Middlemarch: On Eliot and Reading qua Education--Whether Non-AI Writing is "Elitist"

Middlemarch: On Eliot and Reading qua Education--Whether Non-AI writing is "Elitist"

These two concepts are so entangled in my mind right now: Middlemarch and literacy. I’ve been reading Middlemarch for nearly four months and am finally about to finish, during a time when my own literacy has faltered, a time when I can distinguish which of my Creative Writing students are readers, a time when culture claims that our education system is failing us, a time when a friend has told me that a formal education—and the associated literacy—is elitist and therefore expecting writers not use AI is also elitist, a time when the world seems to be pulling away from books and leaning into “the age of AI” in order not to be “left behind,” and it all makes me so anxious I want to scream.

(book review on Middlemarch forthcoming)

Not that long ago, on a deep dive into consciousness, I learned via Annika Harris that intuition cannot always be trusted: our intuition that consciousness stems from complex brain function might be wrong. Instead, consciousness might exist everywhere, in everything—and it might, in fact, be fundamental. While the lessons on consciousness were obviously the point, what stuck with me instead was my false intuition about intuition itself. Can I not trust my gut?

The suggestion that my intuition might be flawed was a blow, and insecurity about some deep kind of knowing in myself persists to this day: is my intuitive repugnance of today’s Big Tech in the forms of social media and AI flawed? Is my innate sense about this a signpost, or does it mislead? The wisdom of repugnance can be debated as a logical fallacy: a false appeal to pathos.

So, over the last three months or so, I’ve gathered evidence in my messy, unregulated, unstructured sort of way, via profound rabbit holes led by curiosity alone, and unfortunately, I’ve left far too few breadcrumbs to write or develop anything valuable to anyone on the topic. The only outcome is my repugnance has fortified. My desire to disconnect has evolved into a need.

But what could this possibly have to do with Middlemarch?

This morning I learned that George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) was an autodidact. She had little formal education but was a voracious reader with access to a library. Sweet Jesus. I am floored. Here I am, on the floor. This woman who wrote in such complex detail about religion, politics, industry, business, romance, marriage, medicine, and psychological realism—learned it all via books and observation.

I’m exhausted, I think, by the two paired sentiments pouring out of my social media (mostly Substack) these past few days: 1. That our education system is failing us, and 2. That to expect writers to be well-read (and therefore not rely on AI) is elitist. The first claim misunderstands the source of the failure, and the second claim lacks real-world evidence.

Our education system is failing us—this is undeniable. But the sentiment seems to be that instructors and institutions are not “keeping up with the times,” and that this is the source of the system’s failure. This perspective suggests a profound misunderstanding of what works in instruction. This perspective looks at the prevalence of AI cheating and blames the teachers, blames the methods of instruction that have been effective for millennia, instead of blaming the real problem: a technology that has been rammed through at such a pace it has outstripped any regulation—rammed through, I might add, without any evidence proffered of its effectiveness.

The other day, I read a Substack note that claimed AI learning was unnatural but reading was natural, and therefore a return to reading is our solution. This is scientifically untrue: reading is far from natural. Reading—learning to read—forces our brain to create neural pathways that never existed at birth and would not have otherwise developed without exposure to training and devoted practice. At every level, from decoding single letters to full words to holding a concept in the mind from the beginning of the sentence and carrying it to the end of the sentence in order to create meaning—reading is deeply unnatural. And don’t even get me started on writing. None of it is natural. What makes it effective is not that it’s more natural than learning with technology, it’s that it asks our brains to work harder than any learning with technology can.

But once a person develops a certain level of literacy, they can learn at the very least the fundamentals on any subject—before, in some cases, needing to turn to a master for additional guidance.

And of course, what I am referring to in terms of reading here does not include audiobooks. Don’t get me wrong: I am not necessarily anti-audiobook. I myself listen to podcasts while I do housework. But this is not reading. When I read, I cannot also wash dishes, sweep the floors, fold laundry, drive, or divide my attention in any way. Reading demands too much of my brain for that.

Further, let me be clear: I can tell which of my Creative Writing students read and which do not by the structures of their sentences. Those who do not read, and perhaps only listen to audiobooks—or worse, consume only social media content—cannot comprehend the potential structural complexity of sentences. They do not punctuate effectively because they have never seen punctuation in use. They write in bits and fragments and omit any commas, semicolons, em-dashes, colons, quotation marks, parentheses. Even the students who submit prose “written” with AI (which, to be clear, is prohibited per my syllabus) cannot seem to submit a truly unique, complex sentence—as AI writing’s current trend is short, choppy sentences and fragment errors: AI never runs on.

