Manuel M. Novillo interviews me
Bob Dylan, the reading crisis, children, happiness, and more
A few weeks ago, Manuel M. Novillo messaged me about AI and literature. We ended up having a conversation over a short period and he sent me some direct interview questions. It is now published on his Substack Curva de aprendizaje. He will publish it soon in Spanish as well. It covers: Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize, whether the Great Books teach us that people from other periods are the same as us or different, children and reading, modern Great Books, J.S. Mill’s views on poetry, how we enjoy fiction, happiness, and the reading crisis.
Here’s one extract.
Manuel: Last one: we might have a reading crisis, or maybe not a crisis, but some kind of decline. Is there something we —writers, critics, academics— should do?
Henry: Stop making bad arguments about the second order effects; stop being newspaper philosophers; stop using survey data to draw large (unjustified) conclusions; stop, in short, all the opinion-talk. Just do all the usual things that one would expect. Have children and teach them to read. Read yourself. Talk about the books you enjoyed. Remember that you catch more flies with honey. It might be true that the end of the Gutenberg Parenthesis comes with many risks for democracy, high culture, and some of the ways of life we have taken for granted. Are we going to make it all go away by writing impassioned social media posts? Do we know enough to justify our opinions? Do we understand the hidden incentives? Are we joining a moral panic with other people who already agree with us? How often do you see someone say something that is going to be interesting to the people who already disagree?
Love the last answer. Do you think maybe there is some virtue signaling in all this “reading crisis” talk (I am not denying that there is one) ?
I can’t avoid a brief comment on the concerns regarding the purported lack of literacy growing in our world. Bringing this to the public’s attention at least enables us to understand the world better. It also allows us in public office to interact more effectively with the public. Also perhaps it may stimulate ways to remediate this problem, so I reject the thought that we should ignore this profound social change which is happening even if we can’t understand everything about it. I thank Neil Postman for articulating this years ago.