Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
There was an article about how reading is so important,
(00:02):
but it was too long, so I didn't read it.
It's one more thing I'm strong and getty speaking of books.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
I just saw this up on the screen, the screen capture,
so we can talk about it tomorrow. Oh, thirteen percent
of eighth graders are proficient in US history. They did
that study coming up on the two hundred and fiftieth
birthday of the country. My own eighth grader was complaining
yesterday he was looking forward to the chapter. It ended
(00:31):
up being a page. He was looking forward to learning
about the Civil War. They barely talked about it at all.
Gettysburg got like a mention in the fact that Lincoln
gave a speech called the Gettysburg Address. That was the
sum total of that and all the rest of it
was about how the Native Americans were affected by the
Civil War. And my son, who's super into history, so
he's watched hours and hours of YouTube videos about the
(00:54):
founding in the Civil War and all this sort of stuff.
He said. Kids that don't do that, he said, they
would They view of the Civil War would be just
what they got in school yesterday. I said, I know,
that's what drives me nuts, and so that's how you
end up with a thirteen percent of eighth graders are
proficient in US history. And as you've been pointing out
later lately, and it should be pointed out all the time,
(01:15):
proficient means you got above an F.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Yeah, yeah, it sounds wow, he's proficient. No, it's like
barely acceptable.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
So only thirteen percent have barely acceptable knowledge of their
own country's history. You cannot continue like that.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
And you cannot read or well enough house explanation of
when you deny people in understanding of their own history,
they don't know who they are, so then you can
tell them who they are. You know.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I've never talked about this much because I'm always uncomfortable
on how it sounds and how to present it. But
I used to watch a lot of book TV. Not
as much anymore. I don't know why not anymore. I
guess because I can listen to it. Didn't used to
be able to listen to it like this, But uh,
book TV on C Span two and it's a thing.
It's all day long. I think it's eighteen hours or
(02:07):
something like that of interviews with authors or authors giving
a speel about their book at bookstores and stuff like that,
and any time it's US history of any kind or
any really any history of any kind, it's a whole
bunch of old white guys and a few old white women,
and there's nobody else at those things.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
And I always think that's the only person that's interested
in this stuff, old white guys. And so I suppose
the you know, the progressive crowd would say, well, that's
because this country was set up to help white men
and nobody else, so nobody else says you could shut
the f up. On the other hand, anyway, that's enough
(02:50):
of that. I didn't mean to get off there.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah, I don't have time for book TV. I watched
TikTok video TV. It's you know, it's all about fifteen
second videos. The interviews are seven seconds long. So I
found this just crazy, crazy interesting. I don't know this guy,
Sam Chris, But you know, the interesting thing about substack
(03:13):
is and I probably need to cancel some of my
subscriptions because much like you know, like YouTube and Instagram
have shown everybody that there are way more amazing musicians
in the world than we suspected. American idol it was
actually kind of the start of this because you realized,
Oh wait a minute, there's like somebody with the best
(03:35):
voice I've ever heard in my life in every town
in America, and probably three to fifty of them, depending
on the size of the town. Right. But Substack, there
are so many people who have so many interesting ideas
and have research to fascinating questions and write so well.
I was just asked the other night do you write much?
And I'm like, yeah, I'm so mentally exhausted by the
(03:57):
time this show's over. I'd rather, you know, work on
my golf or write music. And the other thing is
I just if I were to subscribe to every Substack
column columnist I come across that I think is not
only really good, but is brilliant, I would go broke. Anyway.
(04:18):
I came across this on substack, and again, this gent's
name is Sam Christ I don't know much about him.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
What's it cost per sign on or whatever?
Speaker 1 (04:28):
It's up to the author. And I wish I could remember,
like I subscribe to Matt Tayebe's Substack and the Reality
Strikes Back thing, which is all about common sense in
the face of gender bending madness. But I can't remember
a couple more. But it's marbling more than they should
because it's impossible to get to all the good content.
