Memory Loss
It seems to me that the free and instant access to information has cost humanity something important.
It has happened before: Up to the 1400s, humans in general had well-developed memories, and the scholars among us memorized entire manuscripts word for word, and painstakingly accumulated knowledge by deep reading and understanding. Then Gutenberg developed the printing press (in the face of yet another plague on the planet: an attorney stole it from him).
Soon, in the space of a few generations, one no longer needed to remember entire manuscripts worth of knowledge; you can acquire the thing as a book and have it one your shelf. The ability to memorize giant chunks of information, no longer exercised, was lost to most cultures.
But where was it not lost? In a culture that by its nature excluded the printing press and its output. You can see this coming, especially if you happen to know that these printing presses were cleaned and inked with brushes made from hog-bristles.
The Memory of Pigs
Islam, which holds a tremendous antipathy against the pig and all pig-derived products, and since anything they printed would include invocations to Allah, allowing a pig bristle brush to come into contact with that word was intolerable. So, during the 1500s when the “Gutenberg” press spread across most countries, it does not make it into the Islamic world. It wasn’t until 1798 when the press arrived in Alexandria, Egypt - brought by the conquering Napoleon Bonaparte. He used it right away to print propaganda fliers to the Muslims of Alexandria (“Mamluks”) encouraging them to welcome their new masters:
People of Egypt, they have told you that I come to destroy your religion, but do not believe it; in reply I come to restore your rights, punish the usurpers and that I respect God, his prophet and the Qur’an more than the Mamluks. … Thrice happy are those who will be with us! They shall prosper in their fortune and in their rank. Happy are those who will be neutral! They will get to know us over time, and join their ranks with ours. But unhappy, thrice unhappy, are those who shall arm themselves [to fight] for the Mamluks and who shall fight against us! There shall be no hope for them, they shall perish.
This was rendered in horrifically bad Arabic. It worked for a little while, in combination with Bonaparte’s 20-to-1 kill ratio against Egyptian forces, but the French were forced out after a couple of years of battling the Marmuks internally, the Ottoman Empire externally, and their old enemies the British. And the plague, which killed as many French as their human enemies.
In any event, the printing press did not catch on there; its use was sparing indeed and that is still true. Today, the output of first world countries in original printed works is something like 100 times that of Sharia-law-controlled nations, and similar numbers hold for translations of scholarly works from English to local languages.
But … as a result of the scarcity of (and disdain for) printed works, these Islamic cultures retained their ability to memorize. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, what they memorized was usually the Qur’an, the focus of their culture. Islam has various ranks for people who have memorized all or part of this book. This can be true even if they don’t speak Arabic; they are singing the verses phonetically, like Abba did with their early hits.
The Shallows
Now we see a great information-distribution change again, with cellphones and laptops making access to any sort of information trivial and nearly instantaneous. The net result is a further shallowing of human intellectual ability. Essentially, not only have we lost memorization ability now, we have largely lost the ability to learn. Why learn something if you can look up anything you need to know? This progresses to a lack of desire and even lack of ability to look it up. Why bother? The book The Shallows by Nicholas Carr describes the problem and provides lots of evidence.
And of course, what we are being taught in universities augments the “why bother” message. Classical literature, philosophy, science? Those are the work of “dead white males” and without value. History, especially history of America? America is a racist nation, and without value. Study activism, the plight of the oppressed, social justice, environmental justice. Indoctrination into those topics is now part of a children’s book you read to your two- and three-year-olds.
In this way, we are losing our humanity, our ability to deal with life as it normally is, ignoring the real possibility of a serious challenge. We are raising generations who know nothing of who we are and how we got here, and who are taught to run to safe spaces instead of matching our ideas against the reality of the world.
This means, in practice, a great reduction in understanding once again. And that bodes great ill for societies around the world.
A Solution
I told my staff for nearly half a century: Don’t bring me a problem without offering at least one solution. So, here is a proposal - charter schools. But we don’t have much time.
Charter schools in a free-market education system must compete for your business. They must show results better than public education systems. This is an extremely low bar, of course, and many people with the resources to do it have their children in charter schools already.
But to get the public education versus charter schools on a fair footing, a voucher system needs to be employed. Once charter schools are teaching history, science, the value of learning, government schools will be forced to do so as well, or lose the revenue stream from the vouchers.
But the time frame is short. There are so many young parents that have already been indoctrinated into identity politics that not enough of them, now parents, might value a real education. We can’t force it, it must be voluntary.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle (@DeHavelle)
Originally published at DeHavelle.com. You can comment here or there.