What Was Literacy?
Reading and the Digital Age
A nine-year-old I’m close to can’t really spell (he likes to just hit the Q button on the edge of the keyboard) but he is a specialist in Balkan history. He knows every country (and micro-state), all the world flags, many of the capitals and rivers, can name about every battle and war from Alexander the Great onwards with disquisitions on much of the weaponry and tactics, and is appalled with me anytime I get Macedonia and Montenegro confused.
He can read well, but his route to a (really staggering) arsenal of knowledge has pretty much all been YouTube videos. The other day when we were playing Sporcle he discovered the computer microphone with its text-dictation capacities, and I realized what a double-edged sword that really was: it was almost possible to be a full-fledged brainiac while skipping the written word altogether.
The consensus at the moment is that we are moving into the ‘post-literate’ society and that that is happening faster than anybody really realizes. Anytime this is discussed, it’s SOP to immediately switch to apocalyptic terms, but the truth is that it’s happening smoothly and nobody seems harmed by it. In the broader perspective, literacy is really just a kind of aberration. Most humans in most societies have been illiterate and have managed perfectly fine. It’s been estimated that, even in industrialized countries today, around 40% of people don’t actually cross over to reading-as-a-means-for-acquiring-knowledge (literacy for them is purely a second-tier communicative tool and) they are nonetheless able to live their lives without particular handicap. (Many CEOs and politicians would fit this description.) If illiteracy, for a few centuries, meant lack of contact with a wider world of knowledge, that is no longer true in the post-literate age, as the case of the nine-year-old attests: videos and audio information can offer almost exactly the same access to knowledge that used to be the exclusive province of reading.
What I’ve found most interesting in our dawning post-literate age is the speed with which apparently antiquated modes of communication have returned. Pictograms preceded the more analytically-minded, versatile alphabets, and it’s a bit startling that, in our late-capitalist, post-industrialized, (whatever we are) super-advanced civilization, a new pictographic language would suddenly emerge as the cool new way of communicating. (Personally, I find emojis annoying and confusing, but I’m clearly in the minority, and it’s probably a testament of how oppressed visually-minded people must have felt in the old alphabetic dispensation that emojis have become so screamingly popular.) If I’ve been perplexed by emojis, I’ve been truly baffled by podcasts, which seem to do exactly what writing does but much more slowly and inefficiently — but, again, I’m clearly outvoted: people who lose patience reading even short texts are willing to listen for hours to podcasts and to countenance all the stutterings and looping thoughts that accompany oral speech. The point, it seems, is that orality was never really beaten by literacy, just temporarily sidelined, and that a tremendous number of people prefer to acquire their information that way.
So, now that the literacy monopoly is waning (and it’s no longer quite so clear, for instance, that teaching advanced reading skills is really the best use of children’s formative years), it’s worth asking what literacy really was.
In a throwaway line in a TedTalk, Sugata Mitra offers an interesting hypothesis. “Imagine trying to run the entire planet without computers….but the British Empire actually did it: they created a global computer made up of people, it’s called the bureaucratic administrative machine,” he said. In other words, literacy really was a means for elites to communicate to one another. That’s borne out by the archeological findings that reveal the apparent first uses of writing to be for bureaucratic purposes; by the tendency of elites all over the world to choose some ‘dead language’ (e.g. Latin) to conduct written business. Thomas Ricks has a fascinating demonstration of how this can work in practice — with the American Founding Fathers all so versed in classical literature that they were able to draft a Constitution with startling frictionlessness. Mitra‘s point is that computers largely obviate that whole enterprise: with computers there is little need for memory retention or even specialized communicative techniques. Maybe certain elite castes will wish to generate jargon as a means of excluding others and preserving a guild, but, basically, all ordinary administrative work can be done by anybody “computer-literate” as opposed to the highly-read civil servants of an earlier imperial era.
