Read this and weep

Chris Hedges writes in Truthdig that illiteracy in America is more widespread than we'd imagined:

"We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.

"There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book."

"The illiterate rarely vote and when they do vote they do so without the ability to make decisions based on textual information. American political campaigns, which have learned to speak in the comforting epistemology of images, eschew real ideas and policy for cheap slogans and reassuring personal narratives. Political propaganda now masquerades as ideology. Political campaigns have become an experience. They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills. They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment and collective salvation. Campaigns that succeed are carefully constructed psychological instruments that manipulate fickle public moods, emotions and impulses, many of which are subliminal. They create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a state of mindlessness. They thrust us into an eternal present. They cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia. It is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform our politics and our lives. We prefer happy illusions. And it works because so much of the American electorate, including those who should know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates. We confuse how we feel with knowledge.

"The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless. They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed. They are hostages to brands. Brands come with images and slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand. Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus. And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures. This is our brave new world.

"Political leaders in our post-literate society no longer need to be competent, sincere or honest. They only need to appear to have these qualities. Most of all they need a story, a narrative. The reality of the narrative is irrelevant. It can be completely at odds with the facts. The consistency and emotional appeal of the story are paramount. The most essential skill in political theater and the consumer culture is artifice. Those who are best at artifice succeed. Those who have not mastered the art of artifice fail. In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek or want honesty. We ask to be indulged and entertained by clichés, stereotypes and mythic narratives that tell us we can be whomever we want to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities and that our glorious future is preordained, either because of our attributes as Americans or because we are blessed by God or both.

"The ability to magnify these simple and childish lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives these lies the aura of an uncontested truth. We are repeatedly fed words or phrases like yes we can, maverick, change, pro-life, hope or war on terror. It feels good not to think. All we have to do is visualize what we want, believe in ourselves and summon those hidden inner resources, whether divine or national, that make the world conform to our desires. Reality is never an impediment to our advancement.

"The Princeton Review analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. It reviewed these transcripts using a standard vocabulary test that indicates the minimum educational standard needed for a reader to grasp the text. During the 2000 debates, George W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.7) and Al Gore at a seventh-grade level (7.6). In the 1992 debates, Bill Clinton spoke at a seventh-grade level (7.6), while George H.W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did H. Ross Perot (6.3). In the debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the candidates spoke in language used by 10th-graders. In the debates of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas the scores were respectively 11.2 and 12.0. In short, today’s political rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a 10-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. It is fitted to this level of comprehension because most Americans speak, think and are entertained at this level. This is why serious film and theater and other serious artistic expression, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of American society. Voltaire was the most famous man of the 18th century. Today the most famous “person” is Mickey Mouse.

"In our post-literate world, because ideas are inaccessible, there is a need for constant stimulus. News, political debate, theater, art and books are judged not on the power of their ideas but on their ability to entertain. Cultural products that force us to examine ourselves and our society are condemned as elitist and impenetrable. Hannah Arendt warned that the marketization of culture leads to its degradation, that this marketization creates a new celebrity class of intellectuals who, although well read and informed themselves, see their role in society as persuading the masses that “Hamlet” can be as entertaining as “The Lion King” and perhaps as educational. “Culture,” she wrote, “is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.”

“There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect,” Arendt wrote, “but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.”

"The change from a print-based to an image-based society has transformed our nation. Huge segments of our population, especially those who live in the embrace of the Christian right and the consumer culture, are completely unmoored from reality. They lack the capacity to search for truth and cope rationally with our mounting social and economic ills. They seek clarity, entertainment and order. They are willing to use force to impose this clarity on others, especially those who do not speak as they speak and think as they think. All the traditional tools of democracies, including dispassionate scientific and historical truth, facts, news and rational debate, are useless instruments in a world that lacks the capacity to use them.

"As we descend into a devastating economic crisis, one that Barack Obama cannot halt, there will be tens of millions of Americans who will be ruthlessly thrust aside. As their houses are foreclosed, as their jobs are lost, as they are forced to declare bankruptcy and watch their communities collapse, they will retreat even further into irrational fantasy. They will be led toward glittering and self-destructive illusions by our modern Pied Pipers—our corporate advertisers, our charlatan preachers, our television news celebrities, our self-help gurus, our entertainment industry and our political demagogues—who will offer increasingly absurd forms of escapism.

"The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying. Obama used hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds to appeal to and manipulate this illiteracy and irrationalism to his advantage, but these forces will prove to be his most deadly nemesis once they collide with the awful reality that awaits us."

