Paul G.

How the devil could a poet, who does the best he can just to get it down as it is whispered to
him, decide whether or not to be morally or politically responsible?

It is the same dehumanization of modern times that I have been discussing throughout this book:  language is reduced to be a technology of social engineering, with a barren conception of science ad technology and a collectivist conception of community.  This tendency has been
reinforced by government grants and academic appointments, and it controls the pedagogy in primary schools.
      In this tendency, "communication" is taken to be a transfer of information from one
brain to another, and all the rest, the "expression," is noise or meaningless emotion.
     Technology is a branch of moral philosophy, but the language that is used is not the
language of moral philosophy, which is literature.
     It is the sign of a ignorant man, said Aristotle, to be more precise than the subject allows.
There is more communication in a poem of Keats than in a scientific report, said Norbert Wiener, for the poem alters the code, whereas the report merely repeats it and increases
the noise.
     Society is increasingly taken to be a kind of machine directed by a central will, and in this
structure the teaching of English is turned into social engineering. The purpose of learning
to read is no longer political freedom, clarification, appreciation, and community, but
"Functional Literacy," the ability to follow directions and be employable.  The question
whether a child can and will learn to read with such purpose is not asked.
     Thus, speech is reduced to a code to transfer information for narrow purposes.
Conversely, the expressive part of speech, emptied of meaning and of any relation to telling
the truth, is reduced to ornament or entertainment, as in the rhetorics of the Roman Empire.
Or much worse, it is something to manipulate politically to create thoughtless collective    
solidarity, like the Newspeak of George Orwell's 1984.
 

At present, the plight of a man of letters is made hard by the following state of affairs.  Those in power
"co-opt" the critics, manage them so they are rendered ineffectual. (There is little direct
censorship.)

     Nevertheless, literature is humanly important. ....
Literature is not a "linear" unrolling of printed sentences and it is not a crude code;
it is artful speech. And speech  is not merely a means of communication and expression,
as the anthropologists say, but is a chief action in our human way of being in the world.

     The ability of literature to combine memory and learning with present observation and
spontaneous impulse remarkably serves the nature of man as the animal who makes
himself; for it revives the spirit of past makings, so they are not dead weight, and yet is making that is occurring now. Put psychotherapeutically, this process alleviates "inner conflict"
and helps heal past trauma by bringing it into the public world of sharable speech.

     The materials of literature are cheap and common. This is so with all the fine arts;
they are made of mud, rock, gestures, tinkling, and babbling.  Those who hanker after multimedia and overwhelming environmental effects should consider what is lost by using
an expensive technology. Maybe only a simple and poor medium is flexible and subtle enough to lure the inward outward.


     But in fact, they themselves-- like most politicians and administrators and may parents--
seem to have forgotten the concrete reality of ideals like magnanimity, compassion, honor,
consistency, civil liberty, integrity, justice though the heavens fall, and unpalatable
truth, all of which are not gut feelings and are often not even pragmatic but are maintained
to create and re-create mankind and the possibility of the Second Coming.

     Since the mass pitch of T.V., records, and movies cuts down the possibility of using
unexpected sentences even more, finally the only way to communicate anything
particular is to rely on the various inflections of grunts and exclamations, like a doze
levels of saying "Wow," or on nonverbal means altogether.

But unless reading serves for truth and art, why bother? We have seen that it's not much
use on most jobs, except for getting hired. Radio, television, and movies give other
satisfactions more easily.