How To Do Soul-Craft With State Tools

To be clear about the mechanism: our society selects for the affordances of a medium—speed, ease, efficiency—not for its effects . And it is the effects of literacy that hold its civilizational value. This is the critical point: those deep cognitive and ethical capacities are not being selected for. They are not easily monetized or optimized.

Widespread literacy, then, is not a natural baseline but a costly ecological accomplishment. It depends on sustained, large-scale societal investment in both cultivation and maintenance. If that investment falters—or if new modes of communication arise that are less cognitively demanding and more closely aligned with our oral-auditory predispositio... See more