Post-Literacy

I’ve now read two pieces on the idea of “post-literacy” which require some digestion.

First, I should clarify what I mean by “post-literate.” This is a term that has its roots in Marshall McLuhan’s book Gutenburg Galaxy. To say that we are living in a “Post-literate age” does not mean that people have suddenly lost the ability to read, nor does it suggest that modern society has reverted to a pre-literate age (e.g., an age governed by oral tradition). Rather, it’s a term reckons with the fact that our technological and social moment has largely replaced the reading of the written word with images, radio/audio, tweet-size text, scrolling, etc.

Recent data, not to mention my own and fellow teachers’ set of anecdotal evidence, appears to support this new reality. No one is reading.

…that is, no one is reading the way people in a Western society were reading between (say) the centuries 1500-1950s-ish. The reason is fairly straight forward: the printed word is no longer the primary media by which people learn or engage in the public square.

We live in an age which has undergone and is undergoing a seismic shift in literacy comparable to the age in which Gutenberg invented the printing press. In the same way that the printing press made cheap books available to the average person in the 16th century, the smartphone has been made available to almost everyone in the 21st century. Everyone, from panhandlers to elementary-aged students, have access to a device that prioritizes images and audio over the written word.

This brings me to the first article by Michael Cuenco. Cuenco outlines Marshall McLuhan’s philosophy of media and the effects it has on society through history. One of the main takeaways from Cuenco’s essay (…and there are many takeaways) is the idea that revolutions in technological modes of literacy have a direct influence on social and individual psychology.

A literacy within a “pre-literate society” was defined by oral modes of storytelling and the carrying of messages. Within a McLuhanian framework, “oral man” exhibits an epistemic literacy in which time and space are cyclical/simultaneous, knowledge and wisdom are integrative and associative. This mode of being contrasts sharply with “literate man” for whom the written word represents an epistemic literacy that is linear, sequential, and analytic.

Human civilization in the West has already moved from an oral to a literate stage thanks, in part, to the development of writing systems. One only needs to read Plato’s Phaedrus to recognize that even the ancients recognized and worried about the potential psychological impact of “writing.” In its early days, the fledgling writing system had a relatively small effect on society at large. Acquiring books, manuscripts, parchment, etc. was expensive and hard to come by. Much of the population remained illiterate. All of this changed, however, with the invention of the printing press. Books were cheaper and more easily accessible, therefore more people learned to read. Society as a whole made the leap from being predominately oral to literate. The consequences of this shift worked itself out over centuries, but it’s no accident (McLuhan and Cuenco would argue) that the transition eventually led to the “Age of Reason” and “Enlightenment.” The written word, particularly in the form of a bound volume, is an image of the rationality itself–linear, progressive, and imbued with telos. As an image, the book eschews the simultaneity time, and the associative and integrative epistemology of myth.

According to Cuenco, McLuhan’s argument is that the technological developments of the mid-twentieth century–specifically with the advent of television–mark another moment in human history where the emergence of a new technology will accelerate a transition from one age to another. We are on the brink of passing into a “post-literate age” which take on many of the characteristics of the “oral age” while retaining elements of the “literate age.” Much of McLuhan’s work is centered on trying to understand how and why this transition will take place. He warns that the transition is not a guarantee of future success. We are headed either for a new mode of consciousness that has learned to balance the oral with the literate, or we are headed for a “post-literate perdition.”

In a recent essay for Christianity Today, Brad East takes McLuhan’s arguments and applies them to recent upheavals and hand-wringing in Christian culture. Here are a few highlights:

First, we are in the midst of a seismic technological shift that has already shaken the ground beneath Christians’ feet. We should not continue pretending that the old world is still with us. This includes the nature of ordinary believers’ relationship to the Bible.

Perhaps we need to reimagine what “biblical literacy” can mean: not necessarily the reading and rereading of one’s personal Bible, but a mind, imagination, and vocabulary shot through with the stories and characters and events of Holy Scripture.”

These suggestions are tentative, as I said. I’m open to others, as all of us should be. But alternative visions are what we need. Christians have not always been readers, and it seems that for the foreseeable future, a majority of Christians will not be readers anymore. Discerning a durable form of faithfulness for this new and uncertain time is one of the pressing challenges of our day.

Insofar as the Protestant reformation was made possible, in part, by the printing press, and its theological battles took place within the height of the literate age, Brad’s observations make perfect sense. Having grown up in the evangelical world of the 90s and early 2000s, I have felt the shift. Reading my Bible everyday was a requirement, and I had many friends who did the same. This was how you developed a personal relationship with Jesus.

And yet, within a McLuhan framework, it’s worth noting that the idea that reading a book was essential for my spiritual development is a holdover from the literate age. And it’s a little bit of an odd fundamental of faith when compared to the rest of church history. Many saints and martyrs were functionally illiterate. McLuhan’s observation doesn’t invalidate the practice of reading the Bible everyday, but it does contextualize the overt social pressure to do so.

As East points out, this fundamental of protestant Christianity has not escaped the changing literacy landscape. Very few people–especially in the younger generation–are reading their Bibles anymore. At least, they are not reading them the way that I was taught to read the Bible when I was growing up. There are real negative effects of this change, many of which East points out.

But I agree with East: we must make our peace with this new post-literate reality, and start to ask difficult questions about what we should accommodate and what we should reject if we are to continue to encourage people in discipleship and spiritual growth.

As an educator, I want to also shift my focus to classical education: how should we approach reading, writing, math, and science instruction in an age where very few students read? Should we double-down on forcing students to read physical copies of long books? If so, how many? What is the good we hope to preserve by setting a rigorous curriculum that requires reading? Is reading itself an inherent good?

If nothing else, we have to ask questions that will help us navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of bull-headed conservatism (“If it was good enough for grandpa, then its good enough for me!”) and uncritical progressivism.