From Illiteracy to Idiocracy?

Time was when it was books that people were deep into. Now it’s smartphones with universities now complaining that their students have difficulty reading

James Marriott’s recent post The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society went viral, 

arguing that social media represented a revolution not dissimilar to Gutenberg’s 

invention of the printing press

Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading 

two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. 

People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, 

philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured 

off the presses.

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the 

eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to 

superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other 

historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the 

Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the 

beginnings of the industrial revolution.  

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution. More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.” The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

and prompted this article from Niall Ferguson

Earlier this month Dan Williams asked whether the social media wasn’t destroying 

democracy

Because algorithms and other platform features are designed to capture people’s attention and keep them scrolling, they amplify content that is sensationalist, bias-confirming, and divisive. This viral content then infects public opinion and political debate, driving large numbers of people to adopt misinformed and hateful ideas hostile to liberal democracy. I’ve criticised this narrative. Although social media platforms undoubtedly reward low-quality discourse, narratives that place significant weight on this fact to explain recent political developments are misguided. They rest on implausibly rosy pictures of legacy media and pre-social media history. They’re not well-supported by scientific studies. They overstate the public’s manipulability and underestimate organic demand for low-quality content. And they conveniently overlook more consequential causes of anti-establishment backlash, including the objective gap between the cultural preferences of elites and those of many voters. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see no connection between social media and the rise of populism. To make sense of this connection, however, we should focus less on social media as a dysfunctional technology and more on its status as a democratising technology.

Nathan Witkin has a different view which he elaborates here

But the argument is best summed up in a video I came across recently which first beautifully summarises the plot of an older film set a couple of decades ago. The film portrays an America where the average IQ has sunk to an abysmal level not least through the influence of commercial advertising. 

I don’t particularly recommend its viewing but, for the masochists amongst you, the film itself is called “Idiocracy” and can be seen here

“This too shall pass……” - taking the long view

The table below identifies some of the central issues which have rocked public debate in the West in each of the decades since the 1930s - something I first doodled 20 years ago (with updates from time to time). We think, for example, that populism is something new - but talk of “populism” surfaces whenever things seem to be slipping from the control of “ruling elites”. Such talk has occurred every 30 years or so in the past 150 years – the 1880s in the US and Russia; the 1930s in Europe and Latin America; the late 1960s globally; the late 1990s in Europe. It’s just that we lack the sense of history to appreciate this.…

Decade	Themes of intellectual discussion	Key authors
1930s	End of capitalism Fascism	J Strachey, H Laski G. Sorel, Gramsci
1940s	The managerial revolution Keynesianism Realism in politics	James Burnham John M Keynes Reinhold Niebuhr, Edward H Carr
1950s	Totalitarianism Brainwashing Meritocracy Revisionism Private affluence/public squalour	Hannah Arendt; Zevedei Barbu. Vance Packard Michael Young Anthony Shonfield; Tony Crosland,  J K Galbraith
1960s	End of ideology Corporate planning, management Modernisation of society Participation critique of professionals	Daniel Bell Russell Ackoff, Peter Drucker Peter Berger Paolo Freire, Colin Ward Ivan Illich
1970s	Costs of economic growth, ecology Public choice theory Small is beautiful Change Corporatism Feminism	Edward J Mishan, James Lovelock, Club of Rome James Buchanan Ed Schumacher, Leonard. Kohr Alvin Toffler, Donald Schon Andrew Shonfield Betty Friedan
1980s	Deindustrialisation Privatisation decentralisation globalisation racial equality	Frank Blackaby; Ken Dyson Consultancies; World Bank OECD Joseph Stiglitz, Martin Wolf Bhikhu Parekh
1990s	End of history Flexibility and reengineering Reinvention of government; NPM Climate change The learning organisation Washington consensus	Francis Fukayama Mike Hammer David Osborne, OECD and Scientific community Peter Senge World Bank
2000s	Good governance Neo-liberalism Environmental collapse Migration and social integration Populism	World bank; OECD David Harvey Scientific community Chris Cauldwell Cas Mudde
2010s	Migration Climate warming Capitalism Austerity Inequality Populism	Everyone Everyone Joseph Stiglitz, Jerry Mander, Paul Mason, Paul Collier Mark Blyth, Danny Dorling, Richard Wilkinson, Thomas Pikety Jan-Werner Mueller,
2020s	Migration Populism Extinction AI, robots, future of work Surveillance, big data Pandemics	Everyone Everyone Rupert Read, Jem Bendell ILO, Richard Baldwin, Geoff Mulgan Shoshana Zuboff Adam Tooze, Niall Ferguson

