What does it mean when we hear that incoming Harvard students don't read? Should this concern us? What kind of things will change if people no longer read books?
Right now, the tech elites are insulating their kids from the very apps that are making the next generation illiterate. Most likely we will see most of the population being dopamine addicted serfs ruled over by a class that either eschewed midern media or developed antibodies against it.
Thank you, this is an excellent and insightful article. It appears that the civil society Protestantism fostered has been co-opted by the Enlightenment, which actually divinised the state, throwing out the Logos which bound everything together, leading to this ‘post-literacy’ as you say. Dostoevsky criticised the US in this way; in its religious indifferentism, it actually demands faith in the state as God—an ideology now predominant globally. In his view, Russia ideally is to bear the standard of Orthodoxy and venerate Christ rather than the state.
I also think you’re right that the post-Reformation scholastic Protestant spirit finds itself very foreign in this increasingly uneducated and apostate world. Fortunately, our Reformed fathers such as Calvin, Knox and Bullinger actually realised the centrality of mystical union with Christ (a form of theosis), which is proclaimed in later hymns like ‘Be Thou My Vision’ and ‘Come Thou Fount’. I believe the Reformation was only possible by the grace of God and so we must retrieve its ancient spirit to address the world.
Many people have rung the alarm as we've been transitioning from a literate society wherein common books such as the Bible could provide a shared understanding across America to an image based society where now an infinite variety of floating signifiers has withdrawn people into their own hall of private mirrors. Imaginatio viget in tenebris.
Dr. Morimer Adler, Harold Bloom, National Association of Scholars and most recently this man paid for a dump of 3,500 e-mail messages regarding education in the State of Oregon and many of them discuss literacy. https://x.com/PapaBearMyers/status/1874528194394808445
Now, remarkably, it's rather easy to get literate. My son is 7 and is one of the best readers in the class but myself and these men before me were really talking about living on an edge of multiplicity with the capable of crossing over into others and to do that one must have the literacy required to read the human project. This is also our failure. Once a society enters Psyberspace - the extension of the psychological within the technical - they seem to lose the high functioning people at scale required because all these people have become "busy" as an invisible cosmic dome has come over and mutated experience itself into an addiction. We've become a society of addicts who would rather "need a vacation after our vacation" because if you said hesychasm out in public, it's the only way to get a random person to respond, "God bless you!".
It’s early, but I suspect there may be a rise of Stoicism in evangelicalism as an alternative to Orthodoxy as it emphasizes what is natural (i.e., how God created things to be).
Right now, the tech elites are insulating their kids from the very apps that are making the next generation illiterate. Most likely we will see most of the population being dopamine addicted serfs ruled over by a class that either eschewed midern media or developed antibodies against it.
Very much so. but the problem is that can they produce enough high functioning people at scale to keep the party going?
Thank you, this is an excellent and insightful article. It appears that the civil society Protestantism fostered has been co-opted by the Enlightenment, which actually divinised the state, throwing out the Logos which bound everything together, leading to this ‘post-literacy’ as you say. Dostoevsky criticised the US in this way; in its religious indifferentism, it actually demands faith in the state as God—an ideology now predominant globally. In his view, Russia ideally is to bear the standard of Orthodoxy and venerate Christ rather than the state.
I also think you’re right that the post-Reformation scholastic Protestant spirit finds itself very foreign in this increasingly uneducated and apostate world. Fortunately, our Reformed fathers such as Calvin, Knox and Bullinger actually realised the centrality of mystical union with Christ (a form of theosis), which is proclaimed in later hymns like ‘Be Thou My Vision’ and ‘Come Thou Fount’. I believe the Reformation was only possible by the grace of God and so we must retrieve its ancient spirit to address the world.
Many people have rung the alarm as we've been transitioning from a literate society wherein common books such as the Bible could provide a shared understanding across America to an image based society where now an infinite variety of floating signifiers has withdrawn people into their own hall of private mirrors. Imaginatio viget in tenebris.
Dr. Morimer Adler, Harold Bloom, National Association of Scholars and most recently this man paid for a dump of 3,500 e-mail messages regarding education in the State of Oregon and many of them discuss literacy. https://x.com/PapaBearMyers/status/1874528194394808445
Now, remarkably, it's rather easy to get literate. My son is 7 and is one of the best readers in the class but myself and these men before me were really talking about living on an edge of multiplicity with the capable of crossing over into others and to do that one must have the literacy required to read the human project. This is also our failure. Once a society enters Psyberspace - the extension of the psychological within the technical - they seem to lose the high functioning people at scale required because all these people have become "busy" as an invisible cosmic dome has come over and mutated experience itself into an addiction. We've become a society of addicts who would rather "need a vacation after our vacation" because if you said hesychasm out in public, it's the only way to get a random person to respond, "God bless you!".
Spot on as usual! Thanks for this piece.
Thanks! You’re welcome.
It’s early, but I suspect there may be a rise of Stoicism in evangelicalism as an alternative to Orthodoxy as it emphasizes what is natural (i.e., how God created things to be).
That is an interesting thought. You might be right there.