Lesson learned: discourse is not dead
CAMDEN, Maine – The other day a friend who edits a regional newspaper made an arresting observation. She’s noticed, in the last 18 months, a new sense of seriousness among readers – as though the issues facing the nation have begun to appear more significant, and the culture of superficiality that has seemed for so long to be overtaking our world might finally be reaching its limit.
Her comment was on my mind as I listened this past weekend to David McCullough talk about his latest book, “1776.” Given his celebrity status – “If nations appointed historians laureate,” wrote Edwin Yoder in the Washington Post, “David McCullough would surely be ours” – he predictably packed the Camden Opera House in our small Maine town for a lecture sponsored by the public library.
Less predictably, he did little but tell the tale of that tumultuous, watershed year in America’s history. Speaking with an avuncular interest in his audience and an evident passion for his topic, he profoundly disappointed the gossip-mongers. Except for an opening vignette about the day he learned that “1776” had won a Pulitzer Prize (his second), he sought simply to answer his own question about that momentous year: “What was it about?” There was no banter about what his writing desk looked like or what constituted his favorite afternoon snack. Shunning the cutesy, make-it-personal trivia of celebrity talk shows, he shifted the focus from himself to George Washington and his contemporaries. Their lives, McCullough reminded us, were “hard,” “inconvenient” and “precarious.” Yet through a combination of provident circumstance and integrity of character, they prevailed. By any measure, it was a thoughtful, reflective and penetrating talk – in other words, entirely serious. Yet it was also so gripping that it lifted the audience to a standing ovation.
So how could it be, I found myself asking, that the early 21st century should so glibly equate serious with boring? Why, when issues of foreign policy, domestic economy, and electoral politics loom so large, do we stand for the anesthetizing inanity that so often passes for public discourse? Why, when there has never been more concern with the morality of meaningfulness in our public life – corporate corruption, political sleaze, religious turpitude, athletic depravity – do we settle for insipid, entertainment-driven chat?
To be sure, there are bright spots. Interest in serious news outlets like the “NewsHour” on public television, BBC’s “The World” on National Public Radio, and the weekly Economist magazine continues to grow. Teenagers are taking stands: A new “girlcott” (feminine of boycott) movement has started up, taking aim at the lewd and degrading quasi-humor of the slogans on clothing sold by some companies targeting youth. And “there are still more public libraries in America,” McCullough told his audience, “than there are McDonald’s.”
If that audience was any gauge, there’s also a continuing willingness to assemble in public to hear significance articulated with penetration. There is, in other words, a “hunger … to be more serious.” The words are from the poem “Church Going,” written 50 years ago by the British poet Philip Larkin. In it, Larkin writes of visiting a disused church in the English countryside and wondering, when churches “fall completely out of use / What we shall turn them into.” Will they simply be preserved as antiquities? Or, because they have always been seen as places “proper to grow wise in,” will they continue to attract those seeking “a serious house on serious earth”? He concludes that, in some way, that attraction will remain – because “someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.”
That Larkin, half a century before the age of insipidity, foresaw this “hunger … to be more serious” proves again the prophetic potency of poetry. That McCullough so easily tapped into that hunger on a sunny December afternoon in Maine proves that, beneath the hype and frenzy of popular culture, there remains a longing for the dignity of important ideas honestly and engagingly explored. Yet that those who sense this hunger should find it “surprising” proves how perilously close we’ve come to losing, in the fluffy illusions of infotainment, the gravity of purpose that characterized the lives of our ancestors.
History will tell us whether the issues now facing America prove to be as central to our survival as those of 1776. If they are, let historians be able to write that by 2005 we had learned from our ancestors, surprised ourselves with a new hunger for the serious, taken a stand against vacuity, and risen to the occasion.