This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. There was an article about how reading is so important, but it was too long, so I didn't read it. It's one more thing. Armstrong and Getty. One more thing. Speaking of books, I just saw this up on the screen. Let me screen capture it so we can talk about it tomorrow. Oh. 13% of 8th graders are proficient in U.S. history. They did that study coming up on the 250th birthday of the country. my own eighth grader was complaining yesterday he was looking forward to the chapter it ended up being a page uh 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 and my son who's super into history so he's watched hours and hours of YouTube videos about the founding and the Civil War and all this sort of stuff. He said, kids that don't do that, he said, their 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 13% of 8th graders are proficient in U.S. history. And as you've been pointing out lately, and it should be pointed out all the time, proficient means you got above an F. Yeah. Yeah, it sounds, wow, he's proficient. No, it's like barely acceptable. So only 13% have barely acceptable knowledge of their own country's history. You cannot continue like that. And you cannot read Orwell enough. How is explanation of when you deny people an understanding of their own history, they don't know who they are. So then you can tell them who they are. You know, 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 book TV on C-SPAN 2, it's a thing. It's all day long. I think it's 18 hours or something like that of interviews with authors or authors giving a spiel about their book at bookstores and stuff like that. And any time it's U.S. 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. Wow. 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 has any interest. You could shut the F up, on the other hand. Anyway, that's enough of that. I didn't mean to get off on that. Yeah, I don't have time for book TV. I watch TikTok video TV. It's all about 15-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? is and i i probably need to cancel some of my subscriptions because much like you know like youtube and instagram have have shown everybody that there are way more amazing musicians in the world than we suspected american idol that was actually kind of the start of this because you realized oh wait a minute there's like somebody with the best 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 um but substack there are so many people who have so many interesting ideas and and have researched 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 time the show's over i'd rather you know work on my golf game or write music. And the other thing is, if I were to subscribe to every Substack columnist I come across that I think is not only really good, but is brilliant, I would go broke. Anyway, I came across this on Substack. And again, this gent's name is Sam Christ. I don't know much about him. What's it cost per sign-on? It's up to the author. oh really and i wish i could remember like i subscribed to matt taibbi's substack and oh the reality strikes back uh thing which is all about uh common sense in the face of gender bending madness uh but i can't remember a couple more but it's probably more than they should because it's impossible to get to all the good content 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 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 it generally considered to have started with? the Enlightenment? Like the 1600s? Roughly. Yeah, okay. Anyway, so he writes in 1931, there's this Soviet neuropsychologist, 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 Kyrgyzha, 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, but the way we think is determined by the kind of society we live in. And he was trying to investigate whether that was true. That's amazingly deep and fascinating to think about. Yeah, it's uncomfortably close to some of the critical theory stuff that is so ugly and dangerous and toxic. And so he went to this place that was of a different world than what he knew as an intellectual in the Soviet Union. Dry hills, illiterate cattle herders, isolated green valleys. 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 scientists arrived, the Soviet government was forcing herders and peasants into new regimented collective farms where large numbers of rural people were being taught to read as part of their great Soviet program for bringing the Marxist 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. 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 have any training in geometry nearly half of the peasants who learned to read sorted the shapes geometrically Squares of squares, circles of circles. Meanwhile, none of the illiterate subjects considered the shapes geometrically at all. They related to them as objects. One subject, a 24-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 Luria, the scientist, tried to suggest that she group a square and a rectangle, she refused. That's a glass and that's a drinking bowl. They can't be put together. Other objects described the shapes as tents, bracelets, mountains, irrigation, ditches, and stars. When sorting objects collected, farm workers put a saw with a hammer because they're both tools, while peasants put a saw with a log. The log has to be here, too. They'll be left without firewood. They won't be able to do anything. 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 Luria's puzzles with a mathematical problem. 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 two and refused to answer. Loria 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 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 distances even when they're going the wrong way. But what we think of as politics seems to depend on this stuff and revolutionary politics in particular. what he's 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 well a little too late since reading is going away um so yeah uh most people reading didn't really come around until 1700s when there was 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 to the roman empire whatever it was almost all illiterate 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 then yeah human nature doesn't change but that's close to it i i was i'm reminded of uh reading tim sandifer's brand new book uh declaring liberty is that right proclaiming liberty proclaiming liberty copy here right next to me oh you important um and they point out that one of the uh 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 and it was an example i think it butts up against this the idea that you you can't reason with people in a productive way until they've learned to read and take on abstract ideas outside themselves 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 art we'll go with it's true um 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 yeah he gets into that and it ain't great let me throw in one more thing though that i found unbelievably compelling um this author points out that like a lot of his contemporaries he had a basic uh basically progressive model of psychological development um thinking based on abstractions is more advanced than thinking based on direct experience as time moves on 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, Alay Mountains, I'm not sure, had been one of the great centers of world civilization. In his notes, 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 philosophers had strode. And he's afraid that this could happen to Western civilization, too. Sure could. We could do part two of this for the One More Thing podcast tomorrow. I wonder how happy they were. Oh. Because being happy is one of my main goals in life and should be for most people. Yeah. 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. That is a question that, you know, you'd need 27 philosophers to argue each other to death to answer. Or if 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 seem happy. It is beyond fascinating to me that the period of reading for human beings might end up having a lifespan of 300 years, roughly. Start around 1700, and it has ended roughly now. Our friend Tim Sandifer, 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 read they're dying off young people ain't got no interest in reading books so the future will be unambiguously hellish and miserable part two of that discussion on tomorrow's one more thing podcast why would you want to miss that oh it'll be a no I kid I kid so join us tomorrow well I guess that's it
