being frank

It would be senseless to think that humanity hasn’t wrestled with the issue of ignorance over the many centuries we’ve been on this earth. We’d also be foolish to think that mechanical or technological advancements have never been accused of being the catalysts for the decline of humanity’s intellect.

Yet the one thought that seems to have held its ground over these many years is that the speculative nature of ignorance always assumes in its favor. This brings up a concern that is not so much philosophical as it is measurable.

This week, The Atlantic posted an article that presupposed that society once saw the idea of universal literacy as a foregone conclusion. Yet today it seems that the “age of reading” may be proven to be nothing more than a historical aberration. But the one component in the posting that caught my eye relates to a book that Walter Ong (a historian and Jesuit priest) wrote in 1982 entitled, Orality and Literacy. I felt that Walter’s dissection of these two qualitative forms of communication would provide a helpful window into the fascinating yet precarious nature of ignorance.

“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In the past, literary advancements were seen as a means to deliver knowledge; knowledge that represented the sum total of humanity’s intellect and thus belonging to everyone. In the earliest parts of humanity’s history, knowledge was passed on via oral tradition. Walter Ong refers to this as the Primary Orality. It was a communal process that relied on the oral traditions of storytellers and some of the early philosophers. It bound these exchanges to a literal world; one where abstractions would be difficult to convey and even harder to pass on orally without understanding the nature of the person who first conceived those thoughts.

As writing grew from the foundational beginnings of symbols and cuneiforms, it became possible for people to put their thoughts onto a medium that could be passed on; ideas and concepts frozen in time that could allow for logical analysis and the formation of abstract ideas. Walter Ong refers to this as the Secondary Orality; a tradition shaped by the literate mindset(s) that preceded it. Ptolemy, a first century mathematician and astronomer, envisioned a grand library to house a massive collection containing the writings from the most influential minds of his time. Yet wars, antagonistic religious differences and a general sense of apathy caused such institutions to fall prey to the worst aspects of humanity’s behavior.

Yet before Ptolemy’s time, philosophers such as Socrates saw the written word as the beginning of the end for the concept of internal memory. The written word without the intellect of the original author would be prone to erroneous interpretations and the inability for the words themselves to defend their point of view. Walter Ong saw Socrates’ argument as a way to protect tradition and the established cultural memory which needed constant repetition in order to ensure its survival.

A thousand or so years later, the same dangers perceived in Ptolemy’s time concerning the written word were ascribed to the printing press, and many would suffer a fate similar to the libraries of the ancient world that were burned to the ground because of humanity’s fears. Yet libraries survived and thrived, and the printing press rose to heights that the original inventors could not have possibly imagined. The passion for the written word found a way to survive; the quality of the words written haven’t done so well over the years.

So how does all of this fit into the world of the 21^st century?

Unlike the very early stages of our creative intellect, inventions and technologies that began to surface in late antiquity were driven primarily by profit; be that for financial gain, the subjugation of the masses, or the conquest of territories for – you guessed it – profit. This is not meant to imply that financial gain is characteristically corrosive. It only becomes so when it outweighs the pursuit of truth, education, and human development.

When in the course of history we shifted our personal growth from literacy and knowledge to strength and wealth, we took aim at criticizing knowledge for the sake of using literacy as a benchmark for power. And when you’re on the road to be the best, to be number one, or to become the most powerful whatever, shortcuts will be assumed as policy. And in such circumstances, literacy and human wisdom will suffer. Because at that stage, wisdom is no longer a tool for the betterment of humanity. It becomes a weapon for its subjugation; the suppressive instrument for the willful propagation of ignorance.

“Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail.” – Mark Twain

Attacks against the institutions of learning should be seen as a detriment to society. Yet in today’s fast-paced, information-addicted world, such attacks aren’t coming solely from budgetary cuts or demands for ideological exclusions. They come from a naïve sense of negligence. As the advent of portable technologies began to appear fifty-plus years ago, they made their way into the workforce and classrooms via everything from electronic calculators to personal computers to smartphones. In each instance, we yielded small portions of our critical thinking, diminishing our active cognitive processing and our innate ability to solve analytical problems. Yet it’s not that technology itself became the enemy. The danger began when we allowed convenience to replace understanding.

In the age of Artificial Intelligence, we’ve begun to see how literacy has dropped because education is becoming more dependent on technologies that place less emphasis on grammar and structure. Writing is a chore to even the most passionate of scribblers. But it takes time, it takes study, and it’s a passion to formulate the right words to be sewn together into a compelling argument. When you turn over that process to an AI, you might be saving money, time, or even capturing the advantage over a competitor. But you’re also diminishing the ability to communicate and to learn. AI can accelerate learning when it supports thought, but It becomes a liability when it’s programmed to replace it.

“Ignorant men don’t know what good they hold in their hands until they’ve flung it away.” – Sophocles

Final Thoughts

Ignorance is like a bad actor feigning their death in a movie; it just doesn’t know when to quit. It’s hard to attribute a characterization, policy or standard to a society that lived thousands of years ago. The means by which they captured their thoughts or expressed their beliefs were often too fragile to withstand the passing of time or they grossly underestimated the fickleness of successive generations. But I think it’s safe to say that in general, the societies that gave us the likes of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and even Confucius and Laozi believed in morality, harmony, and the exploration of human intellect and understanding – not the willful proliferation of ignorance.

In today’s world where (in a global sense) we lose ourselves in the marvel of our own self-importance, we have chosen to accept certain distractions on the road to our purported wisdom. When Walter Ong looked at the nature of writing as part of his Secondary Orality, he saw this as a way to preserve ideas; a way to expand our intellectual capacity for memorization and build abstract thoughts within our own virtual realm without the fear of forgetfulness.

But when that Secondary Orality collides with the inability to distinguish truth from lies, critical thinking begins to falter. This is where people start to pass judgment on statements based on the manner in which it’s delivered. An audience will be more inclined to judge the accuracy of a speaker based on an emotional prima facie statement rather than on data that’s been verified and put through a thorough peer review process.

At that stage, knowledge and therefore wisdom become a means to an end. Their success isn’t measured by their quality or the time it took to acquire. Rather, it’s tied to the notion that a personality is more important and therefore carries greater relevance than a verifiable truth. That an institution of learning and the final product it delivers may be mutually exclusive because of a well-timed and heavily seeded reputational campaign.

I saw a comment posted recently by someone that read:

“Literacy depends on being able to go to a good school.”

That may have applied to certain higher institutions of learning thirty to fifty years ago, but that certainly doesn’t apply today. What is important is that we spend the time and money to make every school a “good school” by investing in the quality and preparation of its educators, and place people in administrative positions or authority within the educational sector that actually pursued such an endeavor as their passion and career. I think we’ve had our fill of wrestling scions telling us about how best to organize the future of education.

We need to spend time pursuing the means by which to place the strength of our nation back into its intellectual, intuitive, and emotional fiber. When our country’s best intellectual minds choose to go overseas to pursue ways to use their skillsets to improve the human condition, that’s a clear sign that the nation no longer appreciates the pursuit of knowledge. Our future will not be determined by how intelligent our machines become. It will be determined by whether we continue to cultivate and secure the legacy of the intelligence that created them.