'Consulting Other Understandings'

Dr. Johnson in The Adventurer on August 28, 1753: “. . . I shall, therefore, venture to inculcate to my ingenious contemporaries, the necessity of reading, the fitness of consulting other understandings than their own, and of considering the sentiments and opinions of those who, however neglected in the present age, had in their own times, and many of them a long time afterwards, such reputation for knowledge and acuteness as will scarcely ever be attained by those that despise them.” Not all our forebears were idiots or barbarians. This will come as news to those trained in detesting Western civilization, one byproduct of which is mass literacy. Johnson is writing at a times when printing was becoming widely available. Books and newspapers flourished. Even then there were naysayers. Johnson writes: “An opinion has of late been, I know not how, propagated among us, that libraries are filled only with useless lumber; that men of parts stand in need of no assistance; and that to spend…