Illiterate gynaikocracy
There’s a new essay in worrying in The Atlantic, by a nice young lady who pooh-poohs Trump, to the effect that students are now illiterate & soon most Americans will therefore be illiterate. There’s at least a good likelihood of this coming to pass… Now, in one of those “human interest” moments in her report, she gives this example of the problem:
“[Luria] posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate & literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north & thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.”
For my part, I’m rather skeptical about this kind of “study,” so I might have more in common with the illiterate peasant than with this lady (who, however, is herself somewhat skeptical), but that’s a story for another time. For now, I notice that her report doesn’t involve any philosophy (there’s only a perfunctory reference to Plato’s Phaedrus): It’s only mediocrities in the intellectual world that get cited in The Atlantic. That is itself an example of the problem--the lady & her institution are as decadent as the social situation she describes, which perhaps makes her a faithful witness of it...
But even at the mediocre level now available at The Atlantic, let’s try this sort of Enlightenment on her: Can she complete a fairly simple syllogism? We live in Enlightened regimes where every kid is supposed to go to school, indeed to college, & the result is that a majority of college grads, professors, as well as other people in the Enlightenment business are women--a growing majority every year. Yet every year of this feminism, America become more illiterate than it was within living memory, when there was, of course, much less feminism. All of these are the facts this lady asserts or implies in describing the educational situation. Feminism grows alongside illiteracy, incredibly strongly correlated. There must be causation because women dominate & often run the educational system! What follows from these premises? How might we complete this syllogism?
What if feminism creates cowardice first through an assault on logic, so that “educated” people all become aware of the premises & all become unwilling or unable to draw the necessary conclusion? What if feminists lamenting illiteracy are actually accelerating it?
The reality today is, you either take the side of the techno-lords or of these ladies. Choose the techno-lords, because they’re serious about what they’re doing. The academics & their products aren’t. They’re suicidal, accordingly. Nothing against this young woman, fresh out of college, writing this stuff: To her, this may be a difficult intellectual endeavor. If she were a student, I’d encourage her with a kind word, since I know students are nowadays very needy, very weak, they rarely have what it takes to fall in love with a book or an author. But she’s a clown. She’s not going to spend a year of her life reading McLuhan (a mocking name drop suffices) much less read Aristotle like McLuhan did. She might not even know McLuhan was an academic, a Thomist (would she know what a Thomist is, does anyone in college these days know?), & a faithful Catholic. Everyone in academia is the same kind of clown, because all are burdened by a great scholarly “tradition” that they can neither understand, nor love, nor yet reject. Illiterate types might have an easier path to reality than those lost among words.
Let me also encourage you to consider two reactions from friends: Spencer Klavan had daring thoughts to share about this matter:
Spencer paints a very startling picture, but one we have to take seriously—maybe what you feel about how hard it is to sustain friendship is actually true across all intellectual concerns, down to reading books. What if people don’t know that they’re human or that other people are also human? The implication of Spencer’s position is that there’s a small minority of people who can give this gift, literacy, to their kids; the vast majority of people relied on schooling for this, but that no longer works. What follows from this contradiction between public institutions & private life? Spencer lays out one possibility—readers will be as gods among the illiterate, since they have invisible powers…
Whereas Martin Skold has a much bleaker vision of what’s coming, on trend:
He’s right that our power is very precarious. We need to take care of everything in our artificial world, so many complex systems… You’re reading my remarks here by mediation of digital technology. All of that takes work, workers, institutions, & money. How many people understand that & will act to preserve the preconditions for literacy?
These are the writers The Atlantic should be begging to accept a job there & class up the joint; but that’s of course unimaginable. “Silly women only.”
I'm troubled by the habit you and certain other schooled right wingers have developed of saying "the reality is," and then pronouncing what it supposedly rules out in advance. Unless you wish to wind up anti-democracy Yarvin-ish, maybe shy away from that phrase for a bit? Spencer Klavan, BTW, is an unrepentant suppressor. As for the "tech lords," good Lord, what a phrase! Sincerely, your anti-accelerationist Christian Open-Journalism-demanding populist-conservative friend.