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The Article Was Simply Too Long! · Armstrong & Getty One More Thing

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: There was an article about how reading is so important,
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: but it was too long, so I didn't read it.
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: It's one more thing I'm strong and getty speaking of books.
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  Speaker 2: I just saw this up on the screen, the screen capture,
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: so we can talk about it tomorrow. Oh, thirteen percent
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  Speaker 2: of eighth graders are proficient in US history. They did
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  Speaker 2: that study coming up on the two hundred and fiftieth
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  Speaker 2: birthday of the country. My own eighth grader was complaining
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: yesterday he was looking forward to the chapter. It ended
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: up being a page. He was looking forward to learning
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  Speaker 2: about the Civil War. They barely talked about it at all.
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  Speaker 2: Gettysburg got like a mention in the fact that Lincoln
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: gave a speech called the Gettysburg Address. That was the
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  Speaker 2: sum total of that and all the rest of it
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  Speaker 2: was about how the Native Americans were affected by the
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  Speaker 2: Civil War. And my son, who's super into history, so
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  Speaker 2: he's watched hours and hours of YouTube videos about the
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  Speaker 2: founding in the Civil War and all this sort of stuff.
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  Speaker 2: He said. Kids that don't do that, he said, they
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  Speaker 2: would They view of the Civil War would be just
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  Speaker 2: what they got in school yesterday. I said, I know,
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  Speaker 2: that's what drives me nuts, and so that's how you
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  Speaker 2: end up with a thirteen percent of eighth graders are
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  Speaker 2: proficient in US history. And as you've been pointing out
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  Speaker 2: later lately, and it should be pointed out all the time,
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  Speaker 2: proficient means you got above an F.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it sounds wow, he's proficient. No, it's like
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  Speaker 1: barely acceptable.
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  Speaker 2: So only thirteen percent have barely acceptable knowledge of their
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  Speaker 2: own country's history. You cannot continue like that.
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  Speaker 1: And you cannot read or well enough house explanation of
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  Speaker 1: when you deny people in understanding of their own history,
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  Speaker 1: they don't know who they are, so then you can
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  Speaker 1: tell them who they are. You know.
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  Speaker 2: I've never talked about this much because I'm always uncomfortable
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  Speaker 2: on how it sounds and how to present it. But
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: I used to watch a lot of book TV. Not
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  Speaker 2: as much anymore. I don't know why not anymore. I
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  Speaker 2: guess because I can listen to it. Didn't used to
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: be able to listen to it like this, But uh,
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: book TV on C Span two and it's a thing.
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  Speaker 2: It's all day long. I think it's eighteen hours or
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  Speaker 2: something like that of interviews with authors or authors giving
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: a speel about their book at bookstores and stuff like that,
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  Speaker 2: and any time it's US history of any kind or
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  Speaker 2: any really any history of any kind, it's a whole
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  Speaker 2: bunch of old white guys and a few old white women,
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  Speaker 2: and there's nobody else at those things.
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  Speaker 1: Wow.
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  Speaker 2: And I always think that's the only person that's interested
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  Speaker 2: in this stuff, old white guys. And so I suppose
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  Speaker 2: the you know, the progressive crowd would say, well, that's
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  Speaker 2: because this country was set up to help white men
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  Speaker 2: and nobody else, so nobody else says you could shut
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  Speaker 2: the f up. On the other hand, anyway, that's enough
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  Speaker 2: of that. I didn't mean to get off there.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't have time for book TV. I watched
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  Speaker 1: TikTok video TV. It's you know, it's all about fifteen
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  Speaker 1: second videos. The interviews are seven seconds long. So I
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: found this just crazy, crazy interesting. I don't know this guy,
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: Sam Chris, But you know, the interesting thing about substack
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: is and I probably need to cancel some of my
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: subscriptions because much like you know, like YouTube and Instagram
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: have shown everybody that there are way more amazing musicians
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: in the world than we suspected. American idol it was
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: actually kind of the start of this because you realized,
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: Oh wait a minute, there's like somebody with the best
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: voice I've ever heard in my life in every town
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  Speaker 1: in America, and probably three to fifty of them, depending
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  Speaker 1: on the size of the town. Right. But Substack, there
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  Speaker 1: are so many people who have so many interesting ideas
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: and have research to fascinating questions and write so well.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: I was just asked the other night do you write much?
