Humanity Is Over! (If You Want It)

Who can stop themselves now from being lured into the wilderness of black mirrors?

It isn’t just any English professor who told the New Yorker this:

“You’re talking to someone who has only owned a smartphone for a year—I resisted,” he said. Then he saw that it was futile. “Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,” he went on. “How has it changed me? I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.” He waggled the iPhone disdainfully. “Go to a play now, and watch the flashing screens an hour in, as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!” 

It’s James Shapiro, as good a stand-in as any for what’s thought of as Judeo-Christian civilization, which nowadays, for those who hold onto that term, is roughly interchangeable with “the West”:

Shapiro was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended Midwood High School. He obtained his B.A. at Columbia University in 1977, Master’s degree in 1978 and Ph.D. at University of Chicago in 1982. After teaching at Dartmouth College and Goucher College, Shapiro joined the faculty at Columbia University in 1985. He taught as a Fulbright lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and Tel Aviv University (1988–1989) and served as the Samuel Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe in London (1998).

Shapiro has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Huntington Library, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for his publications and academic activities. He has written for numerous periodicals, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Book Review, the Financial Times, and The Daily Telegraph. In 2006, he was named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow as well as a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Shapiro won the 2006 Samuel Johnson Prize as well as the 2006 Theatre Book Prize for his work 1599: a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. He also won the 2011 George Freedley Memorial Award, given by the Theatre Library Association, for his study of the Shakespeare authorship question, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, which has been described as the “definitive treatment” debunking the Oxfordian theory. The same year Shapiro was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, published in hardback in 2015, was awarded the James Tait Black Prize for Biography as well as the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography. Shapiro presented a three-part series on BBC Four called The King & the Playwright: A Jacobean History about Shakespeare, King James VI and I and the Jacobean era.

Shapiro’s lament inspired a resonant tweet pregnant with a meaning that transcends both the parlance of our times and the ironic distance that here, as so often, it is meant — however falteringly these days — to convey:

LBark @Pontevedrian

It is as over as is conceivably possible

The New Yorker @NewYorker

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. What’s going on? https://t.co/NkRoATHEaD

It? What is it? Our humanity perhaps?

Return to that punchline: Watch the flashing screens as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!

Refresher on what's in those screens?