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 who 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, 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 to be at
grade seven or eight. They convey that a
truly acceptable literacy of 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment