Lord Parekh
Main Page: Lord Parekh (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Parekh (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, would like to begin by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, for securing this debate. I wonder whether I should declare an interest here by virtue of the fact that I happen to be the author of at least nine or 10 books and the editor of about a dozen. I do not know whether that disqualifies me from speaking about the subject—but I shall, nevertheless, persist.
Books, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said, play an indispensable role in creating and sustaining a civilised society. They are the repositories of thought. I do not think we fully appreciate the fact that, compared to television or radio and many other means of communication, books play a unique role. Books are the systematic statement of an individual’s real thinking, spread out over a large number of pages after careful thought. They also force the reader to engage in a dialogue with the author. Unlike television, where the images come and go and I have no time to pause because its immediacy simply overwhelms me, a book allows me to go back and forth, carry an idea with me, sleep on it and return to it a bit later. A book, in other words, is the repository of the dialogue between the reader and the author and, by implication, within the reader himself. Having read the book, the reader wrestles with the ideas in the new world to which the author has introduced him or her, and feels enriched. That is something that a radio or television programme simply cannot do. A book has a certain solidity. It is outside “me”, and therefore a book can be shared collectively in a way that a radio or television programme cannot. A book creates a world. It creates a public; a world in which we all share in common and which binds us into a community.
I say all that boring philosophical stuff not to make out a good case for books but simply to show that a civilisation from which books disappear and in which thoughts are communicated only through images or sounds is a civilisation that will be deeply impoverished. That may partly explain a paradox. We seem to think that as civilisation marches on with more and more technology, the human mind is becoming more sophisticated. The opposite thesis, I think, is more true. Because we are dependent on technology and because our thought processes are conditioned in a certain way, our brain capacity, our cognitive capacity, declines. That is why, in the past 100 years, we have not produced a Shakespeare, a Beethoven or an Einstein. All the greats who shaped our civilisation, who shaped modernity, are conspicuous by their absence.
It needs to be explained why there is progress in every sphere of life and yet, when we come to the fundamentals, the deepest forms of thought, we do not seem to be able to measure up to our ancestors. Forget Plato, forget Aristotle; even a Kant or a Marx would do, but we do not seem to have any. I think that that may have something to do with the fact that the solidity of the process of thinking that a book generates seems increasingly to be absent.
Having said that, I recognise that historically the book cannot remain what it is. Increasingly, it is difficult to define what is a book. Then I saw the title of the debate, and there are two things to be said about it. The first is about the phrase, “civilised society”. Coming from India and being constantly told by our colonial rulers that we are barbarians and uncivilised, the words “civilised society” rang alarm bells in my mind, just as did the word “book” because I was not quite sure what “book” referred to. Is an e-book a book? Is a blog or a series of blogs a book? Increasingly, publishers predict a future in which “physical” books—that word itself is disturbing—as we know them are likely to disappear. That worries me for all kinds of reasons, but that is not what I want to talk about. As of now, we have e-books, which, happily, sell about 80 million, compared to 393 million physical books; they bring in about £320 million, as opposed to £2.3 billion for physical books.
A physical book has an aesthetic appeal. It has what is beautifully called a jacket. We project anthropomorphic categories onto a book. A book has a jacket, a shape and an appearance which an e-book by definition cannot have. That appearance seduces us into reading it. It draws us into its own world. Therefore a book is not merely a repository of thought, it also has an aesthetic quality and is a cultural artefact. My worry is that if we are not careful—or even if we are very careful—there is a danger that books might disappear. Either they will be replaced by blogs or they might not be written at all.
They might not be written for two reasons. First, increasingly in the academic world a book is equal to three or four articles. Why not write an article instead of writing a book? I am told that there is an increasing tendency not to write big books. Secondly, it becomes very difficult for publishers to pay the author because people can read their books on a Kindle or in many other ways; publishers do not make money and they have nothing to give to the author. Increasingly, the recent phenomenon where an author can earn his or her livelihood simply by writing books may not be the case. In that case, why write books? If it cannot be your source of livelihood, only two things can happen. You will write or you will do other things while writing. That is what has happened throughout history. Shakespeare was doing his own things, Charles Dickens was a journalist. Therefore I suggest that we must find some ways in which the love of owning books can be encouraged in our children.