(04:50):
But so this guy writes a lot about literacy and
learning and that sort of thing, and he writes about, well,
the title is reading is magic. What will happen in
our second peasanthood? And we've talked a little about how
the era of literacy of people reading books filled with
(05:11):
ideas and stuff, it's actually not. It didn't start very
long ago, and it appears to be ending. I mean,
so what's what's it generally considered to have started with
the Enlightenment, like sixteen hundreds or roughly. Yeah, okay, anyway,
so he writes in nineteen thirty one, there's this Soviet neuropsychologist,
(05:32):
and the fact that he was a Soviet doesn't enter
into it. But he was traveling into the foothills of
these mountains in the barren borderlands between Uzbekistan and Kirgizia,
which I've never heard of in my life, pretty this
time of year, to find out how the locals thought.
He had this theory that mental processes are social and
historical in origin. Not just that the content of our thoughts,
(05:54):
but the way we think is determined by the kind
of society we live in, and he trying to investigate
whether that was.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
True and amazingly deep and fascinating to think about.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah, it's uncomfortably close to some of the critical theory
stuff that is so ugly and dangerous and toxic. But
and so he went to this place that was a
different world than what he knew as an intellectual. In
the Soviet Union, dry hills, illiterate cattle herders, isolated green valleys,
(06:31):
there were illiterate peasants growing cotton. For centuries, essentially no
one there had been able to read or write. No one.
But that was changing somewhat because when the scientist arrived,
the Soviet government was forcing herders and peasants into new,
regimented collective farms where large numbers of rural people were
(06:51):
being taught to read as part of their great Soviet
program for bringing the Marxist to utopia. And so he
spent the next year among these people, as this guy writes,
bothering them with a series of annoying texts. And what
he found was that just a few years of basic
literacy education in an agricultural school had massive cognitive effects
(07:13):
and here's where it gets crazy. In one of his
early experiments, he showed people a group of geometrical figures,
complete and incomplete circles and triangles, squares and rectangles, drawn
with straight or dotted lines. He asked them to group
the shapes together, even if they didn't have any training
in geometry. Nearly half of the peasants who'd learned to
read sorted the shapes geometrically squares of square, circles of circles. Meanwhile,
(07:37):
none of the illiterate subjects considered the shapes geometrically at all.
They related to them as objects. One subject, a twenty
four year old woman from an isolated village, insisted that
nothing could be grouped with an incomplete circle that should
go by itself. That's the moon. When Lorea tried, the
scientists tried to suggest that she group as sc where
(08:00):
an erectangle, she refused, that's a glass and that's a
drinking bowl. They can't be put together. Other objects describe
the shapes as tense bracelets, mountains, irrigation ditches, and stars.
When sorting objects, collective farm workers put a saw with
a hammering because they're both tools, while peasants put a
saw with a log. The log has to be here too.
(08:20):
They'll be left without firewood, they won't be able to
do anything. So uh uh, So they couldn't relate to
things in an abstract way. Everything had to be an
object they were familiar with. And then he gets into
the most upsetting of Laria's puzzles with a mathematical problem.
(08:42):
He told the subjects that it took three hours to
walk from their village to a town and six along
the same road to a different town. How long would
it take to walk from the second town to the
third town? Again? Every single one of the collective farm
workers solved the problem, but the illiterate villagers knew very
well that the town one was actually closer than town
(09:03):
to and refused to answer. Laura kept saying that it
was just a scenario, but the villagers kept insisting that
they couldn't entertain a scenario that contradicted actual reality. No
one exploded, how can I solve a problem if it
wasn't so? And he took pains to point out that
these people weren't remotely stupid. They were perfectly capable of
thinking rationally and deductively, and they could make excellent judgments
(09:26):
about facts of direct concern to them. But they lived
in an incredibly conservative world with its walls closed tight
around direct sensory experience. Meanwhile, even a cursory exposure to
writing produces an entirely different kind of thought. It lives
in a spooky realm of ideal objects and useless categories,
where you can talk confidently about invisible bears and measured
(09:49):
distances even when they're going the wrong way. But if
we think, but what we think of as politics seems
to depend on this stuff, and revolutionary politics in particular.
