I’m the last person to want to bring bad news where it’s not welcome.
But I’m going to add to the national bonfire by pointing out a blaze whose smoke is still miles off but headed our way.
It’s the idea that very soon we’ll be living in a post-literate society.
None has ever existed before. There are, of course, pre-literate societies made up of entire communities who can neither read nor write, and there are also pre-literate people, like your two-year old cousin, who exist in literate societies like our own where 99% of Canadians can read and write.
Indeed, literacy is the time-honoured moniker for health and longer, richer lives. In Chad, whose literacy rate is just 27%, life is nasty, brutish and short. A literate society is one of those good things that we barely think about, like breathing, but assume everyone is trying to do better at, so that some day we’ll all be better.
Then last month, The Financial Times asked: “Are we becoming a post-literate society?”
This was a cheeky question because a post-literate society “…is a hypothetical society where multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read or write, is no longer necessary or common.” (By the way, the phrase “post-literate society” was coined in 1962 in Marshall McLuhan‘s The Gutenberg Galaxy.)
Even back in 1988, the cultural critic Neil Postman wrote that “human intelligence is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it.”
Postman’s quote frames the FT piece because both he and McLuhan were foretelling the fall of literacy decades before computers, social media, artificial intelligence, misinformation, polarization and the rise of images over words, in media, culture and politics.
Today, these inventions and movements have forced literacy onto its back foot, and I predict they will have their way with it in a few years time. I say this because I can’t think of a single workable solution to the problem.
I ask you, do you write anything but your signature in long-hand any more? Okay, that’s just hand-writing. As for actual writing, that is to say using words to make arguments, sell things and ideas, profess love and declare war, we still do that, of course.
But words aren’t the only things we use any more, as we have for centuries. And even when we do use words, far fewer of them are coming out of our own brains and far more, soon infinitely more, out of a query to ChatGPT. These words are not our thoughts, but someone else’s, or rather something else’s, and giving up our own for theirs, I fear, will come with a nasty price.
I peaked intellectually at age 15, and it’s been downhill ever since.
I was in Grade 10, and our English teacher had published a small textbook called Thought & Style which asked us to analyze essays written by great writers and propagandists and try to figure out whose arguments made sense, versus those that just sounded convincing, and why.
I assumed everyone who made it through high school was as well armed against faulty logic, florid rhetoric, and tribal tom-toms as we were. I was wrong. A few months in the world of work taught me that logic is something best left to philosophy class or law school.
Today, 60 years later, not only has my brain shrunk shockingly, but the world’s has as well.
True, Canadians aren’t bad in terms of how well we read, count and problem-solve. The OECD’s second massive survey across 31 countries came out last month and Canada turned in “a strong performance.” In fact, we’re one of eight countries whose people can count better than in 2012 when the last study was taken. What I also didn’t know is that people with high numeracy skills are 11% more likely to be in very good to excellent health compared to those with low numeracy skills.
But this 2024 study was actually conducted in 2023, when AI was barely born. In fact, for most of us, AI is just a couple of years old. Think how it’s already sucking our words out of our heads and replacing them with its own. Then think how fast and fully it will do that 20 years from now.
As Postman concluded: “A culture does not have to burn books to assure that they will not be read…There are other ways to achieve stupidity.”
Meanwhile…
1. Am I Fat? America asks a losing question. But do we share their values?
America again is exceptional. Plus a taxonomy of Trump’s cabinet.
2. People do look like their dogs. The big question is: why?
3. Could you survive as a ‘trad wife’? It’s far more than cooking and cleaning.
4. The world’s… 10 largest companies…poorest rich people….healthiest meal…busiest airline routes (Canada has only one: Toronto-Vancouver)….oldest (and happiest) skydivers. And speaking of falling from the sky…
5. Going nuclear. Here are some notes from a nuclear petting zoo on how deterrence dialogue makes the end of the world sound safe. Here’s what to eat after the apocalypse, and who’s already back from extinction.
6. Brits box. Olivia Colman takes on Big Oil. Bill Nighy gives (more) advice. The School of Life sets 8 rules because “we are flawed and broken beings.” Plus, how to perfect a British accent. And my very Brit friend, Nigel Napier-Andrews, produces a cookbook worth eating.
7. “The reason I’m calling, dad…” Harrison Ford nails it. Also, a great dad would send you here, and not to America right now. And speaking of glass houses…Finally, Paul Krugman, the godfather of rational economic commentary, retires from The New York Times.
8. Trigger warnings fire blanks. The University of Essex has flagged Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey, warning students “may encounter views and content that they may find uncomfortable.” As for the references to sexual violence, rape and infant mortality, the University advises students to “deal with it in ways that help (e.g. to leave the classroom, contact Wellbeing, and of course talk to the lecturer”) if content is “causing distress.” If this seems like coddling, “safetyism” isn’t new.
9. Men butting in. Male menopause is a valid and well-chronicled condition called andropause. What’s not is male mental menopause. As for women bursting out, it seems the longer the footrace, the closer women perform to men.
10. You didn’t know Barry Malzberg. He was one of the fastest and widest-ranging writers of the last few generations. He could write a readable and publishable novel in 27 hours.