From the long view of civilization, writing in the vernacular seems, to a surprising degree, to be an exception. The idea was that serious business should be conducted by serious people who were marked for their seriousness by their written command of an elevated language, while the vernacular was used for daily life and popular storytelling, which was deemed so trivial that it seemed never to be worth writing down. That’s the legacy we’ve been given from, say, the Middle Ages — its written heritage a bunch of pedants droning on about god knows what and then much of the real lived life of the era irretrievably lost. In the standard humanistic history that I was educated on, the switch to a written vernacular in the later Middle Ages comes to seem like a miracle — with an explosion of writing (e.g. Dante in Italian, Shakespeare in English) that preserved a sense of elevation without social demarcation: it became possible for a culture to narrate its story to itself and to do so in a beautiful, accessible language that required some degree of education but not jargon-y training. More than Mitra‘s vision of the beehive of civil servants, it’s that notion of a common language that we seem really to be abandoning in the shift to post-literacy. It’s not just that storytelling shifts mediums — that high school classes in a couple of centuries can watch The Godfather in the way that we make our students now read Shakespeare — it’s that there’s a sense of the highest that a culture has to offer (in European modernity, it’s usually one of the first major writers to write predominantly in the vernacular, Dante in Spanish, Shakespeare in English, Cervantes in Spanish, Goethe in German, Pushkin in Russian). Take away that emphasis on the written word, on high literature in general (that emphasis is already fading fast), and the national culture summarily loses its sense of continuity.
A family member of mine, Peter Dimock, has a beautiful theory about literacy. Peter (influenced to some extent by Maryanne Wolf) believes that reading creates a suspended internal space in which a person is extracted from their social role, is able to enter into someone else’s consciousness, and in so doing is able to create a genuine independence of thought, which is distinct from one’s social surroundings and is unobtainable through any other means. As Wolf writes, “The moment [true literacy] happens, we are no longer confined by the limits of our own thinking. Wherever they were set out, our original boundaries are challenged, teased, and gradually placed somewhere new.” The obvious question would be whether that process can occur just as easily through film or digital, and Peter’s argument is not quite: that it’s such a peculiar, unnatural, strenuous operation for the brain to teach itself to read that that process of maturation can be done only in this particular way.
Looking at these ideas of what literacy was, it’s a bit difficult for me what to work out what exactly is lost with its passing. Mitra’s idea is a little functionally-minded, but it is true that literacy-as-elite-language has — apart from a few highly specialized domains — basically already left the culture. Literacy-as-cultural-touchstone is a potent sort of national myth but probably can be replaced with something else over time. The idea of literacy-as-a-portal-to-develop-independent-thought is arresting but may give slightly too much credit to reading: I would tend to think that the process of independent thinking is a highly singular process that people undergo in their lives if they choose to do so and that reading can be a tool in that process but can just as easily become a welter of self-reinforcing information.
My sense is that the passing of literacy is a bit like the passing of oral storytelling traditions in an earlier era — it’s not necessarily progress or regression (in conventional histories, the advent of literacy at the expense of orality is usually seen as a critical metric of ‘civilization’) but in the transition something of incalculable value is quietly lost. In Nine Lives, William Dalrymple tells the heartbreaking story of what happens when oral bards are taught to read: almost immediately, their memory atrophies. It turns out that, if writing exists as a mode of storing information, it’s so convenient that almost no one has the willpower to sustain these vast memory palaces that are needed for oral epics. Dalrymple describes how abruptly these ancient oral traditions can be lost — in some cases (this would be because of a payment dispute rather than the advent of literacy) the bards break their instruments and leave them on the steps of their masters’ houses: a sign that the entire lineage of the family house, stretching back for generations, has been, in a stroke, lost.
