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By William S. Lind
January 23, 2006
For years, conservatives have warned that
America's children are not learning to read, and indeed are
not reading: the classics of Western literature are now largely
unknown to them. The next conservatism will have to confront
the results of this dual functional and cultural illiteracy.
Specifically, it will have to face the fact that American
culture is increasingly post-literate.
Nor is the problem simply a vacuum. The
place of reading has been taken by the viewing of images,
images presented on electronic screens. The image has displaced
the word. An unread Plato is hoist on his own petard: for
more and more Americans, reality is defined by flickering
shadows on the cave wall.
This development is more profound and far-reaching
than most people comprehend. One of the defining characteristics
of Western culture has been its painful struggle, waged now
for a good 3000 years, to replace the image with the word.
That struggle has defined both Judaism and Christianity -
Jerusalem - and arguably Athens as well, in the development
of philosophy from the ancient cults and their myths.
What took 3000 years to achieve has been
lost in 30 years. The consequences for our culture range wide,
probably beyond anything we can perceive at present. Some
of those consequences are, in my view:
o A people cut off from its past. The West's
traditions are mostly written, contained in its great literature,
beginning with the Old and New Testaments and the works of
classical Greeks and Romans. When those written works go unread,
the content of Western culture runs out into history's sands.
If Western culture loses its content, then the West loses
its culture, and becomes . . . what? Probably extinct, something
the West's birthrates point to in any case.
o A post-literate culture will have little ability to think
logically. Reason and logic demand words; images, in contrast,
feed emotions. It should not surprise us that Americans no
longer think but rather feel. Again we find ourselves up against
one of the bedrocks of Western culture; logic and reason have
been particularly Western characteristics. As that bedrock
crumbles, what will happen to the structure erected upon it,
a structure we call the Modern Age? Post-literate and post-modern
may be cause and effect.
o A people cut off from its past, largely unable to reason
and directed primarily by images, will be easy to manipulate.
In fact, the people will be as easy to manipulate and control
as the images themselves. This is a phenomenon we already
see all around us, from the power of commercial advertising
to the use of television by the cultural Marxists to psychologically
condition us. Want to "normalize" homosexuality?
Just run television show after television show where the only
normal-seeming white male is a homosexual.
o A people that lives by the image rather than by the word
will easily become entrapped in virtual realities, something
again which we already see, especially among the very post-literate
young. Unfortunately, all virtual realities come from Hell;
if there can be more than one reality, there can be more than
one God. On a purely practical level, all virtual realities
eventually collapse; the more powerful they are, the greater
the crash will be. America's crash could be of epic proportions.
As Paul Weyrich has written in other columns,
the next conservatism will have to grapple with some weighty
issues, issues rather more difficult than marginal tax rates.
The likely fate of a post-literate West is one.
But there is something the next conservatism
can do now. It can call on all Americans to follow the old
rule that when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Turn off the television (or better, like Russell Kirk, throw
it off the roof of the house). Unplug the computers, especially
the kids' computers. Get out the old books, the books that
convey the content of our culture, and start reading them
again. It was not all that long ago that we stopped doing
so. So far, at least, the books are still available (who knows
for how much longer?). The home schoolers, thankfully, are
doing just that.
At the heart of our culture lies
the Word, the Logos. "In the beginning was the Word .
. ." The next conservatism's duty is to conserve precisely
that. It is time we recognized the post-literate, image-worshipping
culture of the electronic age for the mortal danger that it
is.
William S. Lind is Director for the Center for Cultural
Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation.
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