Hildegarde

Over at Arts and Letters  Daily, there was a link today to an article about C.P. Snow’s famous essay on the mental and cultural divisions between “literary intellectuals” (in which he included all the Humanities) and “natural scientists.” Called “The  Two Cultures,” it outlined what Snow thought at the time were the major reasons for division between the two principle systems of knowledge in modern society, and what he thought ought to be done about them.

The first thing I noticed in this article was the way in which Sno’s stereotypes of the two groups–Snow himself was a natural scientists–would not fully fit the world of academia today.   For one thing, nobody would call most Humanities intellectuals “conservative” these days, nor would one expect that there would be mostly socialists in physics departments.

That said, what was clear was that the very core of the break is today what it was then–not so much that the two sides don’t understand or respect each other (as Snow thought), but that the natural sciences side is firmly convinced that there is no content in the Humanities at all, that the Humanities are easy and any fool can understand them, and if you can’t, then it’s because those pesky Humanities intellectuals are being deliberately pretensious and obscure.

If one thing has come throught on this blog repeatedly, it’s that people outside the Humanities are absolutely convinced that studying the Humanities must have something to do with…well, anything but actually studying the Humanities.

People are so convinced of it that they’re convinced I’m saying it when I’m not.   Cheryl seemed to think that I had said that people would make moral decisions based on the Great Tradition.  Robert grumbles that no such moral system can be constructed from the tradition and that the Great Tradition isn’t good at helping us make up our minds in matters of moral choice.

The Humanities are supposed to be studied to make us more moral, or to teach us to love to read, or for any of a dozen reasons that have nothing to do with what they are. 

If there has been one really big change since C.P. Snow’s day, it’s that the assumption that there’s no there there in the Humanities has come to be shared by the general public, and not just by natural scientists.  Hell, it’s come to be shared by some people–like professors of history, literature and philsophy–whose very life work is to concentrate on and illuminate the there.

Of course, Snow was right enough on one point.  There’s something significantly wrong when well-educated people can’t explain and understand basic scientific concepts the existence of which significantly impact their existence.   Sometimes that lack of understanding leads to immediate and unhappy consequences.  The chances your child will end up with a case of whooping cough these days is correlated with the number of  PhDs in your neighborhood–the “vaccines cause autism” and “vaccines aren’t worth the risk of an allergic reaction” scares arose and exist in groups of people who are highly educated in the Humanities and Social Sciences.  Your garage mechanic down the street tends to take his doctor’s word for it that the chances of dying of pertussis are astronomically greater than the chances of getting a bad side effect from the pertussis vaccine.

Even so, the problem from the other direction is worse.  It isn’t that natural scientists and social scientists think that the work of the Humanities has been taken over by big companies determined to make a buck by putting us in danger–which was the basis of the conspiracy panics around vaccines–but that natural scentists and social scientists don’t think there’s anything to study in the Humanities at all.

That’s why the continual demands that the Humanities “do” something—make us better, make us moral, whatever. 

Part of this is a confusion between pure and applied knowledge, and maybe people are confused about this even when it comes to the natural sciences.  Most physicists, for instance, aren’t in the least bit interested in practical applications of the things they learn.  They don’t even know there are any.

The public, however, sees those applications once the pure knowledge has been absorbed by and applied by engineers.

But although we can certainly use the techniques of philosophy to help us construct moral codes and political institutions, we don’t study philosophy in order to do that.  We study philosophy in order to learn to understand how human beings have engaged in that activity and what they’ve come up with because of it and how that activity works.

This study will not tell us a single thing about what is actually moral or immoral.   It will not help us to be moral.   It will not “defend democracy” or any other political system.  It will not–and cannot–tell us that democracy is a better system than any other.

We study the Humanities for the same reason theorectical mathematicians study math and abstract physicists study physics–to know.  Period.  The knowledge is out there to be discovered.  We want to discover it.

There’s a version of this that every writer gets at some point or the other–the assumption on the part of the general public that anybody can do that kind of thing.  It’s so easy, I’d get around to doing it in my spare time if I had any.

You’re a writer?  I’ve got this great idea for a novel I’m going to get to as soon as I retire!

Yes, and I’ve got th is great idea for brain surgery I’m going to get to as soon as I have a spare second–I’ll start by operating on you.

With students and with too many professors these days, professors who come to the Humanities without actually having an education in the Humanities–the assumption is that “English” (by which they mean the study of English literature) is all about opinion, and did you like the book, and did you think it’s interesting. 

