Cost of illiteracy

Submitted by Wayne on Thu, 2008-04-24 12:44. Stupidity

I started this article to explore the effects of widespread illiteracy on our once-American culture. As you see below, I made several points about how we'll be adversely affected, only to discover these effects are already present. The decline of our culture, significantly due to illiteracy, is not a future event but a present one. I would dare say our peak as a culture and in literacy was probably two hundred years ago.

As the illiterate proportion of American culture continues to increase, I've been wondering what the effects will be. For example, the blogosphere will probably tend to dry up. More specifically, rather than thought-provoking analyses, the web will be filled with MySpace/YouTube drivel--intellectual porn--entertaining and placating the moronic masses. As if news weren't superficial (and wrong) enough, being produced by the illiterate and read by the illiterate, it may very well reduce to propagandized headlines only. Any semblance to a First Amendment press, urging accountability, will be a distant, forgotten memory.

As illiteracy rises, any hope of high-tech leadership will be tossed out the window. Even now, many (most?) of my coworkers border on illiterate, unable to extract the salient points in a dozen-word email, let alone a book-sized specification. (Remember: engineers are supposedly in the second or better SD of IQ.) There's no way the U.S. can stay on top of the tech world this way, if indeed we're even still there now. When the world looks elsewhere for the latest innovations, be they military or consumer, I'd imagine the dollar will accelerate its decline. I only wonder which culture is competent enough to take our place at the top, given the general stupidity of much of the world. I expect it would be Israel (if they're not already top dog) were it not for them being hated by everybody--of course they have their own brand of socialism that may end up decimating them from within.

I'm sure our daily lives will continue to be adversely affected by others' illiteracy. Traffic will grow increasingly chaotic and lawless. Government intervention, as measured by the nearly innumerable laws and regulations on the books, will grow in a panic to restore order. In every industry, customer service will become history, then a myth, and eventually a legend. Jobs will become increasingly mind-numbing (for those with a semblance of a mind remaining) as even simple tasks become too complicated for the illiterate; e.g., just when do those fries come out of the boiling oil? Specialization--bane of civilization--will become so acute systemically as to forbid the very means of cultural restoration. A contemporary example of this last point can be seen in government-certified teachers' elitist and condemning attitudes toward homeschooling parents' easy demonstration of superior competence in the teachers' "specialty". To protect their stupidity/incompetence, teachers prefer to outlaw that which is most natural, parents raising their own children. In this way, illiteracy has been and will continue to be self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing.

I'd say illiteracy in government would result in laws having unintended results, being named for the opposite of what they actually do, and a growing disparity between the rulers and the ruled...but that ship has already sailed, largely due to other reasons. Illiteracy would hardly make it worse.

An interesting field affected by illiteracy will be the legal one. Lawyers' lack of comprehension of English has already brought about an almost independent language having little relation to reality: legalese. As illiteracy runs screaming through these guardians of the law, expect the law to continue to be twisted into whatever is desired. Instead of being able to plainly write and understand the law--or, God forbid, submit to Natural Law--those who win will simply be the ones with the most power.

What other effects of widespread illiteracy do you foresee? Or is foresight moot because it's already here? How much worse will it get? Will we regress to a Third World culture simply because of illiteracy (to say nothing of the myriad, other reasons for such regression)?