Digital addictiveness makes us resist classical literature

In the responses to a recent death-of-the-humanities dirge, a long reported piece by Nathan Heller for The New Yorker on the decline of the English major, you could see an illustration of its thesis: The story’s most depressing anecdotes were plucked out and swapped around on social media by people who probably did not even begin to make their way through the lengthy text itself.

One passage in particular appeared and reappeared for days in my Twitter feed. It featured Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and a professor in the English department. She was one of several academics who described, in Heller’s phrase, an “orientation toward the present” among contemporary college students so powerful that they “lost their bearings in the past.”

“The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ ” she told him, “I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences — like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb … Their capacities are different, and the 19th century is a long time ago.”

Like everyone else who managed to make their way through Nathaniel Hawthorne in high school, I read this with a mix of smugness and horror.

What I did not do was click through and read the whole Heller piece (though I have read it now, I swear it!). Even more conspicuously, I definitely did not go pick up a copy of “The Scarlet Letter” or any other 19th-century novel and begin reading it for pleasure.

I flatter myself that I can mostly follow the sentence structure in these books, but in every other way I am the reader described by Claybaugh, too attached to the distracting present to enter fully the complex language of the past.

And I resemble other characters in the Heller piece as well. The academic who describes how he’s traded novel reading for website browsing? Me. The peers whom that same academic describes, who “think of themselves as cultured” but “cannot! Stop! Themselves!” from busting out the iPhone, even at a live performance? Me again.

The quest, understandably enough, has always been to sustain relevance and connection — to politics, to professional life, to whatever trends appear at the cutting edge of fashion, to the idea of “progress.” But that quest can end only in self-destruction when the thing to which you’re trying so desperately to bind yourself — the culture and spirit of the smartphone-era internet, especially — is actually devouring all the habits of mind that are required for your own discipline’s survival. You simply cannot sustain a serious humanism as an integral part of a digitalized culture; you have to separate, at least until we figure out a way to be digital that isn’t just the way of the addict, or the surfer skimming and never going deep.

It could mean banishing every token of the digital age from classrooms and libraries, shutting out the internet, offering your work much more as an initiation into mysteries, a plunge into the very depths. It would mean cultivating a set of skills even less immediately useful to technocratic professional life than reading a dense 19th-century text — memorization and recitation, to your classmates if possible, to an audience of 12-year-olds if necessary.

Would any of this restore the humanities to their former glory? No, not at first. But before restoration comes survival.