If you want to see shock, just get a picture of the faces of my students when they get their first papers back in Intro to Lit.  I had a class once whose average grade was 10.

Out of 100.

Oh,  I know,  I know.  I’m on this a lot.  Maybe it’s that I’m getting close to the point where I think I’m going to give up.  It gets difficult to teach students in an environment like this.  I know I’m sick to death of defending the study of literature to people whose only criteria for excellence is “will it make me money?”

I’m equally sick of listening to people tell me that the only reason to value Shakespeare, or Piero della Francesca, or Bach, is if their work will hasten the arrival of the revolution–and since it won’t, I should be conentrating on Rigoberta Menchu instead.

Okay, this is a depresseding post.

But the book is going well, and I’ve go true financial crime to read, so there’s that.

I wanted to get back to the idea that the only way to increase the sales of novels would be to increase the number of people who love to read, preferably by changing something we do in schools so that more people would develop a passion for it.

And I still think this is wrongheaded–not only do  I not think schools are capable of increasing the numbers of such people, I think trying to sell books only to such people is what we’re doing now, and it’s failing abysmally.

And then I remembered Oprah’s  book club.

I have no idea if Oprah is still doing this–I’ll admit it, I’ve never watched an entire Oprah Winfrey show–but I do know that when she was doing the  club, any book chosen for it sold like crazy, and it was the only one of that author’s books that sold.

I’m putting that in italics for a reason.  The publishing industry is used to a particular kind of dynamic between writers and readers.  Readers who find a book they like go looking for anything else that author has written.  They buy the next book by the same author when it comes out.

If you think about readers you know, about the ones you encounter on  Internet discussion lists, you’ll notice a real tendency to speak in sentences like “I’m reading the new  Lee Child” or “Linda Barnes has something coming out and I’ve got to have it.”

Readers who love reading read writers, not books.  It’s much the same with people who are really passionate about film, or even about a particular movie star.   They don’t go to see the movie so much as they go to see the work of that director or the appearance of that star. 

But if nobody comes to the movie except the people who are passionate about directors or stars, the movie isn’t going to do all that well, because those people–yes, even the ones obsessed with stars–are a minority among the viewing public.

Movies get successful by bringing in people who seldom go to movies.  They are there for the movie, for that particular plot and those particular characters.  If the same director and the same stars put out another movie next month on a topic these people are not much interested in, they won’t bother to go.

What Oprah did was to market books to people who don’t usually read books.  They were there for the book, not for the love of reading or for an author, but for that particular work and what it had to offer.

Publishing, however, virtually never markets books to this kind of reader.  They stick to the people who love books already, to the readers who read writers (or sometimes genres) rather than books.

And those people are a minority audience for any work of art or entertainment.

There are three hundred million people in the United States of  America.  There are fifty thousand readers for any book at all.   What there aren’t are fifty thousand readers who read  because they love reading for any book.

People don’t go to the movies because schools teach them that there are lots of different kinds of movies out there, some of which they will love.

They go to the movies because people around them go to the movies and somebody took them once and they got used to the idea.  

The same with video games and popular music.

If books are going to sell in reasonable numbers to keep writers afloat as writers, then the publishers have to learn how to sell them to people who will read only one book this year, or maybe two. 

And publishers seem to have absolutely no clue as to how to do this. 

The  Oprah effect was real enough, but unfortunately it can’t be duplicated exactly.  People read the books in Oprah’s book club because they liked and admired Oprah–in fact, for the very same reason people go to movies or listen to various kinds of music.

The traditional methods of publicizing books and drawing an audience all seem not to work very well.  Book signings draw only people who already like that particular author, and sometimes they don’t even draw those.  I’ve seen major names in the genre draw almost nobody to book signings–and by their very nature, book signings are an exampe of preaching to the converted.

So aremost book tours, unless they can get unusual media coverage–that is, coverage on something besides the book page or the book segment of a radio or television program already pegged as the “booky” one.

What bothers me is not so much that we aren’t reacing the nonreader reader yet, but that we aren’t even trying.   And when we talk about selling books, or finding an audience for them, we never consider that part of the potential audience. 

It’s always all or nothing, people who love reading and nobody else.

There have got to be ways of reaching the wider audience.

Trying to do it through schools hasn’t worked yet, and never will, because it’s the answer to the wrong question.

The issue isn’t how to make more people love to read.  The issue is how to get people who don’t love to read to realize that they’d really love reading that particular book.