https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/06/philip-jeffery-in-national-affairs.html
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There are other articles at National Affairs that are more in the "why oh why" category and Alan Jacobs has singled out one about "deep literacy". My own response is that the article in question is a downbeat variation on George Steiner's In Bluebird's Castle.
Now while John Borstlap and Richard Taruskin, musicians both and historians of music to varying degrees, have blasted Steiner for either being a highbrow elitist struggling with why the humanities didn't humanize or lambasting the legacy of the West as bearing the guilt of the Holocaust these fusilades seem to almost entirely miss Steiner's actual point in terms of cultural literacy at a literally literary level. There is, however, a rejoinder to even that actual point of Steiner's by way of Alan Jacob's rebuttal to the National Affairs variation of Steiner's thesis that the West has become less deeply literate and Jacobs' response is roughly "Since when?". I'll quote Jacobs' post to let him elaborate his own point:
https://blog.ayjay.org/deep-literacy/
The problem here is the lack of evidence that “deep literacy” really is in decline. Decline from what height? Starting when? Also:
The rise of deep literacy in enough people in early modernity — mightily aided, of course, by Gutenberg’s invention of movable type — was a precondition of Protestantism’s firm establishment and rapid growth, and its establishment was in turn a major accelerator of deep literacy in the societies in which it became the principal faith community, in large part because Protestants ordained compulsory schooling for all children. The Reformation found a very powerful engine in the establishment of these schools: Wherever Protestant beliefs spread, state-mandated education soon followed, each reinforcing the other.
“Protestants ordained compulsory schooling for all children” — all of them? Everywhere? I don’t think so. When and where did this happen? Perhaps Maryanne Wolf provides evidence for these claims in her book, but if so citations of some kind would have been useful. And in any case Wolf is not a historian. Here’s a widely-cited article from 1984 that asks about the relationship between literacy and the Reformation in Germany. The authors conclude that the early Lutherans weren’t especially interested in promoting general literacy — they devoted themselves to promoting catechesis in schools, and this was done orally — and relatively little progress was made in promoting general literacy until the Pietists in the eighteenth century became influential. And even then the achievements were modest:
Besides reorganizing and revitalizing school systems still suffering from the effects of the Thirty Years War, the eighteenth-century ordinances set targets gradually achieved over time. Indicative of the type of incremental progress that was made are some statistics from East Prussia, one of the poorest rural areas in Germany. The percentage of peasants who could sign their names rose from 10 per cent in 1750, to 25 per cent in 1765, to 40 per cent in 1800. Another sign of increasing literacy was the exponential growth in the book trade in the last half of the eighteenth century as the number of titles for sale at the Leipzig book market, the largest in Germany, increased by over 50 per cent between 1740 and 1770 and more than doubled between 1770 and 1800. To be sure, the increase in literacy and reading in the late eighteenth century was still spotty and varied widely in depth and intensity from place to place. Best estimates of school attendance in the second half of the eighteenth century range from one-third to one-half of German school-age children.
How much deep literacy could there be in an environment in which basic literacy was by no means complete — in some areas not even widespread? That’s just in Germany, of course; comparative study needs to be done to make a more general case.
You can’t effectively make an argument like this without being able to answer some questions:
- How, specifically, do we distinguish deep literacy from more basic kinds of literacy?
- Where and when have rates of basic literacy been highest?
- What data do we have, for any of those places and times, to indicate the proportion of people achieving deep literacy (measured in relation both to basically-literate persons and to the whole population)?
Just to start. And I would ask a deeper and harder-to-answer question: For the overall health of a society, is it the number of people who achieve deep literacy that matters? Or is it the social and political influence of the deeply literate?
In other words, somewhat befitting Taruskin's objection to Steiner, Jacobs points out that this "deep literacy" some people talk about was never that widespread to begin with and that it was a rarified realm of the mind.
There are, as someone once put it, ideas so stupid only intellectuals can affirm them and one such idea is ...
