“The vast majority of people, perhaps 90 percent, know how to read, but do not exercise their intelligence beyond this.”
~ Jacques Ellul, Propaganda

The benefits and advantages to literacy are numerous, almost not needing to be mentioned in this literate society. Writing was invented in the Bronze Age. Legibility was what made larger, more complex societies possible because it was an important tool for centralized governance (James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State). It was first used for accounting and tax records. But even before the Bronze Age collapse, literacy was already taking a literary turn. This was also the birth of history, when people began recording important events and figures. Humans became self-conscious of being part of a civilization.

There was simultaneous development of ever more advanced calendrical systems. So, people could both perceive a past and predict a future. Humanity had more fully become a temporal creature. Contrast that to the entirely oral (ahistorical, non-calendrical, and innumerate) Piraha whose sense of time is amorphously present-oriented, more of a spatial perception. A vaster sense of time only became important with large-scale agriculture where key to survival was the planning of crops in order to maximize yields. Those yields weren’t only about the food itself but also in being taxable to support bureaucratic governments and standing armies.

It was only with the Axial Age that the twinklings of a literary tradition fully bloomed into the first literary cultures. This required the emergence of a literate elite who were dedicated to a text-based worldview. This was a revolutionary overturning of oral culture. Much was lost in the process. A literate mind inevitably lacks the prodigious memory skills of orality. Maintaining information, instead, is delegated to the written word. It goes way beyond this, though. Orality is about not only the spoken word but the living word, as part of a living world. Animism is the twin of orality. This is why many traditional mnemonic systems used geography (e.g., Australian Aboriginal Songlines). Knowledge was in the world, as was identity.

Literacy meant the destruction of the bundled mind and 4E cognition that had been the basis of human society presumably since humans first evolved. That archaic mentality hung on for a long time as literacy took hold, as it was a slow process. In much of the world, including Europe, even most of the ruling elite were illiterate until the late middle ages or early modernity. Of course, literary culture was influencing the illiterate as well as the literate. Religions of the book are an example of that, although they typically were the writing down of oral traditions. That is definitely true of Christianity that began as an oral religion, not having a holy text until the second century, with most Christians remaining illiterate until centuries after the transformation initiated by the Protestant Reformation.

In countries like the United States, full literacy among the population only happened with mass urbanization and mandatory public education. Before that, the average American had bare functional literacy in being able to read signs and write their own signature. So, keep in mind that we are barely into the experiment of mass literacy, following the final elimination of the last traces of the premodern oral tradition. So, yeah, it is quite the accomplishment getting humanity this far. The thing is that literary culture and literary education has not quite caught up yet. Most people who can read don’t actually do much reading, many of them still finding it difficult. One can get a high school degree in the U.S. with barely any skills of reading comprehension, textual analysis, critical thinking, and media literacy.

That is the dilemma of where we find ourselves. Modernity isn’t an end point but a transitional stage, or so we hope. So many of the problems of the past century are largely to be blamed on this semi-literate society. We’ve eliminated the cultural autonomy of oral cultures that could resist large-scale hegemonic forces, and in it’s place we’ve created a mass media system that can be more easily controlled and manipulated by centralized power. This has seen the rise of the most powerful ruling elite in history, consisting of a high number of social dominators (SDOs) and dark personalities (Machiavellians, narcissists, psychopaths, sadists); the very kind of people oral cultures tended to keep in check, by enforcement of social norms and other means.

The thing is most of us Westerners have now been far enough from rural life that orality is no longer part of living memory. We don’t appreciate what has been lost. There is a kind of egalitarian autonomy that is possible within orality, as seen with the aforementioned Piraha, that is no longer part of the modern literate mind. We are dominated by mass media and hence mediated reality. That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the population had intellectual defenses against rhetoric, apologetics, propaganda, and perception management. But the ruling elite have conveniently forgotten to include that as part of the education system; or should we say indoctrination system. Our mass literacy has made us even easier to manipulate. Yet literacy also offers the potential antidote to this poison.

The challenge is that the global population was just attaining a literate majority as new media was taking over. In many countries, the first generation of the literate had their attention being drawn away by radio, television, cable, video games, and internet. Literacy barely had a chance to take hold as a literary culture. This wasn’t entirely bad, as this media proliferation has meant media competition. There is no single mediated reality that dominates. But media literacy has not kept up with the media changes. Also, critical thinking skills, as part of the analytical mind, require high levels of literacy. That means spending large amounts of time dedicated to reading difficult texts and navigating across multiple texts.

Yet one suspects that, even in the highly literate West, the younger generations having declining literacy-related abilities. In interacting with the younger generations, one gets the sense that many have never learned how, for example, to skim and summarize a longer text. Anything beyond a few paragraphs bores and tires many of them, as they can’t as easily maintain attention span. Still, it’s hard to know that this is exactly a decline, since the older generations are fairly pathetic in their literary abilities. There is no generation, at least in the U.S., where a majority has fully engaged with literary culture. In some ways, the older generations are even more easily propagandized because their media literacy is vastly more limited. The point is the generations are vulnerable in different ways.

This past century has been mostly about raising the population level of intelligence. It’s been a shift from the concrete intelligence, more typical of oral culture, to the fluid intelligence that is only possible with literacy. But we haven’t quite figured out how to optimally use this fluid intelligence. Nonetheless, if not for that takeover of fluid intelligence, we wouldn’t now be at a point of a left-liberal majority. Probably every single major social, democratic, and civil rights advancement in recent history is at least partly explained by this change in mentality. Fluid intelligence, as a product of literacy and literary education, is what makes possible the more abstract thought that underpins universalist ideologies (e.g., liberal democracy). That is no small achievement, but we have a long ways to go. We are still in our intellectual infancy.

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Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes
by Jacques Ellul

“People used to think that learning to read evidenced human progress; they still celebrate the decline of illiteracy as a great victory; they condemn countries with a large proportion of illiterates; they think that reading is a road to freedom. All this is debatable, for the important thing is not to be able to read, but to understand what one reads, to reflect on and judge what one reads. Outside of that, reading has no meaning (and even destroys certain automatic qualities of memory and observation). But to talk about critical faculties and discernment is to talk about something far above primary education and to consider a very small minority. The vast majority of people, perhaps 90 percent, know how to read, but do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word, or, conversely, reject it altogether. As these people do not possess enough knowledge to reflect and discern, they believe—or disbelieve—in toto what they read. And as such people, moreover, will select the easiest, not the hardest, reading matter, they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and convince them without opposition. They are perfectly adapted to propaganda.”