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: And I'm like, yeah, I'm so mentally exhausted by the
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: time this show's over. I'd rather, you know, work on
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: my golf or write music. And the other thing is
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: I just if I were to subscribe to every Substack
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: column columnist I come across that I think is not
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: only really good, but is brilliant, I would go broke. Anyway.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: I came across this on substack, and again, this gent's
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: name is Sam Christ I don't know much about him.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: What's it cost per sign on or whatever?
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: It's up to the author. And I wish I could remember,
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: like I subscribe to Matt Tayebe's Substack and the Reality
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: Strikes Back thing, which is all about common sense in
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: the face of gender bending madness. But I can't remember
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: a couple more. But it's marbling more than they should
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: because it's impossible to get to all the good content.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: But so this guy writes a lot about literacy and
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: learning and that sort of thing, and he writes about, well,
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: the title is reading is magic. What will happen in
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  Speaker 1: our second peasanthood? And we've talked a little about how
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  Speaker 1: the era of literacy of people reading books filled with
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  Speaker 1: ideas and stuff, it's actually not. It didn't start very
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: long ago, and it appears to be ending. I mean,
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  Speaker 1: so what's what's it generally considered to have started with
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  Speaker 1: the Enlightenment, like sixteen hundreds or roughly. Yeah, okay, anyway,
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  Speaker 1: so he writes in nineteen thirty one, there's this Soviet neuropsychologist,
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  Speaker 1: and the fact that he was a Soviet doesn't enter
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  Speaker 1: into it. But he was traveling into the foothills of
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  Speaker 1: these mountains in the barren borderlands between Uzbekistan and Kirgizia,
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  Speaker 1: which I've never heard of in my life, pretty this
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  Speaker 1: time of year, to find out how the locals thought.
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  Speaker 1: He had this theory that mental processes are social and
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  Speaker 1: historical in origin. Not just that the content of our thoughts,
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  Speaker 1: but the way we think is determined by the kind
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  Speaker 1: of society we live in, and he trying to investigate
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  Speaker 1: whether that was.
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  Speaker 2: True and amazingly deep and fascinating to think about.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's uncomfortably close to some of the critical theory
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  Speaker 1: stuff that is so ugly and dangerous and toxic. But
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  Speaker 1: and so he went to this place that was a
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  Speaker 1: different world than what he knew as an intellectual. In
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  Speaker 1: the Soviet Union, dry hills, illiterate cattle herders, isolated green valleys,
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  Speaker 1: there were illiterate peasants growing cotton. For centuries, essentially no
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  Speaker 1: one there had been able to read or write. No one.
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  Speaker 1: But that was changing somewhat because when the scientist arrived,
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  Speaker 1: the Soviet government was forcing herders and peasants into new,
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  Speaker 1: regimented collective farms where large numbers of rural people were
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  Speaker 1: being taught to read as part of their great Soviet
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  Speaker 1: program for bringing the Marxist to utopia. And so he
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  Speaker 1: spent the next year among these people, as this guy writes,
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  Speaker 1: bothering them with a series of annoying texts. And what
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  Speaker 1: he found was that just a few years of basic
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  Speaker 1: literacy education in an agricultural school had massive cognitive effects
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: and here's where it gets crazy. In one of his
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  Speaker 1: early experiments, he showed people a group of geometrical figures,
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  Speaker 1: complete and incomplete circles and triangles, squares and rectangles, drawn
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  Speaker 1: with straight or dotted lines. He asked them to group
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  Speaker 1: the shapes together, even if they didn't have any training
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  Speaker 1: in geometry. Nearly half of the peasants who'd learned to
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  Speaker 1: read sorted the shapes geometrically squares of square, circles of circles. Meanwhile,
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  Speaker 1: none of the illiterate subjects considered the shapes geometrically at all.