Note to table; I do appreciate that the allocation is arbitrary and therefore contentious….and that the table gives no indication of how long each “debate” lasted….Managerialism, for example, seems to have had several phases….and various forms of human rights were being argued throughout the entire period. Nor do I try to justify detail with google analytics. My purpose is simply impressionistic – to remind us of the ebb and flow of ideas…

Our constant preoccupation with what is new and modern has a name – ”neophilia” – which makes us too easily the prey of the latest political and intellectual fashions. We drift into without exploring why we dropped our previous enthusiasm develops in us what Clive James called “cultural amnesia” – an almost fatal inability to look back at what people much wiser than us were saying in previous generations  

About the blog

This blog has been running since I began to contemplate “hanging up my boots” after a career which had started in the late 1960s in “planning” work, moved on to economics and public administration and finished as a “consultant” in ex-communist countries in something called “institutional development”. You might think that after 16 years this blog has said most of what there is to say – but I keep coming across books which throw new light on things. Most blogs have a specialist focus, be it economic, political, sociological or cultural and apply that lens to the latest fashion of the day. This blog celebrates instead the butterfly approach and depends very much on what catches my fancy – generally a book or article, sometimes an incident, painting or piece of music. And I do like to offer excerpts from the books and articles I feel positive about – as distinct from offering opinions. It’s time, however, to do one of my periodic stock-takings of the blog. When it started (in 2009) it set out three aims -    

• “This blog will try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history (let alone hope).

• I read a lot and want to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the 

• time nor inclination to read widely.

• A final motive for the blog is What have we done with our life? What is important to us?”

The first two objectives are still important. After 12 years, it’s fairly obvious from the unfinished nature of my books on administrative reform (“Change for the Better?”) and on social change (“What is to be Done?”) that there’s still work to be done – although I often feel I’m just going round in circles. And I’m still finding fascinating books and continue to have this urge to share relevant insights with posterity. But I should probably stop imposing these rather forbidding reading lists.

But the blog has been weak on the third purpose. Indeed one friend has queried the absence of the personal touch – feeling that the tone is too clinical and aseptic. And it’s certainly fair comment that the blog is a bit “scholastic”. A couple of other friends have indeed called me a “scholar” – which I used to take as a compliment. Perhaps they meant bloodless!?

As I move through my “autumn days” and feel the approach of winter, the “settling of final accounts” (in the spiritual sense) should, certainly, loom larger. Charles Handy is a real inspiration here – someone constantly challenging himself and making fresh choices every decade or so about where to put the energies and skills he’s been endowed with  

One of my favourite fellow-bloggers is Canadian Dave Pollard who is constantly offering valuable insights from his life experience – he is a few years younger than me. A lot of this touches on inter-personal relations – one of my weak areas. In that spirit let me apply the Johari Window

	strong Known to me weak
Strong Known to others Weak	Open “The Arena”	Blind The “blind corner”
	Hidden “The Façade”	Unknown

Our public self is something we try to control – but rarely succeed in. People notice things about us which we ourselves are not necessarily aware of (our blind corners). Friends should be helpful here – but we often resent critical comment and they soon learn to shut up…

From 1990 I’ve had a nomadic life – living in some ten different countries – generally leader of teams in which I would make a few new friends. Both the contexts and my particular role were very different from those in which I had spent the previous 20 years.

But I was very aware of this – even so, it took me almost a decade before I was fully up to speed and confident that my skills were producing results. Those skills were broadly the same mix of political and scholastic I had used in my previous life - but the context was so very different. And my new skill was being sensitive to that and making the appropriate adjustments to the tools I used. 

As a Team Leader, I had, of course, to be sensitive to the strengths and weaknesses of the members of the team – but it’s almost impossible to shake off one’s cultural assumptions and I carried the baggage then of a Brit still proud of what our democratic tradition had given the world (!!!). In the past decade, in Bulgaria and Romania, I've deepened my understanding of cultural contexts - and am still learning..... 

I write in English – but literally a handful of Brits read the blog. Americans are its biggest fans making up 30% of readers (for which I’m so deeply grateful) - with Russians, curiously, coming in next at 15% and no other country having more than 5%. But the scale of non-English readership is an argument for keeping the posts short. 

Because I have the time to read widely; live on Europe’s edge; and have been out of my home country for more than 30 years, I have perhaps developed a bit of the outsider’s perspective….But I remain painfully aware of my shortcomings in the inter-personal field - I learned so much when I first did the Belbin test.... 

