“We Used to Read Things in This Country”:
But as interest in historical materialism surged after the global financial crisis of 2008, the left rediscovered the financial press as they searched for the rational kernel within the mystical shell. At first, the Financial Times was the center of attention. As Amber A’Lee Frost wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, the FT “covers the world as it is—a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests.”
[F]or most of human history, culture was exclusively oral. Knowledge was transmitted by speech, and what could be transmitted was what could be remembered. Oral culture was “aggregative rather than analytic”—full of redundancy, traditionalist in disposition, and embedded in the “human lifeworld,” rather than allowing abstract thought. Therefore, it was conservative and traditional, against innovation and any departure from the long-established norms of agricultural life. Repetition, cliché, and formulas are essential, as in Homer with his repeated phrases such as “swift ships” and “wine-dark sea.” With writing comes precision, analytical rigor, deliberate word choices, analytic remove from life, and abstract thought.
Then, with the emergence of electronic media, Ong sees society regressing/advancing into a “secondary orality,” which brings back many qualities of the first orality (note the supposedly permanent basis of writing)
Looking at social media, Weisenthal sees the return of oral values to dominance in the public square, like loud one-upmanship. Rather than the ideal of reasoned debate, social media sets the stage for constant jousting, rewarding those who can be viral and have memes ready in their memory, as today’s Homeric formula shifts both our political and neurological landscapes.
I do not hold that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” for various tedious factual and periodizing reasons, but I would argue that the history of all hitherto literacy is the history of class struggle.
In the feudal order, there were those who fought, those who prayed, and those who tilled. Since those who prayed were most often those who also administered, what need had most for literacy? Reading was a form of power, which is why the nobility increasingly wanted it for themselves.
The bourgeoisie ascending on both sides of the Atlantic was a class made of ink and newsprint. Aristocracies across Europe were small; they could be bound by common culture and marriages. The bourgeoisie was large, heterogenous, and not able to form kin connections at scale; they required the “many replications” of print to cohere a class identity. Why then would the bourgeoisie allow, much less encourage, their subordinates to also be literate? Because they needed literate and numerate labor from some and hoped to rule others with a Gramscian hegemony transmitted by literacy.
Ong was wrong that secondary orality would remain yoked to literacy. While literacy remains a mass phenomenon, the number of readers and the quality of what they read are declining. At the same time, while memory is traditionally the organizing principle of orality, those immersed in its second coming have seen their faculties of recall replaced by data centers, leaving them bereft of meaningful culture of either the print or oral variety.
[I]t is AI that has given the American ruling class the final impetus to more or less abolish education. As primary and secondary schools prepare to push AI on students, higher-education funding is basically being eliminated. For the first time in centuries, the elite no longer feel they need educated workers and soldiers to uphold and reproduce the system.