beg to get them because they are there.
What bugs her are the many who don't want to read - they have always been there. Just as in Zimbabwe they exist. She fails to notice them because there are plenty who want books and they overshadow those who don't.
I'll stop there. I always find it amusing to see people freak out over new technology. Especially when it infringes on things "they" consider to be important.