Charles Handy's Inside Organisations - 21 ideas for managers includes the Johari window as one of the ideas. It's a delightful and easy read which I strongly recommend

What I am really trying to say is that I have to recognise that I have always been a bit “distant” in my relations with others. Indeed, as a young politician who was quickly given responsibilities, I was seen as a bit arrogant – when that was the last thing I actually felt. It was rather a defence mechanism. Ernest Schumacher (author of "Small is Beautiful") put our usual approach into superb perspective in 1973 when he wrote -

"There are four sorts of worthwhile learning

· learning about things
- learning about oneself
· learning how others see us
· learning how we see others"

I was slow to learn about myself – let alone the other dimensions. Despite undergoing some sessions of psychotherapy in the late 1980s, I was too much of a “word merchant” to allow mere words to get inside my brain and challenge my being.

It’s only recently I’ve been willing to be open about that experience all of 30 plus years ago which, at the time, it wasn’t possible to discuss. Philip Toynbee was one of the rare people who had actually written about it – I learned later that Winston Churchill used the euphemism of “black dog” to refer to his episodes. And about the only popular book about the subject was Dorothy Rowe’s Depression – a way out of your prison (1983). How times have changed – with credit being due to characters such as Stephen Fry and Alasdair Campbell who were amongst the first to go public and to encourage others to be open about a condition which touches most of us at some time in our lives.

One of my favourite books is Robin Skynner and John Clease’s Life – and how to survive it (1993) A therapist and leading British comic have a Socratic dialogue about the initial stages of everyone’s development – as babies weaning ourselves from our mothers, learning about the wider environment and coping with our feelings. The understanding the principles of healthy (family) relationships and then use these to explore the preconditions for healthy organisations and societies: and for leadership viz -
- valuing and respecting others
- ability to communicate
- willingness to wield authority firmly but always for the general welfare and with as much consultation as possible while handing power back when the crisis is over)
- capacity to face reality squarely
- flexibility and willingness to change
- belief in values above and beyond the personal or considerations of party.

It took a massive change of role and circumstances before I came across an early edition of “A Manager’s Guide to Self-Development” by Mike Pedler et al which made me aware of a range of self-evaluation tools such as the Belbin Test of team roles which you can try out on yourself here. When I did it for the first time with my team of the moment, it was quite a revelation. I had assumed that I was a “leader”. What I discovered was that I was a “resource person” ie good at networking and sharing information – which was exactly right.

Harrison and Bramson’s The Art of Thinking (1982) was also a revelation for me - indicating that people have very different ways of approaching problems and that we will operate better in teams if we (a) understand what our own style is and (b) that others think in different ways. The authors suggest we have 5 styles – “synthetist”, “pragmatist”, “idealist”, “realist” and “analyst” and, of course, combinations thereof. I regret now that I came late to an understanding of the interpersonal - the question I now have is how people can avoid my fate. Is it enough that there are so many books around for people to stumble on? Or should it now be an integral part of undergraduate work? Perhaps it is?

Dave Pollard is one of the few bloggers whose posts I generally read in full – always thoughtful, generally provocative. This post is typical - professing lack of interest in what people had to say about themselves in CVs or expressions of future hopes – but preferring rather to suggest……

six “leading questions” that might evoke some kind of useful sense of who someone is and what they care about - and possibly assess whether the person you’re talking with might be the potential brilliant colleague, life partner, inspiring mentor or new best friend you’ve been looking for. These are the questions:

1. 1. What adjectives or nouns would you use to describe yourself that differentiate you 

• from most other people? When and how did these words come to apply to you?

1. 1. Describe the most fulfilling day you can imagine, some day that might realistically

   • occur in the next year. Why would it be fulfilling? What are you doing now that might 
   • increase its likelihood of happening?

   1. What do you care about, big picture, right now? What would you mourn if it disappeared?

   • What do you ache to have in your life? What would you work really long and hard to 

   • conserve or achieve? How did you come to care about this?

   1. What is your purpose, right now? Not your role or occupation, but the thing you’re 

   • uniquely gifted and inspired to be doing, something the world needs. What would elate you if you achieved it, today, this month, in the next year? What would devastate you if you failed, or didn’t get to try? How did this become your purpose?

   1. What’s your basic belief about why you, and other humans, exist? Not what you believe 

   • is right or important (or what you, or humans ‘should’ do or be), but why 

   • you think we are the way we are now, and why you think we evolved to be where we are. 

   • It’s an existential question, not a moral one. How did you come to this belief?

   1. What’s your basic sense of what the next century holds for our planet and our 

   • civilization? How do you imagine yourself coping with it? How did you come to this belief?

• These are not easy questions, and asking them might prove intimidating or even threatening to some people, which is why in the last post I suggested volunteering your own answer to each question yourself first, in a form such as “Someone asked me the other day… and I told them…”. It’s also why there are supplementary questions to each, to get the person you’re asking started. And the last supplementary question in each group lends itself to telling a story, since that’s what we’re most comfortable with. Even then, some of these questions will stop many people cold, which might tell you something about them right there.