It is easy to be a doom-monger - to literally go out into the world and mong doom. Monging hope is less easy, and tends to have to be done practically rather than theoretically. Doom is monged through words - dire prophecies and warnings, or elegies for times past. Hope is monged through doing, rather than telling. A hope-monger shows the way.
There is a lot of doom (ok, ok, I will stop with the whole 'mong' thing now) being spread about in respect of reading these days. A lot of people are worried that people aren't reading as much as they used to. Apocalyptic scenarios are envisaged: The End of Reading is here; a New Dark Ages is dawning; the era of Post-Literacy is upon us. And, for what it is worth, I share many of the concerns being expressed. I am a fan of the written word and I read a lot of books, as I always have. I think that screen-based entertainment does not facilitate viewer engagement with the subtleties and complexities of the human condition in the way that a good book does with its readers; I think reading great books cultivates empathy, judgment and wisdom, that watching great TV mostly just passes the time really well, and that doomscrolling rots the brain. I also don't think that reading books is something that should have to be defended in instrumental terms. Most of the best things Western civilisation has produced are books - why wouldn't any sane adult want to imbibe cultural artefacts that have been recognised to be great by vast numbers of discerning human beings for tens, hundreds, or even thousands of years?
With that said, my feeling is that if it is true that the end of reading is upon us (I have some doubts about this, but that is a subject for another post), then there is nothing that anybody can really do about it, and it is certainly not a problem that it is open to politics to solve. It so happens that a few days ago the cross-party Education Committee of the UK Parliament issued a report on the sharp decline in reading for pleasure among the young and what to do about it. No doubt the people who wrote it are well-intentioned but the recommendations in it - automatic library enrolment for children from birth; a state-funded library in every secondary school; a national 'Decade of Reading'; and so on - are either faintly ludicrous or highly unlikely to make much difference. No: it is not in the state's gift to save us from the New Dark Ages. We have to resurrect reading on our own, in our own small ways, and in the meantime accept that the culture is moving away from print.
Part of that acceptance means reconciling oneself to, and taking advantage of, new media, and here is where hope comes into play. There is no doubt in my mind that although reading print literature is in decline, and although that trend is lamentable, other opportunities to tell stories are presenting themselves, and humanity is finding other ways to generate the type of narratives that non-televisual modes of communication provide. The problems with screen-based story-telling are: a) that, while a great actor can give some insight into what the character he or she depicts is thinking or feeling, it does not allow the viewer to inhabit somebody else's thoughts and experiences in the way print fiction can; and b) because the narrative is visual it does not require the viewer to use much imagination.
Books are the opposite in that their main strengths are precisely to do with cultivating empathy and imagination. But as books decline other forms are filing the gap. RPGs, I am convinced, are one of them, and it is probably not a coincidence that as fiction-reading loses cultural cache RPGs are gaining mainstream popularity - again, because they allow the player to inhabit somebody else's thoughts and experiences, and because they require such extensive use of the imagination.
I also think that the type of theatre-of-the-mind mixture of RPG and fiction that is present in something like Tale of the Manticore will become more popular for the same reasons. We will lean into the convenience and intimacy (that word is the appropriate one to use, I think) that is provided by the spoken word. The result is a differently textured experience to novel-reading. But it can scratch similar itches in a way that screen-media cannot.
This, to come back to hope, is worth embracing. It is a cultural catastrophe that millions of children are now growing up without having a love of reading cultivated in them, and without any experience of living in a print-based world. That represents a devastating loss. Yet all is not lost. Those who love books can still read them. But they can also explore new possibilities for creativity and expand into new frontiers. This needs to happen through practice rather than theory: more people have to just do it. Yet it is within our power all the same.
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