Small world
Literacy is plummeting, taking democracy with it.
In the summer of 2002, I finally took a break from 18-hour days reporting on the aftermath of 9/11 and jetted to Salt Lake City. From there, it was a few hours in a minivan to the next day finding myself carrying a 60-pound backpack, exhausted, and barely able to walk.
It was the first day of a National Outdoor Leadership School rock climbing program in Wyoming’s Wind River mountains, and it was utterly transformative. At 29, I was the oldest in the group aside from two of the three instructors. But I quickly learned that while I was wildly out of shape—apparently, a few walks around Central Park hadn’t adequately prepared me—I was stronger and more capable than I realized, and I relished being immersed in a team of strangers discovering the joy of camaraderie and collective capability.
When we hiked out to return to NOLS’ headquarters three weeks later, I learned a few more things. I stunk like absolute polecat, but no one noticed or cared since none of us had been able to bathe. After showering, I put on the clean clothes I’d saved, slipped my belt on, and realized I’d lost about six inches off my waist. And the instructors asked if I was interested in joining their ranks, which was tempting but reassured me I had unfinished journalistic business.
Still, the lure of the outdoors remained. When I quit the Australian Financial Review and freelanced while awaiting my green card, I wrote a couple of articles for Outside, back when it was the place for that kind of journalism; the stomping ground of Sebastian Junger and Jon Krakauer (as opposed to the weird, digital-first shell it is today). I even spent a few weeks moonlighting at a mountaineering news start-up in a dodgy loft in the dodgy part of SoHo, which was about as weird as you’d imagine.
In the dark recesses of my mind, I harbored dreams of scaling a serious mountain. This was the era when Ed Viesturs was becoming the first American to summit the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks—all without supplemental oxygen—and only a few years after the Everest disaster that killed eight climbers, made famous by Krakauer’s book, Into Thin Air.1 But while pay-to-play clients were becoming a thing, mounting any expedition back then was still a serious, serious business—serious in terms of cost and the time commitment, serious in terms of the nature of the challenge and the preparation required, and serious in terms of the risks. Today, it’s apparently a doddle.
“An Austrian guide will soon lead trips up the world’s highest peak in less time than an average beach holiday,” the Weekend FT just reported, marking yet another realm where our apparent need for efficiency and expedience can’t be denied. Thanks to sucking in xenon to instantly acclimate your body to the lack of oxygen, the plan is to helicopter clients to base camp as soon as the weather’s clear, send ‘em up, and get them home.
“I’m super-excited to see if we can leave home on a Monday morning, be on the summit of Everest on Thursday night, and make it home for Sunday lunch,” one of the initial group of guinea pigs told the newspaper, as if Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing (not to mention George Mallory) were kinda bonkers with their whole “test the limits of human endurance to inspire the world” shtick.
I know I’m being a little churlish, as the people involved are serious climbers. But the whole enterprise smells of yet another example of both the transactional nature of modern life (tick “Everest” off the bucket list!) and how taking the path of least resistance seems to be all that matters. Forget about trekking to base camp, spending weeks letting your body adjust to the altitude, and hoping a favorable weather window appears for a summit attempt. Topping Everest used to be about as rare as going into space. Soon, it’ll be a bumper sticker, right alongside those annoying “26.2” ones.2
It’s this seemingly collective need to do everything in a hurry that struck me on multiple fronts last week. I recall wondering why I was bothering to learn calculus in school when a calculator spat out the answers, just like that. But kids today aren’t just handed iPads in second grade: they’re growing up to be adults who lack the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, as evidenced by the OECD’s release of an assessment of 160,000 adults aged 16 to 65 in 31 countries.
“Compared with the last set of assessments a decade earlier, the trends in literacy skills were striking,” Sarah O’Connor wrote in the FT. “Proficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14, and declined significantly in 11, with the biggest deterioration in South Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland.
“Among adults with tertiary-level education (such as university graduates), literacy proficiency fell in 13 countries and only increased in Finland, while nearly all countries and economies experienced declines in literacy proficiency among adults with below upper secondary education. Singapore and the US had the biggest inequalities in both literacy and numeracy.”