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  Speaker 1: They related to them as objects. One subject, a twenty
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  Speaker 1: four year old woman from an isolated village, insisted that
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  Speaker 1: nothing could be grouped with an incomplete circle that should
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  Speaker 1: go by itself. That's the moon. When Lorea tried, the
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  Speaker 1: scientists tried to suggest that she group as sc where
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  Speaker 1: an erectangle, she refused, that's a glass and that's a
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  Speaker 1: drinking bowl. They can't be put together. Other objects describe
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  Speaker 1: the shapes as tense bracelets, mountains, irrigation ditches, and stars.
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  Speaker 1: When sorting objects, collective farm workers put a saw with
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  Speaker 1: a hammering because they're both tools, while peasants put a
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  Speaker 1: saw with a log. The log has to be here too.
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  Speaker 1: They'll be left without firewood, they won't be able to
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  Speaker 1: do anything. So uh uh, So they couldn't relate to
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  Speaker 1: things in an abstract way. Everything had to be an
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  Speaker 1: object they were familiar with. And then he gets into
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  Speaker 1: the most upsetting of Laria's puzzles with a mathematical problem.
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  Speaker 1: He told the subjects that it took three hours to
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  Speaker 1: walk from their village to a town and six along
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  Speaker 1: the same road to a different town. How long would
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  Speaker 1: it take to walk from the second town to the
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  Speaker 1: third town? Again? Every single one of the collective farm
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  Speaker 1: workers solved the problem, but the illiterate villagers knew very
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  Speaker 1: well that the town one was actually closer than town
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  Speaker 1: to and refused to answer. Laura kept saying that it
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  Speaker 1: was just a scenario, but the villagers kept insisting that
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  Speaker 1: they couldn't entertain a scenario that contradicted actual reality. No
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  Speaker 1: one exploded, how can I solve a problem if it
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  Speaker 1: wasn't so? And he took pains to point out that
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  Speaker 1: these people weren't remotely stupid. They were perfectly capable of
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  Speaker 1: thinking rationally and deductively, and they could make excellent judgments
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  Speaker 1: about facts of direct concern to them. But they lived
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  Speaker 1: in an incredibly conservative world with its walls closed tight
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  Speaker 1: around direct sensory experience. Meanwhile, even a cursory exposure to
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  Speaker 1: writing produces an entirely different kind of thought. It lives
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  Speaker 1: in a spooky realm of ideal objects and useless categories,
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  Speaker 1: where you can talk confidently about invisible bears and measured
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  Speaker 1: distances even when they're going the wrong way. But if
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: we think, but what we think of as politics seems
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  Speaker 1: to depend on this stuff, and revolutionary politics in particular.
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  Speaker 1: What he I'm saying is abstract thinking seriously looking at
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  Speaker 1: ideas seems almost impossible without the ability to read. For
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  Speaker 1: reasons that scientists are just scratching the surface of understanding.
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  Speaker 2: Well a little too late, since reading is going away.
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  Speaker 2: So yeah, most people reading didn't really come around till
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  Speaker 2: seventeen hundreds, when there is enough literacy and books printed
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  Speaker 2: and everything like that. So all of the conversations we
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  Speaker 2: have about populations prior to that Middle Ages go back
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  Speaker 2: to the Roman Empire whatever, as almost all the literate people.
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  Speaker 2: So I mean, so based on this thing we're talking about,
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  Speaker 2: like a different species or animal than what we think
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  Speaker 2: of as human beings because of the way they think.
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  Speaker 2: So none of the things that we extrapolate about all
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  Speaker 2: of those times make any sense.
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  Speaker 1: Then, yeah, human nature doesn't change, but that's close to it.
