Aliteracy (alit·er·a·cy): The quality or state of being able to read but uninterested in doing so.

It’s an ugly word aliteracy, don’t you think? I don’t like to use words like that but there seems to be no alternative, because illiteracy doesn’t capture the predicament we are dealing with, “people who can read but don’t”. Nor does “functional illiteracy” quite cut it because most are fully functional when it comes to interpreting road signs or writing up e-mails. The issue for me is rather the sort of reading that is an end in itself and which can only be done with the whole mind.

I came across a large study commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts (around 17,000 human guinea pigs interviewed through each of the last three U.S. censuses against a background of other data) has documented that there was a steady drop in “serious” or literary book reading through recent decades which has picked up the pace in the last decade or so. This applies across all classes, races, nationalities, genders, what have you — though the drop in such reading among the youth is quickest, and threatens an even faster overall decline for the coming generation.

We don’t have such a study for Canada or Pakistan/India, at least not that I can find, but I will believe that the observations apply over there too and quite possibly throughout the West. Some groups read more than others; the wealthy read more than the poor; women read more than men; English-speaking people read more than most other-speaking people — that sort of thing. But the trend-line is consistent: it goes down and only down everywhere.

Well… as someone who has long been noting that this civilization is going to the dogs, I am barely surprised, however I gain no pleasure from it. I would really like to see some proof of even modest recovery somewhere. And I will continue to do whatever I can to fight the violation of night. But pretending things are not as they are will never get us anywhere.

The paradox –yes, there is always a paradox — is that the technical level of literacy remains so high. The general ability to read is about as rare as democracy in human history. Believe it or not, it is one of those Scottish inventions (universal schooling) that has spread in disobedience of human nature to the most unlikely places.

But such narrow literacy as we have retained is now being sustained, I think less and less by our bureaucratized schools and more and more by technology. It is necessary to be thoroughly alphabetical to survive in electronic space. My own impression from watching my young cousins grow is that even if we shut down the schools entirely… about the same percentage would learn to “read” and type.

The potential to THINK and articulate thought requires a lot more than technical literacy. It involves the projection by imagination into objects beyond ourselves. It relies upon mysteriously sophisticated apprehensions of time and space, of historical time and personal location. It calls for the syntactical mastery of words a being-at-home in language that may be accomplished even without technical literacy; though it is impossible to build without literacy over time. Poetry, novels, and plays are among the toys with which the playful human-animal acquires such skills.

In defiance of human nature (because humans are lazy and without grace would only be motivated by their hungers and lusts) we were able to build a remarkable universal culture. The central accomplishment of modernity was making high culture available to people of almost all degrees, right? Its central risk was the “neglect of the superiority” that sustained high culture at the cost of keeping most of the people at the peasant level grubbing the fields.

So, AAGAHIS, what we are now experiencing in post-modernity is the peasants’ revenge – or what José Ortega y Gasset (Philosopher, who I suggest you should read about) called the revolt of the masses. This is not something sudden but increasing a “universal degradation of standards” that has restlessly progressed through much more than a century — the dying at every level of society of the ability to maintain high culture and with it the ability to fight ignorance.

With that loss comes the loss of freedom – not for some but for all.

Tags: Aagahi, Aliteracy, Armughan Azam, Freedom, José Ortega y Gasset, National Endowment for the Arts, Switched off & Plugged In, U.S. censuses