This is a speculation on my part, but I think it makes a lot of sense. In the New Yorker a week ago, a writer looked at the science of reading. His piece, called Twilight of the Books raised crucial points for those of interested in democracy and concerned about American’s recent appetite for self-destruction.
The piece begins with the familiar bad news about the decline of reading, but goes much deeper into the implications of this trend, far surpassing the usual hand-wringing about how people just don’t read Middlemarch anymore. Let me focus on two central concepts.
First, according to recent brain research, reading actually changes the brain in crucial ways:
A major breakthrough occurred around 750 B.C.E., when the Greeks,
borrowing characters from a Semitic language, perhaps Phoenician,
developed a writing system that had just twenty-four letters. There had
been scripts with a limited number of characters before, as there had
been consonants and even occasionally vowels, but the Greek alphabet
was the first whose letters recorded every significant sound element in
a spoken language in a one-to-one correspondence, give or take a few
diphthongs. In ancient Greek, if you knew how to pronounce a word, you
knew how to spell it, and you could sound out almost any word you saw,
even if you’d never heard it before. Children learned to read and write
Greek in about three years, somewhat faster than modern children learn
English, whose alphabet is more ambiguous. The ease democratized
literacy; the ability to read and write spread to citizens who didn’t
specialize in it. The classicist Eric A. Havelock believed that the
alphabet changed “the character of the Greek consciousness." [and]
…the scholar Walter J. Ong once speculated that television and similar
media are taking us into an era of “secondary orality,” akin to the
primary orality that existed before the emergence of text. If so, it is
worth trying to understand how different primary orality must have been
from our own mind-set. Havelock theorized that, in ancient Greece, the
effort required to preserve knowledge colored everything. In Plato’s
day, the word mimesis referred to an actor’s performance of his
role, an audience’s identification with a performance, a pupil’s
recitation of his lesson, and an apprentice’s emulation of his master.
Plato, who was literate, worried about the kind of trance or emotional
enthrallment that came over people in all these situations, and
Havelock inferred from this that the idea of distinguishing the knower
from the known was then still a novelty. In a society that had only
recently learned to take notes, learning something still meant
abandoning yourself to it. “Enormous powers of poetic memorization
could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity,” he
wrote.
Second, Ong takes the research to show a fundamental conflict between two ways of thinking. A literate audience has little difficulty with concepts; an oral audience has difficulty even understanding the concept of a concept:
Soon after this study, Ong synthesized existing research into a vivid
picture of the oral mind-set. Whereas literates can rotate concepts in
their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories.
According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of
writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their
transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as
accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting
those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and
redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex
argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and
abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in
“enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way
to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not
to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no
older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different
from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the
scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate
culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a
process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from
myth.
Repeat: Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their
concepts in stories.
Now take a look at this fascinating piece by a Nation editor, who spent months going door to door in Wisconsin in 2004, trying to convince undecided voters to pull a lever for John Kerry. Christopher Hayes writes:
Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we
at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We’re giving them
too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush,
but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man
told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney,
an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to
make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who
had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush
after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man’s house,
she still couldn’t make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman
who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that
though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to
back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research. The
office became quiet as we all stopped what we were doing to listen to
one of our fellow organizers try, nobly, to disabuse her of this
notion. Despite having the facts on her side, the organizer didn’t have
much luck.
But not only do undecided voters have difficulty thinking clearly, they don’t understand the concept of "issues." Hayes writes:
Undecided voters don’t think in terms of issues. Perhaps the
greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because
of the "issues." That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy,
they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they
also support social welfare programs. Occasionally I did encounter
undecided voters who were genuinely cross-pressured–a couple who was
fiercely pro-life, antiwar, and pro-environment for example–but such
cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked
undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made
up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them
to name their favorite prime number.
The majority of undecided voters I spoke to couldn’t name a single
issue that was important to them. This was shocking to me. Think about
it: The "issue" is the basic unit of political analysis for campaigns,
candidates, journalists, and other members of the chattering classes.
It’s what makes up the subheadings on a candidate’s website, it’s what
sober, serious people wish election outcomes hinged on, it’s what every
candidate pledges to run his campaign on, and it’s what we always
complain we don’t see enough coverage of.
But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien
to most of the undecided voters I spoke to. (This was also true of a
number of committed voters in both camps–though I’ll risk being
partisan here and say that Kerry voters, in my experience, were more
likely to name specific issues they cared about than Bush supporters.)
At first I thought this was a problem of simple semantics–maybe, I
thought, "issue" is a term of art that sounds wonky and intimidating,
causing voters to react as if they’re being quizzed on a topic they
haven’t studied. So I tried other ways of asking the same question:
"Anything of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried
about anything? Are you excited about what’s been happening in the
country in the last four years?"
These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far
as I could tell, the problem wasn’t the word "issue"; it was a
fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad
category of the "political." The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to
have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as
political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they
would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I
would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums,
they would respond in disbelief–not in disbelief that he had a plan,
but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if
you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into
December.
Next question: are undecided voters literates or orals? Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out?
Kit Stolz 