What he I'm saying is abstract thinking seriously looking at
ideas seems almost impossible without the ability to read. For
reasons that scientists are just scratching the surface of understanding.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Well a little too late, since reading is going away.
So yeah, most people reading didn't really come around till
seventeen hundreds, when there is enough literacy and books printed
and everything like that. So all of the conversations we
have about populations prior to that Middle Ages go back
(10:35):
to the Roman Empire whatever, as almost all the literate people.
So I mean, so based on this thing we're talking about,
like a different species or animal than what we think
of as human beings because of the way they think.
So none of the things that we extrapolate about all
of those times make any sense.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Then, yeah, human nature doesn't change, but that's close to it.
I was. I'm reminded of reading Tim Sanderfer's brand new
book Declaring Liberty. Proclaiming Liberty copy next to me, Oh
you're important, and they point out that one of the
(11:17):
political philosophers that the Founding Fathers really really liked. One
of the first things he did was taking down the
idea of persecuting people for being witches, explaining how unjust
that was and how it's prone to hysteria and stupid
and we got to stop doing it. And it was
an example. I think it butts up against this, the
(11:38):
idea that you can't reason with people in a productive
way until they've learned to read and take on abstract
ideas outside themselves.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
I don't know, well if this is true, and I'm
not sure I believe it can be, but for the
sake of the artment, we'll go with it's true. If
this is true, I wonder what the next iteration of
humans is going to be like. Who just take in
short videos for all their information.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Yeah, he gets into that and it ain't great. Let
me throw in one more thing though, that I found
unbelievably compelling. This author points out that, like a lot
of his contemporaries, he had a basic, basically progressive model
of psychological development. Thinking based on abstractions is more advanced
than thinking based on direct experience. As time moves on,
(12:31):
the advanced way of doing things will obviously overtake the
more backwards, which is why he had to go to
the farthest barren fringes of the old Russian Empire to
find people who had never been exposed to writing. But
the villages he visited hadn't always been a backwater. A
thousand years ago, this land in the foothills of the
Alay Mountains Alie Mountains, I'm not sure, had been one
of the great centers of world civilization. In his notes,
(12:53):
he mentioned that he was walking in the homeland of scientists, astronomers, mathematicians,
and poets like guys I've never heard of. The illiterate
herders and peasants were living in the ruins of a
sophisticated literary culture that had for the most part vanished
from the world, and these people were utterly illiterate and
incapable of abstract thought in the very streets where great
(13:17):
philosophers had strode. And he's afraid that this could happen
to Western civilization too.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Sure could.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
I could do part two of this for the One
More Thing podcast tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
I wonder how happy they were?
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Being happy is one of my main goals in life
and should be for most people.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Yeah, Now, if you can't form a civilization that can
continue or protect yourself, it doesn't make any difference because
it won't last long. But I do wonder how happy
they were.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
That is a question that you know you'd need twenty
seven philosophers to argue each other to death to answer,
Or if you know you're better off being happy and
refusing to answer a theoretical question because you've never done it.
I don't know. Ignorant is a damn dog, But dogs
(14:13):
seem happy.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
It is beyond fascinating to me that the period of
reading for human beings might end up having a life
span of three hundred years. Roughly started around seventeen hundred
and it has ended roughly now. Our friend Tim sanderfer
We referenced his book. I've been talking to him about that.
People don't buy books anymore, people don't read anymore, and
it's exponentially going away because old people still kind of
(14:37):
read their dying off. Young people ain't got no interest
in reading books.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
So the future will be unambiguously hellish and miserable. Part
two of that discussion on tomorrow's One More Thing podcast.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Why would you want to miss that?
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Oh it'll be a nod kid, I kid, so join
us tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Well, I guess that's it.