But the distinction between listening and reading goes deeper. With an audiobook, a person cannot read a sentence, get caught up in a thought, look out the window for a moment, and then return to the sentence, realizing that perhaps upon the first read-through they did not quite, quite grasp the author’s full meaning, and then re-read the sentence with more intentionality to comprehend. With an audiobook, the reader cannot scrawl in the margin their immediate reactions, true-to-life connections, or disagreements. Indeed, unless the audiobook “reader” is extremely active and quick with that finger, they will be forced on to the next sentence without being given the opportunity to consider that they might not have comprehended in the first place.

In fact, upon writing the previous few paragraphs it has suddenly occurred to me that this is why I do not consume audiobooks: I am an achingly slow, deliberate reader. My brain cannot tolerate misunderstanding. Hence it has taken me three months to read Middlemarch. The pace of audiobooks frustrates me. I’d prefer to dwell a bit longer.

The truth about our education system’s failure is complex, but perhaps we should entertain the possibility that the issue could center upon the system’s incorporation of ed tech without evidence of its effectiveness and pulling away from actual physical books.

And this might point any person suggesting it is acceptable for writers to employ AI in their writing because demanding a writer to be book-read or literate is “elitist” to also consider that as one needn’t pay for an advanced degree or even opt in to Big Education at all in order to be well-educated, being literate is not, in fact, elitist. Nor is writing without AI. To the contrary, writing “with” AI might be more classist than otherwise, as via libraries, books are both accessible and free use. And if you’re not paying for your AI, you are the product—the implications of which would comprise an entirely separate essay.

The droves of authors whose works are timeless, universal, and should be read by anyone in any culture—who were either impoverished or autodidactic or both—should stay any gash uttering such nonsense as above. Here is just one brief list of famous writerly autodidacts, as pulled from, yes, good old AI-banning Wikipedia:

1.     George Eliot

2.     Malcolm X

3.     Mark Twain

4.     Herman Melville

5.     Ernest Hemingway

6.     Ray Bradbury

7.     Vincent van Gogh

8.     George Orwell

9.     HP Lovecraft

10.  Frederick Douglass

11.  Booker T Washington

12.  Abraham Lincoln

13.  Steve Jobs

Now, I have certainly curated this list to include certain particular authors, but there are many, many more, and I recommend anyone with the slightest thought that literacy is elitist or that reading actual writing from the pages of an actual book is not worthwhile to peruse the Wikipedia list on their own.

I have intentionally included here the dystopian authors, Orwell and Bradbury, whose anti-surveillance-state 1984 and anti-mindless-media Farenheit 451 I have consumed within the past two years in reflex to the emergence of GenAI. But it is also worthy of note to find Steve Jobs on this list, whose tech corporation, Apple, has conscientiously decided to remain a bystander of the GenAI arms race. Of course, there is also Malcolm X, who famously taught himself to read and write by copying word-for-word and page-by-page from a dictionary while he was in prison. And there are others that might startle you here on this list.

What will AI autodidacts contribute?

That question is rhetorical. You know my answer.

When I told someone recently that I don’t write with AI and opt not to read anything “written” with AI, they suggested, “Well you must not have read anything since 2023 then,” as though this proved their point that AI was inescapable—and therefore I should embrace it without sticking my head in the sand. This claim fails at four critical assumptions: 1. It suggests that I am likely consuming AI without realizing it (maybe, but as both a writer and someone who devotes hours a day to reading both amateur and professional writing—doubtful), 2. It suggests that there are no authors extant today who write without AI (hi! I’m right here!), 3. It suggests that anything penned since 2023 is worth reading (dubitable), and 4. It suggests that because AI is invading my spaces, I should simply accept it (um, no thanks). Truly, all four are problematic; however, I do not think the claims are universally true or the case against AI is sealed.

Therefore, my mind is stuck on Eliot and what I know of her own literacy via Middlemarch, which was penned in the (what my friend might deem archaic) 1870s. What would this autodidactic woman who dove so deep into so many fields of expertise think of the claim that because our education system is broken, literacy, and thus writing without AI, is “elitist”? God, what I wouldn’t give to have that conversation with her—to permit myself to be enlightened by her perspective.

In the meantime, I think I might continue to listen to my intuition here. Just yesterday, one of my Creative Writing students submitted a piece of fiction “written with” AI, and I felt such aversion that afterward I needed a shower. And I think that’s ok. My intuition is telling me that as a civilization we are walking away from something valuable and toward something that strips away value—and it’s quite alright to lean into my wisdom of repugnance on this point.