‘As a consequence, an oral person does not endeavor to judge beyond personal or tribal experience, that is, beyond experience lived through, individually or collectively.’
From here on i could not stop thinking about immigrants and asylum seekers (mostly an alternative form of migration) to western Europe.
Contemporary acceptance of immigration is typically based on pity (i.e. on media images), on a certain discomfort with our wealth, and on the ability to physically exclude one self and one’s family from literally having to live under the consequences of one’s political preferences (in the real world, when it comes down to it, progressives are mightily in favor of the (advantages of) social ordering of class systems).
Meanwhile words on immigration are harshly patrolled by our version of Iran’s and Saudi Arabia’s morality police (though SA has reigned in its morality police while in the west the reverse happened), having opinions on immigration in msm allowed within a certain bandwidth (1970s: 'be careful, you might be a fascist’, 2020s: ‘yes, you probably are a fascist’).
The first generations were rather often full- or semi illiterates. Their offspring had and has typically little assistance from their parents when attaining knowledge about the world while school, exactly in the decades when the immigrants arrived, moved from a traditional masculine (tough) learning setting, to a much more accommodating, progressive environment where high expectations were replaced by niceness (it’s no coincidence our primary- and secondary school systems have completely feminized). Since the 70s school has to be enjoyed, shape the morals of the young person (preferably a bit left wing) and produce social harmony.
Sexual education used to be just that: it taught you how babies are made and implicitly warned you ‘don’t be stupid and produce a baby when you’re 16’.Tellingly now, in a ‘woke’ environment (woke is very much about ‘being nice’ after all) sexual education has been renamed at public secular schools to ‘sexual development’. Meaning the preferred opinions about sexual preferences are to be handed to you, and absorbed by you. If schools wish they can opt for sexual development material meant for 8 yos where boys are encouraged to share if they have already touched their ‘dickie’...
All the while the very same school system has to deal with children from the most conservative, often semi literate at best, and highly religious, backgrounds. Who openly reject most of a school's progressive teaching objectives (learning about the Holocaust isn’t that popular anymore in urban schools, so it’s often abandoned).
But the end goal is still to produce a kind, progressive, highly tolerant person, worried about the fate of the planet and its boiling oceans - teenagers and 20-somethings from the middle- and upper class milieus protest boiling oceans on warm Saturday afternoons, blocking highways while their parents and grandparents take photographs from the hard shoulder).
The word ‘produce’ is the exact right word for progressive educational environments, we’re all blank slates after all, products of our surroundings - though some people seem to behave like balls in a pinball machine.
Yet while the white progressive elite is very tolerant of immigrant intolerance (though it prefers to simply pretend it doesn't exist so that they can ignore it), it is extremely intolerant of those who protest tolerating immigrant intolerance. We ended up in a bizarre situation where the self professed tolerant are intolerant of intolerance of intolerance when that intolerance of intolerance is professed by white natives who protest intolerance by immigrants.
Today, the result of decades of educational niceness results in 1 in 3 15 yos being qualified functional illiterates (for 12 yos it’s 1 in 2). The ministry of education sees no reason to change its ways while Dutch teachers historically only protest when salary cuts are at stake. They’ve never, ever, assembled to rail against the loss of quality.
You’ll understand immigrants, and the 2nd and 3nd generations, have the worst educational results. Many of them cannot understand the manuals of the tech devices they own. While the tolerant do not tolerate bad education for their children, nor immigrant intolerance and sexism, and exclude themselves from it, sending their children to white schools while living in white neighborhoods - where the tolerant tribes live. (A few years ago a progressive Swedish gov secretary, publicly very much in favor of mixing immigrant- and native kids at school, was found busing her own children far away to an all white elite school).
During covid the Dutch gov found that after 60 years of immigration from the Maghreb, sub sahara Africa and the Middle East, and after tons of special programs and hundreds of billions spent, it could not reach immigrants through the msm tv channels and newspapers. It had to communicate on facebook and physically send doctors and nurses to immigrant-rich areas to teach them about the preferred personal measures and to counter conspiracy theories (vaccines would cause infertility etc).
Tribal block voting has been going on for decades, with mostly the labour parties benefitting. Politically we are now seeing the beginning of tribal, ethnicity and religion based political parties (the same is happening in the UK, over there Pakistani’s and Bangladeshi’s are assembling, mainly fueled by the Gazan war).