Comments

[tinker]

This disturbing report - that nearly a third of Americans are illiterate or nearly so -- is both shocking, and yet, in it's own way, not as surprising to me as it probably should be... Especially coming on top of a blog post, I just read earlier tonight on DiscoMermaid (Laini has a link to it on her current post). One of the lines I remember hearing Obama say, that really grabbed my attention, is when he talked about Americans needing to turn off the television, and read with their children. I wish I could remember the exact quote now, but I remember feeling like giving him a standing ovation in my living room, when I heard him talking about that. I hope he continues to spread that message - and I hope people will be inspired to do just that.
Heaven help us all~xox

[elizabeth]

That is sad. I cannot imagine a life without reading. If I were to buy all the books I read, I would go bankrupt. Thank goodness for the library and bookstores with comfy chairs. :)

[jeanie]

The part about 80 percent not buying a book got to me. I can hardly stop!

[julochka]

those are shocking statistics! what's amazing is that bookstores are full of people. i'm shocked to hear that it's only 20% of the people! thank you for sharing this article!

[Sharon]

This does not bode well for our democracy.

[Chris]

I am going to read the rest of the article right after I say this little rant:
What amazes me is how many of us who can read don't prioritize doing so. We just won't make time for it. And it opens up life in a completely different and personal way than does watching all our favorite shows and internet browsing (which you know I love to do!). It is very sad to me when I hear from a friend that they don't have time to read. However, they DO have time to watch Top Chef.

I know it's a very different issue, but how sad we would be if we'd never gotten the luxury of sitting and hearing the voice of a good author in our private minds, building a whole universe we otherwise wouldn't see.

Off to read the article now.

[gillian at indigo blue]

I am having trouble with those numbers. They are far too great.
What a sad thing.
This subject is close to my heart as my own grandmother never learned to read or write. It always bothered me. I wondered what her life would have been like, had she known.
xoxo

[Randal Graves]

"Me fail English? That's unpossible!"

Ralph Wiggum, poster boy for modern American society. It's okay to read books people, really, it is.

[Allegra]

I cannot imagine a life without books. May as well take the oxygen out of my air, we are always wondering what to do with the ocean of books we live with. Our dining room is now "the library" pretentious as it may sound. We converted our dining room into a soothing, quiet space surrounded by books where one can go and sit, put big books on the round table and spend hours in quiet solitude traveling through their pages, even from a cookbook to some distant and wondrous place.

As you know we have not watched tv going on twenty years. What a wise, wonderful decision that was! We get the New York Times every Sunday and the Book Review is my Rand-McNally or my Garmin if you prefer to find my way to Amazon. From my bed I have ordered extraordinary books, late at night and that makes me more giddy than finding a vintage dress that fits and on sale.

So yes, an illiterate country is bound to follow the snake oil salesmen wherever they want to go. Reading is fundamental should be more than a slogan, in our country it should be an imperative for all.

[Barbara]

I do weep when I consider these statistics but I can attest that here is a family of four AVID readers and book-buyers and library-users. I send several books a year to my nephews as gifts.

I also weep, as does Sir Ian McKellan, to consider the work of a teacher named Rafe Esquith out in California. (Mr. Esquith has a book called 'Teach as though Your Hair's on Fire') He and his fifth graders are jaw-droppingly awesome. Please check them out at www.hobartshakespeareans.org ... weep a little at their 'Will Power' ... Then you smile.

[ally bean]

This explains so much to me. I had no idea that so many Americans were illiterate, yet now that I read this it makes sense to me why I always feel so out of place. I read and think-- sometimes just for the fun of it. I'm moored to reality. I accept complexity and live very happily with ambiguity. Why, I can even debate issues!

I'm doomed, aren't I?

[Christina]

I want my kids to read this! This is a shame. I volunteer for a literacy program and I agree, many of them hold a high school diploma. This is sad. The education system is failing. I am not a rocket scientist but I am at the table each day with my kids teaching them. I crossed my fingers at borders book store yesterday, hoping my discount/coupon would help the cost. Anything we couldn't afford was gotten at the library.

When we decided we would be charge of our kids educations we were told the best thing to do was to ease them into the love of reading. That was the best advice.

I get the willies when I walk into the house of someone who doesn't have books out. Hmm... ; )

[Joyce Ellen Davis]

Such a sad comment about American literacy. Well, I've certainly done my part to raise those stats--I've become ADDICTED to Amazon and buying books over the net with one click....