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  Speaker 1: I was. I'm reminded of reading Tim Sanderfer's brand new
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  Speaker 1: book Declaring Liberty. Proclaiming Liberty copy next to me, Oh
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  Speaker 1: you're important, and they point out that one of the
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  Speaker 1: political philosophers that the Founding Fathers really really liked. One
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  Speaker 1: of the first things he did was taking down the
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  Speaker 1: idea of persecuting people for being witches, explaining how unjust
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  Speaker 1: that was and how it's prone to hysteria and stupid
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  Speaker 1: and we got to stop doing it. And it was
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  Speaker 1: an example. I think it butts up against this, the
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  Speaker 1: idea that you can't reason with people in a productive
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  Speaker 1: way until they've learned to read and take on abstract
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  Speaker 1: ideas outside themselves.
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  Speaker 2: I don't know, well if this is true, and I'm
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  Speaker 2: not sure I believe it can be, but for the
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  Speaker 2: sake of the artment, we'll go with it's true. If
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: this is true, I wonder what the next iteration of
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  Speaker 2: humans is going to be like. Who just take in
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  Speaker 2: short videos for all their information.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, he gets into that and it ain't great. Let
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  Speaker 1: me throw in one more thing though, that I found
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  Speaker 1: unbelievably compelling. This author points out that, like a lot
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  Speaker 1: of his contemporaries, he had a basic, basically progressive model
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  Speaker 1: of psychological development. Thinking based on abstractions is more advanced
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: than thinking based on direct experience. As time moves on,
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  Speaker 1: the advanced way of doing things will obviously overtake the
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  Speaker 1: more backwards, which is why he had to go to
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  Speaker 1: the farthest barren fringes of the old Russian Empire to
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: find people who had never been exposed to writing. But
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  Speaker 1: the villages he visited hadn't always been a backwater. A
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: thousand years ago, this land in the foothills of the
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: Alay Mountains Alie Mountains, I'm not sure, had been one
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  Speaker 1: of the great centers of world civilization. In his notes,
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: he mentioned that he was walking in the homeland of scientists, astronomers, mathematicians,
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  Speaker 1: and poets like guys I've never heard of. The illiterate
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: herders and peasants were living in the ruins of a
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  Speaker 1: sophisticated literary culture that had for the most part vanished
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  Speaker 1: from the world, and these people were utterly illiterate and
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  Speaker 1: incapable of abstract thought in the very streets where great
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  Speaker 1: philosophers had strode. And he's afraid that this could happen
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  Speaker 1: to Western civilization too.
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  Speaker 2: Sure could.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: I could do part two of this for the One
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  Speaker 1: More Thing podcast tomorrow.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: I wonder how happy they were?
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: Oh?
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: Being happy is one of my main goals in life
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  Speaker 2: and should be for most people.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, Now, if you can't form a civilization that can
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  Speaker 2: continue or protect yourself, it doesn't make any difference because
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  Speaker 2: it won't last long. But I do wonder how happy
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  Speaker 2: they were.
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  Speaker 1: That is a question that you know you'd need twenty
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  Speaker 1: seven philosophers to argue each other to death to answer,
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  Speaker 1: Or if you know you're better off being happy and
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: refusing to answer a theoretical question because you've never done it.
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  Speaker 1: I don't know. Ignorant is a damn dog, But dogs
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  Speaker 1: seem happy.
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  Speaker 2: It is beyond fascinating to me that the period of
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: reading for human beings might end up having a life
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: span of three hundred years. Roughly started around seventeen hundred
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: and it has ended roughly now. Our friend Tim sanderfer
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  Speaker 2: We referenced his book. I've been talking to him about that.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: People don't buy books anymore, people don't read anymore, and
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  Speaker 2: it's exponentially going away because old people still kind of
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: read their dying off. Young people ain't got no interest
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: in reading books.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: So the future will be unambiguously hellish and miserable. Part
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: two of that discussion on tomorrow's One More Thing podcast.
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  Speaker 2: Why would you want to miss that?
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: Oh it'll be a nod kid, I kid, so join
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: us tomorrow.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: Well, I guess that's it.