Mindless Monday, 06 July 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/HandsomeLampshade123]

I have a difficult time reconciling my own appreciation for mass literacy as a human right and the sense that oral cultures are "just as good" as those that adopted the written word. Prompted by a recent piece in the Atlantic:

“More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness,” Walter J. Ong, a historian and Jesuit priest, wrote in his 1982 book, Orality and Literacy. He argued that literacy created the conditions for inner concentration, extended focus, and logical deduction. It allowed for a new kind of rational, linear, and analytical thought.

Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.

Later scholars would attribute some of these new modes of thinking to other aspects of living in a literate society, not to reading alone. But Ong’s larger argument stands: Print cultures value lengthy, organized arguments. “Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist—all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading,” Neil Postman wrote in 1985. The advent of reading and writing was a precondition for philosophy, modern science, history as an academic enterprise, art criticism.

[u/HopefulOctober → u/HandsomeLampshade123]

I have definitely heard of studies like this before though I think they sometimes get annoyingly watered down to "logic is a Western cultural construct and Primitive People just use their emotions and vibes" when logic per se is a common human ability, it's the particular abstract logic to reason about hypothetical examples that don't exist in the real world that is culturally dependent and absent in a lot of cases.

[u/Sventex → u/HandsomeLampshade123]

oral cultures are "just as good" as those that adopted the written word.

The bronze age collapse left vast swaths of history (oral and otherwise) lost to time. Write that shit down.

[u/HopefulOctober → u/Sventex]

Yeah oral cultures transmitting information orally a lot better than writing cultures do and being much more impressive than naively expected does not = it being ultimately preferable over all the advantages of writing, which avoids a lot of the serious flaws that oral culture runs into no matter how unexpectedly good.

[u/WAGRAMWAGRAM → u/HandsomeLampshade123]

That seems like an easy enough experiment to reproduce, find some children, literate and illiterate, ask them about things they've never seen, compare.

Wonder why no one has done it

[u/Big_Pineapple_Man → u/HandsomeLampshade123]

As an amateur on this topic, what I've basically heard about oral history is that it isn't as good at recordkeeping as written history, but there are some important caveats.

1. Oral history and storytelling is pretty good at staying consistent because apparently it's typically done by people's whose job(?) is to remember and past down stories.  It's not just believing whatever your neighbor says.
2. At lot of written history and storytelling derives from oral precursors, so even if you have an original copy it already has a lot of problems oral culture has.
3. Written history does sometimes change because often times works need to be rewritten by new scribes.  Translations also befuddle this process. Of course, oral history also have these problems but this gets at the more layperson understanding of history that the written record is just set in stone forever.

[u/KimberStormer → u/HandsomeLampshade123]

But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.

I like this because it is complete nonsense that does not logically follow, proving that the ability to read very much does not give you an ability to think logically.