Our Mission

Our baleful insight is that the West has entered a post-literate stage.  This does not mean that people no longer read.  It means, rather, that reading has become ancillary to electronic technology, and that the quality of literature is largely dictated by that technology.  "Self help" manuals and biographies about "stars" were elbowing serious writing off the charts years ago.  Now even non-fiction monographs on major political issues inanely joke about "foreign-sounding" names or attempt silly puns.   Fiction is highly imitative of electronic narrative: that is, it displays shallow characters, formulaic dialogue, and plots where physical action trumps psychological depth.  When our students and children do any writing of their own, they misspell ("lite" for "light"), they spout stale clichés ("you were there for me"), they support their views with peer-group prejudice rather than objectively valid reasons ("people should never judge people's sex lives"), and they lurch impulsively from one point to another rather than building a logical chain ("it makes me mad that some people...").  In fact, the constant intrusion of "I" and "me" into this writing is specific and convincing evidence that our children can no longer sort personal mood (or even downright moodiness) from arguments which reach out to other intelligences and lead them to common ground.

The three youths in a crowded Third World city are having a good time--more so, probably, than the white-collar professional.  Yet he is almost certainly selling "good times" at some stage and level, and lads like these will buy his wares at an assembly line's far end (while slaving on that line by day).  What happens anywhere along the way to preserve humane cultural tradition?  (The environs of St. Selskar's ruined abbey in Wexford, Ireland, have in fact provided a parking lot near the city center for years.) 

The great scholars mentioned above (Havelock, Ong, et al.) have remarked that denizens of oral-traditional cultures display precisely these same habits of thought.  Whether in Homeric Greece or on the Serengeti, they tell stories where characters act rather than reflect--and they all tell the same stories, speak the same slang, and orient their behavior to the same proverbs and prejudices.  They do not think for themselves, as we would say.  (Achilles is forced to do a bit of this when he withdraws from battle to save face, but all he can find beyond the communal context is chaos.)  Now, responsibility to the group isn't a bad thing: but members of oral-traditional cultures do not acknowledge an abstract debt to the tribe (let alone a mystical allegiance to humanity) so much as they do what the neighbors are doing.  Their obedience is not guided by principle, but conditioned by habit.  In this regard, they are already somewhat hampered in moral endeavor: that is, they do not freely choose their acts but merely conform to an ageless paradigm, which may include stoning hapless strangers as well as dying on the front line for their brothers.  They have often been called child-like, no doubt with Victorian condescension sometimes.  Yet they do tend to show a child's discomfort with the onerous freedom to arbitrate situations not reducible to a certain pattern.

Literacy, by giving us such moral freedom, has made us both better and worse.  It has made us capable of being good or bad.  When we learned to write as a civilization (at least in the West, where alphabetic spelling put literate skills within everyone's grasp), we became much more private.  We knew what we had read--which could differ widely for every individual--rather than what we had all heard in the plaza.  We stared at our own thoughts on paper and revised them rather than releasing them glibly into thin air.  We developed an inner life whose lonely depths could be more than a match for the buzzing activity around us.  We grew to be creatures who could stand up before the whole tribe and say, "My heart tells me that stoning this stranger is wrong."  Unfortunately, we also grew more apt to engineer our rival's stoning in Iago-like fashion, keeping our own counsel and nursing along our own soul's decay.  The moral history of human creation is less one of peaks and troughs than one of a "progress" whose harvest of mature good souls is vitiated by highly evolved weeds.

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Greek Woman.  Image courtesy of The Art Renewal Center at www.artrenewal.org

Yet we at The Center for Literate Values believe that humanity's solemn obligation is to pursue this ambiguous progress.  A generation of very good and very bad people is significantly closer to achieving the metaphysical ends of human life than a generation of lukewarm, protected, underdeveloped, "child-like" people.  Literacy is confessional, from a spiritual standpoint.  The person who does not know his own heart may be less guilty for the wrong he does--but our duty to a transcending goodness begins in studying our motives minutely, honestly, and humbly.  As we lose writing, we lose the very ability to confess, to know who we are and what we do.  Our reading may help us plan a vacation (thereby serving utility) or may permit us to escape to a planet populated by talking camels (thereby serving frivolous amusement).  It is no longer prodding us to dissect psychology, however--our own and others'--since reading and writing are no longer practiced with slow, meticulous care and in silent, intense privacy.

Besides, as our children's minds are trained by pulsing screens, they are really not veering back into oral tradition at all (a truth entirely lost on the young Marshall MacLuhan and many others since).  The traditional tribesman is firmly oriented to a body of myth, lore, ritual, and proverb, much of which has a moral component.  Our children, in contrast, have no orientation to anything but the latest fads, which are becoming outdated at exponentially increasing rates.  Their devotion is to change.  They hunger insatiably for something new.  That hunger drives our economy today, and may soon drive us along with our economy into a cultural meltdown.  Yet politicians and professional educators continue to place more screens in the classroom and insist upon more digitalization of the marketplace.  None of them seems willing to engage the career risks involved in telling us to our face that we have a cancer in need of aggressive and immediate treatment.

If you are reading these words, you almost certainly have Internet access.  It is not our policy, obviously, to disdain the Net's worldwide forum.  On the contrary, an organization of our limited resources would have no hope of reaching a large audience without the Net.  Are we cutting a deal with the devil?  It need not be so: the best movies and TV shows were once based on good books or created by very literate writers.  Just as writing supported oral tradition for a millennium in northwest Europe (the Middle Ages), so electronic media, used correctly, can nurture the literate values of fine analysis, patience, objectivity, and creation of mature consensus.  At present, our primary endeavor is to bring to the world a quarterly, Praesidium: A Journal of Literate and Literary Analysis.  We believe that you will find the essays, stories, and poetry contained herein to be of a profound and readable caliber not known, perhaps, since Blackwood's Magazine (the first literary journal ever) shut down its operation more than thirty years ago.  Soon we hope to publish and distribute useful e-books (able to be downloaded from this site) for those who share our concerns.  We should be delighted to hear from you, whether in response to our undertaking or in contribution, perhaps, to a forthcoming Praesidium.