There’s a sense — being slightly dramatic — that something similar is happening in our era. In Succession (god, I’ve been quoting Succession a lot), Roman Roy delivers his strategic business plan, saying, “I was at the book shop the other day and I just started laughing. I started thinking about the olden days, the monasteries and the Bibles, and who said what and what they meant, and all the wars and what have you — all gone. No one gives a fuck….It’s all about the morsels, man. That’s where we’re headed.” And this line — as it’s meant to be — is really chilling. The needed attention spans for sustained reading have (as everybody knows) been lost. The social pressure to ‘be a reader’ is fading away. And, if the great delusion of my life has been the idea that there is a mimetic version of life that goes on after us, that writing is a way of preserving ourselves, Roman Roy might be more astute than I am: visual media is a better chronicle of our existence than writing is; and, in the market, the ‘morsels’ are more entertaining than somebody or other’s life story.
So if literacy is fading away from the center of the culture — the immortality game, at the moment, is to do anything possible to get somebody to point a camera at you — writing and reading become an activity carried out by a hardcore, and they do so, more than anything else, simply because they like to do it. More and more I’ve become unconvinced of the lack of social utility of heavy reading — probably my peak of reading was from about 11 to 13, when I was just devouring books, and, as it turned out, I would have been much better off, when entering middle school, to have spent that time watching Dawson’s Creek — but there are some people for whom reading just really works for their brains.
So basically that’s what literacy was. It was an amazing innovation that created mirror and shadow worlds and helped to develop interiority. The coin of the realm, though, was sustained, solitary attention, and, after a relatively brief period passed in which literacy was an elite language and then a point of cultural pride, it became very difficult for people to motivate themselves to read unless they were the kinds of people who, for some strange reason, really liked doing it. And in a weird way I’m sort of ok with that. I don’t think literacy is, particularly, a better means of transmitting thought than orality or the new digital techniques. In my case, it’s just what happens to best fit my personality. And what I’m looking for is people who are similarly dedicated to it — not from any sense of personal edification (as it loses its cultural primacy, it’s replaced by other things) but simply because, for them, it gives greater pleasure.
Sam Kahn writes
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I posted a long comment on Castalia that I'll copy here, in case it sparks further conversation:
An unnerving argument, Sam, but difficult to contest. My eldest daughter has an encyclopedia knowledge of Greek mythology, wildlife, and scientific ideas that she owes largely to podcasts. But she is also such a voracious reader that she often carries a book or her Kindle with her into the kitchen while she gropes blindly in the refrigerator for her breakfast. There is, for her, a kind of seamless conversation across the genres. And she is presently at work on the first of what she claims will be a 7-part fantasy series. So it's perhaps too soon to say that literacy is dead. I hesitate to use the theoretical buzzword "hybridity," but it's clear that reading and writing are as much influenced by multimedia forms as in reverse. And what is the Substack phenomenon, if not proof of some enduring form of literacy, albeit at a less epic scale?
Your last line resonates with me. I became a writer largely because I could never get the words right in person. But you're making me wonder if this was so because I grew up without a television, necessarily found my escape and entertainment in books, and then as a result found my spontaneous utterances wanting by comparison.
I'll indulge one more observation -- that writing is always different from reading/listening/viewing. My students were saturated in audiovisual stories, but when I assigned a Moth-style performance at the end of a radio storytelling course, they struggled to hone their stories. And I wonder now if the refining capacity of literacy lay not in the medium so much as in the sense of craft, and that anyone who completes a long apprenticeship in craft (in whatever form) gains a kind of refinement as a result? But I suppose one can be an exquisite carpenter and still be terrible at self-reflection. So perhaps the craft must be at least adjacent to what we've known writing to be for it to have that transformative effect. (Now I'm wishing this could go on as a kind of Socratic exchange...)
Absolutely fascinating. Thank you for the thought provoking piece.
One thought: What if the new Latin is data science?
The elites are increasingly literate in coding and structuring data. In a society where financial and policy decisions must be “data driven,” only those fluent in data can decide what gets measured and what those metrics mean.
Data scientists are the new priests and python is the language they preach in. Cultural artifacts are less subservient, but their power over everything else holds sway.