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-erosion-of-deep-literacy
As Hermann Hesse pointed out, "[w]ithout words, without writing, and without books there would be no history," and so "there could be no concept of humanity."
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Yes, tell that to a baby and see how the baby responds. Without words, without writing and without books there'd be no history? I'm supposed to believe that storytellers as historians in non-literate cultures don't count? I'm supposed to run with the idea that literacy, which in some legends was described as a bane of memory because what can be written down can be forgotten, has been lost. Yes, yes, I hear we live in an age of distraction and people read lazily. It's one of the reasons I avoid Twitter while trying to be nice about the idea that other people can use it in socially beneficial ways. I just don't want to be on Twitter because, as anyone who has read even a single blog post of mine has probably seen, I refuse to write about the things I think about or care about in ways that are meant to be reducible to tweets.
There are folks who use Twitter whose work I read and respect but I don't usually read their tweets because I try to stay away from Twitter. It had some limited use to me during my Mars Hill chronicling days because of the jaw-dropping amount of stuff that was supposedly private that leaders gave away on Twitter as matters of public record. I try to cut those folks slack because as Terry Teachout put it years ago many of us are new to social media use and most of us, unlike Teachout himself, have not been professional journalists and so haven't thought through the implications of using what is, for all practical purposes 1) mass media 2) broadcast media and 3) print media, however mediated by cyberspace all of Twitter and such happen to be.
The thing is that while George Steiner talked at length about the demise of what more recent writers describe as "deep literacy" Steiner, at least, proposed a potential trade off, one that Richard Taruskin and John Borstlap seem to have studiously ignored while lambasting Steiner for their respective hobby horse reasons (I've got mine, I suppose, but I'm not writing here to emphasize that)--they missed that Steiner proposed that what the West may be losing in terms of what some call "deep literacy" is that there's a shift to a new kind of literacy, and Steiner proposed that the West was evolving a new and formidably comprehensive and pan-stylistic musical literacy. We live in an era where my brother can find out that Beth Gibbons of Portishead performed a version of Gorecki's Third, for instance. I'll pass on the Phillip Glass Bowie symphonies because I can listen to Bowie instead, but musicians interacting across putative stylistic boundaries is something that's been going on for generations and as Leo Brouwer put it, these types of fusion tend to get ignored by scholars who prefer to discuss music that can be slotted easily into pedagogical categories and boxes.
I've tried to sum up some thoughts about Steiner and Taruskin and Borstlap now and then.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/03/richard-taruskins-new-book-cursed.html
I think it's fair to say when someone has bad ideas. I think Adorno had some catastrophically bad ideas but I also think he had some brilliant observations about music as an art and I also believe that Terry Teachout had a point in proposing that the difference between an average critic and a great critic is that the great critic can be spectacularly wrong but is wrong in such a way as to spur other artists, writers and thinkers to come up with something interesting, useful or effective toward the end of proving that critic wrong. Or as Leonard B. Meyer put it, in the sciences a bad theory leads to science that simply fails whereas in the arts bad or fuzzy theories don't preclude playing some role in the creation of something we can consider beautiful art. Some writers have grappled with the reality that it seems the history of the arts is full of people who made beautiful art inspired by some very ugly ideas.
I have put my cards on the table in the past about how I think that writers like Taruskin and Borstlap have engaged more with what they believe Steiner is supposed to be saying than what Steiner wrote. I get the antipathy but I also think that writers as combative at Taruskin and Borstlap can be might let their soap box issues blinker their vision with respect to what writers like Steiner wrote. There are still ways to engage with the key ideas and assertions of Steiner and point out, a la Alan Jacobs, that this "deep literacy" may be a figment of academic imagination rather than something that corresponds to flesh and blood people who have lived in what's colloquially known as the real world.
Many people the world over for thousands of years were fully capable of understanding language without being literate and who can plausibly say that they were somehow less than "fully" human for that?
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