The OECD’s director for education and skills, Andreas Schleicher, put it this way: “Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child. It is actually hard to imagine—that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”
At face value, this is bad enough: these are basic skills for functioning in life (and I’d also throw in there the ability to write freehand—in cursive!). But they’re critical for another reason: is it any wonder the world’s acceleration toward isolationism, tribalism, and authoritarianism has tracked literacy’s decline?
“What does it mean to call a society literate or post-literate?” Ian Leslie wrote. “It refers not just to the skills of reading and writing, but to the centrality of the written word—to the extent to which it shapes our culture, politics, and leisure, and, most fundamentally, our minds. Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves To Death, a brilliantly written polemic, argued that literacy was crucial to the rise of secular democracy. It raised the collective intelligence of society by making the citizenry better at thinking and arguing.
“Literacy inculcates particular habits of thought and discourse that orality does not. Sentence by sentence, a written text makes it easier to see how one proposition follows from another—or fails to. It shows you the workings of an argument rather than just conveying its effect. Without this discipline, intuitions and feelings reign supreme. In a society where literacy is marginalised, the vibe is king. Public discourse devolves into the marijuana-smoke haze of a Joe Rogan podcast and the cocaine snort of a TikTok video. We become more easily gulled by specious claims and less patient with argument and complexity.”
Or, as cartoonist Mike Luckovich put it in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:3
Incoming president Donald Trump is, of course, a master of the vibe. He’s not a deep thinker. Has no strategic nous. But where he truly has a sixth sense is in distilling anything to its (usually highly misleading, divisive, and self-serving) essence; punching the buttons of those either unable to critically analyze his nonsense or, more likely, who choose not to.
That’s the other big problem. The internet was supposed to empower us by giving everyone instant access to everything. Sunshine would be the best disinfectant: we’d be able to weigh all available information on any given topic, methodically coming to informed decisions or forming informed opinions.
Ha.
What we failed to account for was both our desire to have our existing prejudices reinforced and the ruthlessness of others to take advantage of that, facts be damned. That’s why we’re now drowning in disinformation and the very people holding us underwater can’t even be bothered pretending that they’re pretending to protect us. A big part of the problem, of course, is social-media companies refuse to take responsibility for being media sources: they insist they’re merely platforms, and any moderation (or fact checking) of user posts infringes their right to free speech.
Yet 71% of Gen Z get news from social media daily and 91% weekly. Whether that information is accurate matters—both for being genuinely informed, and because misinformation on X/Twitter, as an example, is 70% more likely to be retweeted than real news, and true stories take six times longer to reach 1,500 users.
I’d love to believe traditional media can play a role in reasserting the primacy of facts, but its ability to do so has been neutered by a two-decades-long digital pummeling that may be turbocharged by the arrival of artificial intelligence. Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait thinks elements of AI provide grounds for optimism—I hope so, and I certainly think the technology can and should prompt a flight to quality amid a tsunami of AI-generated mediocrity.
But the more likely outcome seems to be what we’re already seeing: that AI simply makes it even easier to create and disseminate even more content tailored to all of our specific preconceptions and prejudices. Add that to a populace increasingly unable to objectively evaluate what it reads, sees, and hears, and it’s no wonder we seem to be hurtling toward a genuine idiocracy. Pass the popcorn.
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.
New Zealander Rob Hall was among those who died. An elite mountain guide, the 35-year-old stayed with client Doug Hansen near the summit to help him down, only for both of them to perish. Stuck near the top in impossible conditions, Hall asked to be patched through by satellite to his pregnant wife, a doctor and fellow mountaineer, in New Zealand, with Hall assuring her he was comfortable and to “sleep well my sweetheart. Please don't worry too much.” Hall was posthumously awarded the New Zealand Bravery Star for his actions, and his story inspired the haunting Neil Finn song, The Climber (which is great, natch).
Here’s an idea: marathon decals where the finishing time is also displayed. Knock one off in under four hours or so? Good for you! Stumble over the line after six-plus hours of walking? Hmmm.
This is obviously inspired by Trump’s usual craziness. Having already floated snatching Greenland or the Panama Canal, he declared: “We're going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring.” Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, then trolled him deliciously by noting North America should really be “América Mexicana” or “Mexican America,” as it once was. “That sounds nice, no?” she said.