Of Old Books and New

Comparing the books I read that were new (new in the sense of having been published this century, or not much before it) with the books published before that, I am time and again struck by the differences. Among newer work there is a sharper contrast between what might be published for a scholarly audience, and what might be of interest to a general audience, with what the latter seems likely to get often a magazine article (and rather a banal one at that) blown up to book length. Meanwhile the scholarly stuff, if striking for its wealth of data and apparent meticulousness in handling it, compares poorly with older work in point of breadth and fullness of vision, moral and intellectual clarity and courage, and plain old readability, to say nothing of literary graces and literary craft and literary force. (For example, just what writer of today would stand comparison with a C. Wright Mills or a John Kenneth Galbraith or a Richard Hofstadter? Let alone figures from still earlier such as an Upton Sinclair or a Thorstein Veblen?)

Considering all this I can see the tendencies already evident then in academic work playing their part, not least that toward extreme specialization, which some were already complaining had become excessive a century ago and more, but which has gone further still, and made writers timid as they handle smaller and smaller subjects in a manner not so much rigorous as overtimid, cumbersomely demonstrating that they "read everything" on their subject (at least, everything so far as the Establishment in their field is concerned), never making a claim they cannot back with a battery of full citations, and shying away from bold conclusions as they do their damnedest to make their writing read like a lab report.* However, if hyper-specialization played its part in making thinkers timid, so did that cheap and stupid epistemological nihilism that puts any seeker after knowledge on the defensive. All about putting limits on what can be discussed, it has done its job here only too well--and we are the poorer for it, so poor that I often find myself learning more about the problems of today from books a century old than anything being published now.

* Certainly H.G. Wells discusses that drive in his Outline of History.