Aug 20, 2019

Understanding Human Ignorance >>>>> Chapter Five >>>>> Illiteracy and Semi-Literacy


Happiness is grounded in concern for one’s fellows and a genuine desire to make life better for all people on the planet at the time one lives and as one anticipates the future.

 

Before the advent of writing systems, oral communication was the only means of recording thoughts, including those pertaining to ethics and spirituality in poetry, stories, and epics that combined those two forms.  In the aftermath of the creation of systems of writing in certain parts of the globe, many societies continued to transmit intellectual, creative, ethical, and spiritual thoughts orally, operating without the written word.  Such societies often continued to operate very close to nature, so that the sun, moon, rivers, lakes, land, all manner of features of the sky and what could be observed of the cosmos pervaded the lives of humans, giving them ideas of creation, deity, and meaning. 

 

Given that God is to be found in and in contemplation of Nature and Cosmos, people living in preliterate and non-literate societies had a deeper understanding of life than would be the case with the advent of civilization.  Writing systems came with the urbanization and hierarchical mechanisms of control identified with civilization.  City life and concerns associated with urban people presented distractions that people in less complex forms of social and civic organization did not have.  Although people warred on each other, the capacity for enormous destruction was limited and the impetus for survival necessitated a focus on what was good for the community as a whole in the present and in contemplation of the future.

 

Civilizations have been dominated by elites who sought to control all aspects of existence as much as possible.  Expressed concern for the greater good was mostly a rationalization for the exercise of power.  Life in the palace and territorial expansion became chief goals for the governing elite and associated militarists, and by extension those scribes who served their needs.  Concern was not to make life better for all but for an elite few, who pretended that the greater number of inhabitants in realm and empire would also benefit from their political, territorial, and hedonistic gratifications.

 

Scribes used writing systems first created approximately 3500-3000 BCE by the Vinca culture of Serbia and then very proximately by elites in Sumer, the first of numerous influential civilizations in Mesopotamia, the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (today’s Iraq).  The writing system of Sumer, cuneiform, was in the beginning highly functional in application, used to advance the purposes of mercantile, trader, and government elites.  This was true, too, in Egypt, in which the pharaohs and others in the bureaucracy used hieroglyphics, the first writing system to incorporate phonetic values, to further their personal aggrandizements and to control the populace.  Hieroglyphics, while a very distinct system, was at a high degree of likelihood inspired by the Serbian and Sumerian initiatives.

 

Over the expanse of Eurasia, other people created writing systems that may have had some sense of those initiatives but were largely independent.  Some time after 2000 BCE, elites in the urban center of Harappa in the Indus River Valley created an as yet undeciphered script, used for the familiar mercantile and governing purposes.  By 1200 BCE, the ruling classes of the Shang Dynasty recorded details of their religious sacrifices, military fates, and matters of law and governance on oracle bones.

 

More definitely independently generated in the Serbian and Sumerian manner were scripts developed by the elites of the Americas from today’s Mexico southward.  During 900-400 BCE, the Olmecs and Zapotecs created royal iconography and calendars via writing systems that furthered the aims of elites in today’s Mexico.  And in today’s Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and southward to Guatemala, the Mayans created the most sophisticated writing system of the American pre-Columbian era, used for administration and for the propagation of the religion and governing dictates of the ruling class.

 

Inspired by a succession of scripts induced by the achievements of the Serbians and Sumerians, the Greeks developed an alphabetic system during 1100-700 BCE that feature consonants and vowels.  But this alphabetic system in all likelihood was part of a historical concatenation dating to the consonantal alphabetic system of the Canaanites from 1500 BCE.  This script became influential upon those elites who developed the Phoenician writing system featuring the first linear alphabet, a script which in turn inspired Hebrew and Aramaic systems.  The Hebrew system was used by those who migrated to Canaan during 1200-1000 BCE;  the system evolved into the new “Square Hebrew” system after the 6th century BCE Babylonian exile.

 

Aramaic, developed during the same 1200-1000 BCE period as in the Canaanite case, became a hugely influential system, adopted by the Achaemenid rulers of Persia and inspiring systems ranging to Turkish and Mongol populations in today’s Siberia, Mongolia, and Turkestan.  With the expansion of trade and associated advantages of reading and writing for mercantile classes, literacy in West Asia (Middle East) may have increased to 15-20% of the population.  Literacy may have been in that range also in the Roman Republic and Empire, where from 1200 BCE Latin evolved from systems used by the Etruscan and Latin peoples and from the various systems of the Mediterranean and West Asia.   And during the Middle Ages (500-1500 CE), Latin was used by Christians at the papal court and by clergy and monks throughout Europe for purposes of maintaining the papacy;  and by governing aristocrats, who often employed these clerics and monks do their administrative bidding.

