Politics in an Era of Secondary Orality

As 9/12 protesters marked the 8th anniversary of 9/11 with more signs visualizing the myth that our President is in the company of some of history’s most devious and radical actors, I am reminded of an article, ‘Twilight of the Books’, that Caleb Crain wrote for a late December 2007 issue of the New Yorker.

Crain reports that pleasure reading might no longer be considered a traditional American pastime and notes that this fact has quite wide-ranging implications. A National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) survey shows that in 2002 less than 50% of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the past 12 months. And, as we are now more than ever painfully aware, newspaper sales and readership have plummeted in recent years.  Those of us who love the world of books may romantically lament this sad state of affairs. However, these statistics are more than nominally disheartening.

Before we learned to read and write humans understood the world by talking and listening. And, as it turns out, reading and writing enable us to view the world in shades of gray, while talking and listening keep the facts in black and white. Crain quotes Walter Ong on the difference between those who are literate and those who are not: “Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories… In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued as accumulation of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon for putting those accumulations at risk.”

Brain scans corroborate Ong’s distinction. Crain writes, “Brain Scans show that when a child first starts to read she has to use more of her brain than adults do. Broad regions light up in both hemispheres. As a child’s neurons specialize in recognizing letters and become more efficient, the regions activated become smaller. At some point as a child progresses from decoding to fluent reading the route of signals though her brain shifts… With the gain in time and the freed-up brainpower, a fluent reader is able to integrate more of her own thoughts and feelings into her experience… When reading goes well, it feels effortless, like drifting down a river rather than rowing up it. It makes you smarter because it leaves more of your brain alone.” In contrast, watching TV takes up more of the brain’s attention, so an individual is less critical of the information he or she receives.

When a person achieves true literacy that person may be critical of what she reads as she reads it. However, the majority of our population does not enjoy the benefits of literacy – either because they choose not to glean information about the world by reading or because their reading skills are too deficient to do so. Thus, our citizenry’s knowledge is constituted by talking and listening, not by reading and writing, substantiating Walter Ong vision of the dawning era of secondary orality.

When I first read Crain’s piece, I found it astonishing that reading was easier on the brain than watching TV. Of course, that is a dilettante’s way of stating the point. Nonetheless, the discrepancy between reading and TV viewing – that the former allows our critical capacities to run concurrent with our capacity to absorb to new facts and that the latter does not – holds incredible explanatory power, and, I wager, may help us understand why Americans increasingly self-select and wield social facts so dogmatically. If we are in an era of secondary orality, then the extent to which political parties rely on, defend and generate cliché and stereotype makes perfect sense.

Advertisement