It is interesting to note how, more than in any other endeavor, the writing market tracks with the degradation or renovation of the mind of the masses. That might be a lot to take in for an opening sentence, but if you had the time to study it, you’d find it is a remarkable metric for measuring human intellectual health.

Prior to the advent of moveable type and modern publishing, the other arts flourished… architecture, drama, sculpture, and painting, but intellectually (as far as the masses go) we call that period “The Dark Ages.” Wars and fighting were ubiquitous and armies criss-crossed continents for centuries on end. The mass of mankind sat in relative darkness, uneducated, and superstitious. With the advent of printing… Bibles, polemical philosophical and theological works, and eventually novels and non-fiction reference works (dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.) the average man (the mass) was elevated in his intellect. Civilization flourished. Quite often writers were financed and subsidized by wealthy advocates. Martin Luther and even Shakespeare lived off of grants and subsidies because their benefactors saw the value in their works. Tolstoy and Pushkin came from rich families, but they also fought against censorship, arrest, and exile.

In the early 1800s, absent more accessible forms of arts and entertainment, novels and long-form writing flourished. People were smarter. Then newspapers began to abound, and the human mind once again drifted, and the mass began desiring shorter works.

Soon enough, publishers found profits producing and distributing political pamphlets, tracts, and short stories. Authors received more immediate satisfaction (financial and otherwise) from being published in magazines and short story anthologies and poetry. Many (Hemingway, Dos Passos, and others,) though they desired to write longer works, found that they could only finance their lifestyles by rapidly producing shorter works or they worked as newsmen. The financial motive drove the industry. Fitzgerald was a great example of someone who profited from short stories early on. He wrote what was considered possibly the “Great American Novel”, but it didn’t make him much money. He went back to financing his life by writing short stories, and eventually Hollywood screenplays.

With The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway brought novels back into vogue, and publishers began once again clamoring for longer works. Our own Katherine Anne Porter became famous for writing short stories, but the public clamored for a novel – one that took her 20 years to produce. There was a spurt in intellectual rigor, book clubs, personal libraries.

Think of this as a graph… like the stock market. Then overlay it with further graphs like the ubiquity of wars, times of peace and intellectual improvement, and the massive degradation of morals and philosophy.

I’m not saying that you can predict the future this way, but… you can predict the future this way. Pan out a bit and you will see that the almost universal way of receiving information now is by tweets, tiktoks, memes, and headlines. People don’t even read the articles anymore. Specialization reigns, ignorance is spirituality, and sociopathy becomes the norm. Bubble life.

Ok, maybe this column was a bit of a downer, but if you got this far you are an exceptional person and perhaps there is hope. Go buy a book… a physical book with paper and pages and stuff. Maybe one of mine, who knows?

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.