Christopher Nolan’s "The Odyssey" opened this summer to sellout crowds. Whatever one thinks of the film, its ubiquity testifies to the enduring power of great stories.
Nearly 3,000 years later, we are still thinking about Homer, author of the poem that inspired the movie. The story's themes – truth and cunning, hospitality and its lack, wandering and longing for home – these are ideas that get at the very heart of what it means to be human.
Even as we watched the latest rendering of one of humanity’s oldest stories capture public consciousness, an article in The Atlantic made waves nationwide with a title as bold as it was disconcerting: "The End of Reading Is Here."
As its central metaphor, the piece considers the fate of the Library of Alexandria.
Long believed to have been destroyed by a single catastrophe, historians now suggest the Alexandrian library instead vanished over time due to gradual neglect.
Does declining literacy herald a new Dark Age?
Many fear that our own society is on the brink of a similar kind of loss.
The article relays sobering statistics on declining literacy, arguing that while universal literacy was once thought a certainty, we appear to be entering a post-literateera, with an online headline suggesting “the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.”
As a university president, my concern is with the attitude of fatalism that my fellow educators may take away from it.
One may argue, if "the end of reading" is here, we may as well throw up our hands and surrender to the inevitable. What is the use in teaching classics and critical thinking to students no longer capable of receiving them?
From my experience at Pepperdine, I know firsthand that this is not the case. I recently asked an instructor who teaches one of our first-year core humanities courses how he felt the decline in student literacy and the supposed end of reading were affecting his classroom.
His class, by design, includes no technology, centering around Socratic discussion and the close reading of great texts. Writing assignments are completed during class in blue exam books.
“You do notice it in the student attention spans, especially at first,” he told me. “But as the semester goes on, it is amazing to see the light bulbs come on. ... There is something in these works that resonates deeply with them as human beings, even if it has yet to be uncovered, even if it has yet to be unmined."
This type of teaching requires educators to have the courage to meet the moment. If literacy is indeed in decline – and with it, the critical thinking and moral formation that comes from reading well – we must not give up the fight.
Nor must we, as some have done, cut humanities programs in the name of practicality. We must continue to form readers who will lead a largely post-literate society, should that come to pass. We must continue to cultivate students of wisdom and virtue, sharpened by the discipline of reading and writing well.
Technological advances shouldn't come at the expense of reading
Even as we must be on the forefront of scientific innovation and conversations around the ethics of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, we must not cut off the very branch on which we sit, which gives us the stability and common vocabulary to have such conversations – a longstanding tradition rooted in the great books and in our own ability to engage with them.
I am convinced that the decline described in The Atlantic piece is not inevitable.
Near the end of Nolan’s movie, Odysseus laments the coming dark age brought about, in part, by his own role in the sacking of Troy. Yet he is confident that civilization will rise again, in part because of the song the poets sing throughout the film, remembering the exploits of Odysseus and his fellow conquerors and their subsequent journeys home.
Odysseus predicts that this song (which viewers realize is actually "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" poems) will preserve historical memory even when the dark age arrives: “The song will be all they have to remember those of us who could write.”
Generations after Homer, a time again came when much that should not have been forgotten was nearly lost. Even as the Western Roman Empire fell, Alexandria lost its library to neglect and much of Europe descended into the Dark Ages. Monks in little huts and caves spent their lives meticulously copying down the texts that had formed the world they knew, from the writings of the church fathers to the epics of Homer.
It was their faithfulness in pursuit of a hopeless task that allows us, even today, to draw from the riches of the great tradition.
It's not too late to keep storytelling traditions alive
We remember "The Odyssey" because the poets in the time of Homer sang it, and because the monks in the Dark Ages copied it down. Their faithful work, their refusal to give up, was both a gift to us and an example.
Our situation may be dire, but it is surely not as dire as theirs.
Perhaps we are all like the Alexandrians, slowly losing a rich inheritance through years of subtle neglect.
But maybe we could be more like Homer, more like the monks in the Dark Ages, more like so many great figures throughout history who preserved the good despite the inconvenience of the task. We can cherish what we have been given, doing our best to pass it to the next generation and looking forward in faith to future generations who may harvest the fruit of our labor.
Jim Gashis the president of Pepperdine University.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The end of literacy isn't here … yet | Opinion