 

The Renaissance featured a revival of interest in the humanistic works of the Greeks and Romans and created a spirit of critical analysis that impelled a concern for reform of received institutions, including conspicuously the Roman Catholic Church.  Protestants created their own orthodoxies and manifested their particular institutional deficiencies, but their approach to religion proved a boon to literacy.  With Protestant emphasis on actually reading the Bible, with new printing presses churning out works far more cheaply, and with the quest for data and facts engendered by the Enlightenment (1600-1800, Age of Reason, Scientific Revolution), some nations of northern Europe surged toward full literacy;  in Sweden, literacy became a prerequisite for marriage.

 

But in the British Isles and then in the United States literacy remained below 50% through the 19th and into the 20th century.  Worldwide, the masses remained mostly illiterate until the latter half of the 20th century:  Literacy increased from 55.7% in 1950 to 86.2%  in 2015.   In the year 2019, literacy remains wildly variable:  almost full literacy in North America, Europe, West Asia, and Central Asia;  above 90 percent in East Asia, the Pacific, Latin America;  67.55 percent in South Asia and North Africa;  and 59.76 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Literacy among youth (younger than 15 years of age) augurs more promisingly for the future, but still is at only 84.03 percent for South Asia and North Africa and 70.06 percent for Sub-Saharan Africa.

 

And although female literacy increased fifty percent from the year 1970 through 2000, reducing the gender gap, there has been stagnation in the literacy rates for women, who constitute 63 percent of the world’s 745,000 illiterate people.  In North Africa, the gap is sixteen percentage points, with 70 percent of women and 86% of men literate;  the comparable figures for South Asia are 58 percent and 77 percent;  and for Sub-Saharan Africa 52 percent and 68 percent.  Thus, although illiteracy worldwide is now low, gender and regional disparities exist.  In the contemporary world, these disparities predict others:  Incarcerated people across the globe tend heavily toward illiteracy;  children of literate mothers are 50 percent more likely to live past the age of five years.

 

Literacy rates are all the more disturbing, since reportage of such rates indicates only very minimal literacy.  Scholars classify literacy in three or four categories that rise from the very basic literacy recorded in reported rates to a classification typically labeled “full prose proficiency.”  Those who possess full prose proficiency are readers who can comprehend complex texts, defined as those assigned at the undergraduate level in college.  To make this reference concrete, perpend the following :

 

Such ability would be required, for example, to understand the much-discussed Mueller Report from an investigation into actions that might rise to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and thus involve impeachable offenses.  Scholars estimate that only 15 percent of the American adult population have full prose proficiency.

 

Only fifteen (15%) of adults in the United States could read this chapter and the other chapters of Understanding Human Ignorance, fully comprehend the articles entered on my blog, or read my books that appear on the blog or those that have been commercially published. 

 

And dauntingly, such scholars fix the literacy rate for the average American adult at grade seven or eight.  They convey that a truly acceptable literacy rate abides only in the 65-85 percent range;  that 19 percent of the American adult population cannot comprehend a newspaper or comparable website, or fill out a job application;  that 50 percent cannot read at an eighth grade level (understanding that many grade 8 students also cannot read at grade level);  and that 21-23 percent of adults have trouble locating information even in rudimentary texts or making low-level inferences.

 

Thus, people who lived in societies before the advent of writing systems proceeded on their earthly sojourn more fully in control of their lives than have those who lived in those literate societies called civilizations.  Once civilizations developed and society became socially stratified and occupationally specialized, male governing, military, and scribal elites used literacy as a device of control.  Failure in contemporary society to educate most people (who attend wretched public schools) at a high level of literacy suggests strongly that elites continue to maneuver to send their children to private schools (the case, for example with almost all Senators and Representatives in the United States Congress) or the best suburban schools they can find.

 

The United States and other putatively advanced nations who claim democracy as a descriptor of governance do so in name only:  They have yet to become the democracies that they imagine themselves to be.

 

This means more work for women, who shall lead the world into the future.              

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