MODERN PRIMITIVE THOUGHT IN EVANGELISTIC AMERICA

C. R. Hallpike has written about how people in preliterate societies reason in THE FOUNDATIONS OF PRIMITIVE THOUGHT (Oxford Press, 1979) which E. O. Wilson summarizes in CONSILIENCE, p. 208:

“...intuitive and dogmatic, bound up with specific emotional relationships rather than physical causality, preoccupied with essences and metamorphosis, opaque to logical abstraction or arrays of the hypothetical possible, prone to use language for social interaction rather than as a conceptual tool, limited in quantification mostly to rough images of frequency and rarity, and inclined to view mind as stemming partly from the environment and able to project back out into it, so that words become entities with power unto themselves.

“It will become at once apparent, and should be a working premise of economists and other social scientists, that the same preliterate traits are commonplace in [some] citizens of modern industrial societies. They are intensified among cult members, the deeply religious, and the less educated. [capital letters mine] Systematic logico-deductive thought, which is very much a specialized product of Western culture, comes hard on the other hand....”

The preliterate qualities of religious and less educated thought is a concept which is pretty widespread in the literature of science which studies language and the mind. I tend to believe it. What are the rest of us to make of it? Aren’t we slipping back into preliterate times with America’s current decline in literacy? I think we must all keep our eyes on this backward slide of the mental life of American citizens. I do believe we are trending in a way which will cost us our position of leadership in the modern world, and we can blame it clearly on conservatism and religiosity, two of the most destructive forces in American life today. They both are and historically have been retrogressive rather than progressive forces whenever they appear in whatever culture.



MORE ON THE AMERICAN RETREAT
FROM INFORMATION

I wrote the following on December 6, 2004:

When we ask ourselves what’s wrong with our educational systems and why our kids are not learning, I think we all need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves how respectful of intelligence am I?

I could ask, “Do I read for pleasure and fun or just when I have to? Do I respect the intellectual elite or do I feel inferior to them, expressed in and hidden by my contempt? If I’m angry at people who read more than I do and who, therefore, are better informed than I am, do I blame them for my own failure to read and get information in depth? Do I read widely and learn about many things or do I read narrowly only to buttress my own beliefs? For example: If I’m an evolutionist, have I read a “Bible” or “Koran” or the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” lately? And if I’m a creationist, have I read Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” or Richard Dawkins’ “The Blind Watchmaker”? In short, do I really know what I’m talking about or why I feel threatened by a difference in ideas? And, more, to return to the opening idea, shouldn’t I ask, if I have no respect for the literate, well-informed citizen who thinks differently from me, then why do I expect my children to respect intelligence and learning and the facts of a situation?
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“If it weren’t for pickpockets, I’d have no sex life at all.” —Rodney Dangerfield