AT The Orthosphere, Dr. Thomas F. Bertonneau describes the breakdown in reading ability and discipline he has witnessed as a literature professor. Increasingly, students tell him they cannot understand assigned readings and about ten percent flatly refuse to read at all, probably because it is too demanding. He writes:

Post-literacy is both a symptom of the general breakdown of North American society and a cause of many other aspects of that disaster. It combines insidiously, for example, with the trends of narcissism and group-identity that have so distorted our “liberal” politics; it helps make people vulnerable to propaganda and demagoguery; and it stultifies the cultural scene by deleting the ability to think. Indeed, post-literacy has an ideological expression under such terms as “critical thinking,” which is a euphemism designed to equalize groupthink with actual ratiocination and judgment. “Offense” and “discomfort” are likewise ideological constructions rooted in the post-literate “shame culture.”

More and more the institutions of higher education – beginning most radically at the supposed top of the academic hierarchy – are themselves post-literate. What does a Harvard or a Yale dissertation from one of the “studies” programs mean, metaphysically, or what value does it have apart from its snob appeal? There is an identifiable “higher post-literacy” alongside the ordinary brand of the same.

Post-literacy shows up in weird ways at all levels of higher education. When I taught briefly at a community college in Syracuse, New York, already somewhat more than a decade ago, one of my students was obviously totally illiterate. What was he doing in college, even in a community college, and how was he supposed to cope with college-level work?

Easy: The institution had assigned him a “reader,” who read to him out loud the reading assignments related to his coursework; it also assigned him a “scribe,” who took dictation from him and typed up the results, which he then handed in as “written work” under his own name.

— Comments —

Michael S. writes:

A “student” with his own scribe! How utterly scholastic! Just like Saint Thomas Aquinas and Brother Reginald.

OK, maybe not.

Sam writes:

I have been teaching college-aged men and women for nearly eleven years now, and I can attest to the truth of what Thomas Bertonneau is saying. Increasingly, I find that my students cannot follow a train of thought, cannot decode symbolism, and cannot mentally operate at any degree of abstraction over and above a subjective report of one’s occurent feelings and inclinations. The situation was bad eleven years ago, but I can say unequivocally that it is now, in 2014, much, much worse than it was in 2003.

Last semester, I taught a class nominally referred to as “Critical Reasoning.” These courses, as typically instructed, are neither critical of anything worth criticizing nor involve reasoning. So, in place of the standard curriculum, I teach my kids Aristotelian logic; the square of opposition, the valid syllogisms, and so forth.

I have, on average, a class of more than 70 students, half of whom cannot reliably deduce that “No Saints are Sinners” follows from “All Saints are nonSinners.” For the record, I am not at a backwater community college but at a second-tier state university. Half of my students think that by teaching them basic logic I am pulling a verbal trick on them, and they regularly complain about how “hard” the course is.

 We are a culture consisting almost entirely of dis-enpsychied bodies, capable only of responding to shiny visual cues and basic urges. It is not an accident that the pop culture has been saturated with references to “zombies” for the last three or four years. Millenials are, in the aggregate, the most perfect living embodiments of zombie-hood imaginable.

Laura writes:

People have not been forcibly lobotomized. They have gone like so many lemmings to their cognitive graves, lapping up mental narcotics and spending vast sums to do it. They pay to have themselves lobotomized. Look at the amazing, herd-like passivity with which most people have accepted amplified noise (it’s not music) and television screens everywhere. They want to be ruled and manipulated. They want to be mentally disarmed.

Dr. Bertonneau writes:

My old graduate schoolchum Ivar the Midwesterner inveterately asks his freshman composition students on the first day of class to respond in writing to the following prompt, one of the aphorisms from the extant fragments of the Archaic Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (the “Logos Philosopher”):

All men should speak clearly and logically, and thus share a rational discourse and have a body of thought in common, just as the people of a city should be under the same laws.

Here are five typical responses, as Ivar assures me, to the prompt.

01. “I do agree that people should speak logically.  I don’t, however, think that everybody should think the same way.  For if everybody shared common thoughts, laws would not have to be in place.  While logic and sense is important, the world would be nothing without individuality. In my opinion individuality is what makes us human.  If one looks at animals, they all have common thoughts and are all pretty much the same.”

02. “I disagree that all men should ‘share a rational discourse and have a body of thought in common.’  If everyone thought the same way, what would the world be like?  It would be peaceful and there would be no tension or nothing to worry about.  But, would this be a good thing?  There would be a lack of creativity and diversity.  It would be a monotonous place to be.”

03. “The same uniformity, or logic, of thought when shared by all men does not breed diversity.  Diversity is necessary for expression and leads to more avenues of advancement in the arts and in culture.  A shared and clearly expressed language fosters both enforcement and creation of laws as well as allowing for an exchange of ideas.  A shared language is vital for a city while undiverse logic and argument lead to stagnation.”

04. “This seems to have a negative feeling.  It seems Heraclitus didn’t want people to think for themselves.  Not everyone in a city like all the laws opposed on them. Not everyone should vote or go for something if they don’t like the outcome. Heraclitus quote makes it seems like they should.”

05. “The majority of individuals have a distinct way of living. Everyone is different and unique in their own way but societal pressure drives an organized group in a similar direction.  There is a way the world has designated persons to act, where Heraclitus of Ephesus has portrayed the image of all men being in common with each other, just as laws.”

Notice how the student respondents interpret the idea that all men “should have a body of thought in common” (that is, share convergent educations) as a hostile attempt to impose uniformity of opinion on everyone.  Ironically, it is the near-uniform opinion of the student respondents that this is what Heraclitus is saying.  Notice that the students regard the philosopher’s precepts as hostile to “individuality,”“creativity,” and “diversity.”  Notice the phrase (from student respondent No. 03), “undiverse logic.”  Notice that the philosopher’s statement strikes one of the student respondents (No. 04) as being in the character of “a negative feeling.”

The five responses aren’t exactly wretched from a grammar-syntax perspective, although some are more competent than others, but they all show fairly strong resentment against what is, logically, a self-evidently true proposition. I draw the following conclusion: Even where post-literacy does not reduce the writer to a producer of illiterate and indecipherable iterations, it instills hostile resistance to and rejection of reasonable thoughts and propositions; post-literacy collaborates with ideology in motivating students to invoke topoi such as “uniqueness”and “diversity” to defend themselves against the internalization of a genuinely literate point of view.  I believe that this phenomenon is related to the one that Sam mentions – to wit, that students cannot infer “no saints are sinners” from “all saints are non-sinners.”

Laura writes:

That’s such an important point. Even students who are relatively competent writers show the effects of post-literacy. It’s not just about style; it’s about the ability to reason. And that is profoundly scary.

Pete writes:

The following quote is from a book called The Next Conservatism, by William Lind and the late Paul Weyrich. The book is standard fare in certain respects, but I found their comments on post-literate culture penetrating:

“The generation reared on video games and computers reads little; one wonders if much of it has the attention span to read anything serious. A consequence will be a people cut off from its past. Western culture is mostly a written culture, contained in its great literature, beginning with the Old and New Testaments and the works of the classical Greeks and Romans. When those works go unread, the content of the West’s culture runs out into history’s sands… A post-literate people will have little ability to think logically. Reason and logic demand words; images – which are the language of the video screen – feed emotions. Is it any wonder that Americans no longer think but feel? A people cut off from its past, largely unable to reason and guided primarily by emotion, will be easy to manipulate. In fact, people will be as easy to manipulate as the images on their video screens.”

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