In the Netherlands an Amsterdam Green party city councilor (‘left as f**k’ as he described himself) waited 6 months before publishing a report about Moroccan violence against gays so that it made, or rather, didn’t make, the news during the summer holidays.
Recently in France a lesbian Greens politician stepped back because her pov was not aligned with the highly conservative povs of her immigrant constituents.
Western- Northern- and Southern Europe is entirely ripe for tribalism. Physically, psychologically, ethnically and morally.
Digital orality pretty much aligns with cultures with strong oral residues: the same relationalism over rationalism (typical of literate culture) and other oral features.
It’s an interesting piece. I may be misunderstanding you. Are you suggesting that in purely oral cultures people were/are unable to imagine the future? Isn’t referential displacement - the capacity to speak about what is not immediately present to the senses - a basic feature of speech? I mean, isn’t that one of the reasons why speech exists in the first place? And didn’t that give humans a decisive advantage - that they could think and plan ahead and talk about what they could imagine happening? E.g ‘It looks like it’s going to rain soon so let’s make a shelter’ is a darn sight more useful to a person than ‘I am currently experiencing a horrible downpour’. Now, perhaps you are saying such predictive planning is only possible if you’ve experienced the phenomenon before, i.e. a downpour. But you’re still using speech to communicate about something that is not right there, right now. So what’s the difference?
I wouldn’t use concepts like inability. Instead, the term “affordance” works better. Orality favored living in the “here and now” due to its behavioral nature. As a collective memory device, orality preserved the past—Havelock’s “tribal encyclopedia,” Korzybski’s humans as time-binding beings.
The affordance of writing is different. It literally excludes the “here and now,” because writer and reader have different “here and now”s. Orality synchronizes people in behavior, writing synchronizes people in thought. Writing is always not about now.
Writing not only enforced the accuracy of the past but also introduced the future as the space of intellectual and practical operations. When temple priests made records of offerings-taxes from farmers and craftsmen, they also ordered distribution and issued work orders to let water into the fields, for example. So writing enforced the future at the practical level.
Essentially, any notation is left for future reference.
‘As a consequence, an oral person does not endeavor to judge beyond personal or tribal experience, that is, beyond experience lived through, individually or collectively.’
From here on i could not stop thinking about immigrants and asylum seekers (mostly an alternative form of migration) to western Europe.
Contemporary acceptance of immigration is typically based on pity (i.e. on media images), on a certain discomfort with our wealth, and on the ability to physically exclude one self and one’s family from literally having to live under the consequences of one’s political preferences (in the real world, when it comes down to it, progressives are mightily in favor of the (advantages of) social ordering of class systems).
Meanwhile words on immigration are harshly patrolled by our version of Iran’s and Saudi Arabia’s morality police (though SA has reigned in its morality police while in the west the reverse happened), having opinions on immigration in msm allowed within a certain bandwidth (1970s: 'be careful, you might be a fascist’, 2020s: ‘yes, you probably are a fascist’).
All the while, for decades, and up to this day, a large portion of immigrants were/are from tribal parts of the world: North Africa, sub Saharan Afrca, and the Middle east. https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/individualism-and-cooperation-i#:~:text=Across%20the%20globe%2C%20most%20cultures
The first generations were rather often full- or semi illiterates. Their offspring had and has typically little assistance from their parents when attaining knowledge about the world while school, exactly in the decades when the immigrants arrived, moved from a traditional masculine (tough) learning setting, to a much more accommodating, progressive environment where high expectations were replaced by niceness (it’s no coincidence our primary- and secondary school systems have completely feminized). Since the 70s school has to be enjoyed, shape the morals of the young person (preferably a bit left wing) and produce social harmony.
Sexual education used to be just that: it taught you how babies are made and implicitly warned you ‘don’t be stupid and produce a baby when you’re 16’.Tellingly now, in a ‘woke’ environment (woke is very much about ‘being nice’ after all) sexual education has been renamed at public secular schools to ‘sexual development’. Meaning the preferred opinions about sexual preferences are to be handed to you, and absorbed by you. If schools wish they can opt for sexual development material meant for 8 yos where boys are encouraged to share if they have already touched their ‘dickie’...
All the while the very same school system has to deal with children from the most conservative, often semi literate at best, and highly religious, backgrounds. Who openly reject most of a school's progressive teaching objectives (learning about the Holocaust isn’t that popular anymore in urban schools, so it’s often abandoned).
