Is literature the canary in the mine?

If we in the 21st century stand on the shoulders of giants, it must be a particularly light load for the giants - as there seems to be a dearth of intellectual weight in the current era.

Can you think of any writer as essential as Charles Dickens alive today? Or Tolstoy? Or Emily Dickinson? Or Hemingway? Or Joseph Conrad? Or Jane Austen? Or Voltaire? Or Mark Twain?

For that matter, can you think of any writer alive today who is essential not to you personally, but to our mutual understanding of what it means to be human? The emphasis must be on mutual, because it is just such touchstones of common understanding which have provided the glue of culture and society for at least the entire era of civilized life.

You can certainly name good writers - as diverse as Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, as entertaining as Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, as poetic as Toni Morrison and Isabel Allende, as magical as Gabriel Garcia Marquez - but will any of them have an impact on mankind's continuing redefinition of itself?

Critical thinking is in critically short supply these days, and perhaps the explanation is that our modern world has chosen to educate itself on a diet of Conan, Borat and Oprah instead of Emerson, Rousseau and Dickens. We are limited only by our aspirations, but doesn't that mean this current generation is stuck inside an incredibly small box called TV?

Yes, we still read, but we read books with titles like "Mommywood" (by Tori Spelling no less) or "Be Careful Who You Love" (identified on Amazon.com as "the explosive definitive account of the Michael Jackson saga"). If we read Jane Austen at all, it is in the form of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies."

And yes, I know this is an exaggeration. There are some people who still read classics, but the point is not about the classics; it is about where our collective mind is today, and trust me it isn't on the eternal verities that Faulkner spoke of in his Nobel acceptance speech. What we do together is watch "American Idol," read or write inane comments on Twitter, or line up at theaters to see the latest installment of "Harry Potter."

The novelist William Faulkner warned of such a time, a time of defeat and despair, and it is worth paying heed to him, one of the last of the giants. He was speaking of writers, but it's almost as though he could be speaking of our declining culture when he warned his peers to hold on to "the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice."

Faulkner said that without those values, a writer "labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands… he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man."

Faulkner said he "decline[d] to accept the end of man," but that was because he saw the poet and writer as capable of "help[ing] man endure by lifting his heart." I wonder what he would have thought of this strange doldrum of literary inactivity at the start of the 21st century. Perhaps writers are the canaries in the mine. If their voice is silenced by the poisons in the air, the toxins in our culture, then the song of mankind may well be next.

n Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake and writes a weekly column. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com