Reason for concern, but not the end

Throughout time, the end of reason has been a precipice whose edge conservatives have watched us teeter over. While Umi Perkins’ May 5 article “Reason’s End” rightly identifies a trend away from the consumption of books, philosophy texts especially, his focus on the bookstore as intellectual keystone species is misguided and cynical. By examining the decay of the physical book in the context of the Information Age, a more hopeful prognosis is possible.

In 1987, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students served as both bellwether and lightning rod, attracting praise and criticism for his scathing attack on the institution of higher education. Bloom identified a shift in thought toward relativism and away from the past wisdom of the West, which Bloom located in reasoned texts, especially those of German philosophers with names like Nietzsche and Hegel, and the Greek philosopher Plato. Bloom lamented the loss of this textual wisdom and attributed it to the failure of universities to instill in students an appreciation for philosophy and the life of inquiry that a study of philosophy demands.

While the fundamental shift in the American consciousness identified by Bloom may well have been caused by the failure of the university, the shift away from books noticed by Perkins correlates far better with the development of the Internet. As Bloom was publishing his work in the late 1980s, the Internet was developing slowly, with the first commercial internet service providers emerging. By the mid-1990s, the Internet had transformed culture and commerce while also allowing for rapid dissemination of intellectual capital on a scale previously unimaginable.

According to Census data, the percentage of Americans with internet access at home grew from zero percent in 1984, to 18 percent in 1997, to an astounding 74.8% by 2012. During this period, new and disruptive technologies related to the Internet reshaped our world. MP3 players and file sharing spelled the end for CDs and Walkmans, redefining the record industry in the process. The advent of the iPhone in 2007 and subsequent popularization of smartphones transformed the mobile phone industry. By the time the iPad ushered in the popular era of tablet computing in 2010, Americans were no longer surprised by the disruptive power of the Internet.

Consumers now have the Internet at their disposal in their homes, at work and everywhere in between. Technologies related to this ubiquity have continued to disrupt traditional business models. If you’ve eaten out in Honolulu recently, you’ve likely experienced this at the point of sale, with companies like Square redefining the way merchants receive payments. But the promise of the Internet is not only to disrupt, but also to reorder the way information is distributed.

Perkins believes that there is a marked inequity in intellectual capital, but the emergence and ubiquity of the internet is a direct affront to this idea. Without discounting the value of earning a degree at ever more selective institutions of higher learning, it is now possible for anyone to benefit from the teachings of elite professors, including those at Harvard where Michael Sandel, a noted American political philosopher offers a twelve lecture course in Justice for free online. Other educational ventures like Khan Academy and edX point toward a new age of egalitarian, multimodal instruction. These are just a few of many opportunities offered online for the self-directed learner in the Information Age.

In addition to the online distribution of intellectual capital offered by massive open online courses, there are other more immediate and tangible benefits for a young scholar coming of age today. Our Hawai’i State Public Library System now provides electronic access to some reading materials, allowing remote access for those geographically isolated. This practice is more convenient and results in less harm to the environment—less trees felled to make books, less shipping cost to and on our remote islands, less physical storage space needed, less refuse in our island landfills.

Furthermore, the intellectual history of humanity is being digitized and made available to almost all at an ever increasing pace. The Gutenberg Project offers more than 45,000 titles. MIT maintains the complete works of Shakespeare. These projects signal the approach of an unprecedented epoch in which the collective body of human thought will be made available to, if not the world, at least those with internet access. However much we lament the loss of physical books, we should celebrate more the emergence of the Internet and the possibilities this medium represents for humanity at large.

Borders went bankrupt in large part because it failed to apprehend the nature of the Information Age and reacted slowly to the move toward e-readers led by offerings from more progressive rivals Amazon and Barnes & Nobles. Its closure reflected a stubborn resistance to change in the face of a new, disruptive technology.

Writing in 1987, Bloom warned that “we need history, not to tell us what happened, or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.” When we commit to a nuanced examination of the decline of the book, it is possible to recognize the development of a more egalitarian medium for the transfer of intellectual capital. Viewed in light of the Information Age, the closing of bookstores signals the end of an era, but not the end of reason.