But the end goal is still to produce a kind, progressive, highly tolerant person, worried about the fate of the planet and its boiling oceans - teenagers and 20-somethings from the middle- and upper class milieus protest boiling oceans on warm Saturday afternoons, blocking highways while their parents and grandparents take photographs from the hard shoulder).
The word ‘produce’ is the exact right word for progressive educational environments, we’re all blank slates after all, products of our surroundings - though some people seem to behave like balls in a pinball machine.
Yet while the white progressive elite is very tolerant of immigrant intolerance (though it prefers to simply pretend it doesn't exist so that they can ignore it), it is extremely intolerant of those who protest tolerating immigrant intolerance. We ended up in a bizarre situation where the self professed tolerant are intolerant of intolerance of intolerance when that intolerance of intolerance is professed by white natives who protest intolerance by immigrants.
Today, the result of decades of educational niceness results in 1 in 3 15 yos being qualified functional illiterates (for 12 yos it’s 1 in 2). The ministry of education sees no reason to change its ways while Dutch teachers historically only protest when salary cuts are at stake. They’ve never, ever, assembled to rail against the loss of quality.
You’ll understand immigrants, and the 2nd and 3nd generations, have the worst educational results. Many of them cannot understand the manuals of the tech devices they own. While the tolerant do not tolerate bad education for their children, nor immigrant intolerance and sexism, and exclude themselves from it, sending their children to white schools while living in white neighborhoods - where the tolerant tribes live. (A few years ago a progressive Swedish gov secretary, publicly very much in favor of mixing immigrant- and native kids at school, was found busing her own children far away to an all white elite school).
During covid the Dutch gov found that after 60 years of immigration from the Maghreb, sub sahara Africa and the Middle East, and after tons of special programs and hundreds of billions spent, it could not reach immigrants through the msm tv channels and newspapers. It had to communicate on facebook and physically send doctors and nurses to immigrant-rich areas to teach them about the preferred personal measures and to counter conspiracy theories (vaccines would cause infertility etc).
Tribal block voting has been going on for decades, with mostly the labour parties benefitting. Politically we are now seeing the beginning of tribal, ethnicity and religion based political parties (the same is happening in the UK, over there Pakistani’s and Bangladeshi’s are assembling, mainly fueled by the Gazan war).
In the Netherlands an Amsterdam Green party city councilor (‘left as f**k’ as he described himself) waited 6 months before publishing a report about Moroccan violence against gays so that it made, or rather, didn’t make, the news during the summer holidays.
Recently in France a lesbian Greens politician stepped back because her pov was not aligned with the highly conservative povs of her immigrant constituents.
Western- Northern- and Southern Europe is entirely ripe for tribalism. Physically, psychologically, ethnically and morally.
Digital orality pretty much aligns with cultures with strong oral residues: the same relationalism over rationalism (typical of literate culture) and other oral features.
It’s an interesting piece. I may be misunderstanding you. Are you suggesting that in purely oral cultures people were/are unable to imagine the future? Isn’t referential displacement - the capacity to speak about what is not immediately present to the senses - a basic feature of speech? I mean, isn’t that one of the reasons why speech exists in the first place? And didn’t that give humans a decisive advantage - that they could think and plan ahead and talk about what they could imagine happening? E.g ‘It looks like it’s going to rain soon so let’s make a shelter’ is a darn sight more useful to a person than ‘I am currently experiencing a horrible downpour’. Now, perhaps you are saying such predictive planning is only possible if you’ve experienced the phenomenon before, i.e. a downpour. But you’re still using speech to communicate about something that is not right there, right now. So what’s the difference?
I wouldn’t use concepts like inability. Instead, the term “affordance” works better. Orality favored living in the “here and now” due to its behavioral nature. As a collective memory device, orality preserved the past—Havelock’s “tribal encyclopedia,” Korzybski’s humans as time-binding beings.
The affordance of writing is different. It literally excludes the “here and now,” because writer and reader have different “here and now”s. Orality synchronizes people in behavior, writing synchronizes people in thought. Writing is always not about now.
Writing not only enforced the accuracy of the past but also introduced the future as the space of intellectual and practical operations. When temple priests made records of offerings-taxes from farmers and craftsmen, they also ordered distribution and issued work orders to let water into the fields, for example. So writing enforced the future at the practical level.
Essentially, any notation is left for future reference.
Thanks for taking the trouble to respond.