Posts Tagged ‘civilization’
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it”*…
… What we read– and, librarian Carlo Iacono argues, how we read.
Our inabilty to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time…
Everyone is panicking about the death of reading. The statistics look damning: the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day has fallen by more than 40 per cent over the past 20 years, according to research published in iScience this year. The OECD calls the 2022 decline in educational outcomes ‘unprecedented’ across developed nations. In the OECD’s latest adult-skills survey, Denmark and Finland were the only participating countries where average literacy proficiency improved over the past decade. Your nephew speaks in TikTok references. Democracy itself apparently hangs by the thread of our collective attention span.
This narrative has a seductive simplicity. Screens are destroying civilisation. Children can no longer think. We are witnessing the twilight of the literate mind. A recent Substack essay by James Marriott proclaimed the arrival of a ‘post-literate society’ and invited us to accept this as a fait accompli. (Marriott does also write for The Times.) The diagnosis is familiar: technology has fundamentally degraded our capacity for sustained thought, and there’s nothing to be done except write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance.
I spend my working life in a university library, watching how people actually engage with information. What I observe doesn’t match this narrative. Not because the problems aren’t real, but because the diagnosis is wrong.
The declinist position rests on a category error: treating ‘screen culture’ as a unified phenomenon with inherent cognitive properties. As if the same device that delivers algorithmically curated rage-bait and also the complete works of Shakespeare is itself the problem rather than how we decide to use it…
[… observing that “people who ‘can’t focus’ on traditional texts can maintain extraordinary concentration when working across modes, he argues that “we haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels.”…]
… What troubles me most about the declinist position is not its diagnosis but its conclusion. The commentators who lament the post-literate society often identify the same villains I do. They recognise that technology companies are, in Marriott’s words, ‘actively working to destroy human enlightenment’, that tech oligarchs ‘have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat.’
And then they surrender. As Marriott says: ‘Nothing will ever be the same again. Welcome to the post-literate society.’
This is the move I cannot follow. To name the actors responsible and then treat the outcome as inevitable is to provide them cover. If the crisis is a force of nature, ‘screens’ destroying civilisation like some technological weather system, then there’s nothing to be done but write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance. But if the crisis is the product of specific design choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons, then those choices can be challenged, regulated, reversed.
The fatalism, however beautifully expressed, serves the very interests it condemns. The technology companies would very much like us to believe that what they’re doing to human attention is simply the inevitable result of technological progress rather than something they’re doing to us, something that could, with sufficient political will, be stopped.
Your inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking. You’re trying to sustain attention in spaces engineered to shatter it. You’re fighting algorithms explicitly optimised to keep you scrolling, not learning.
The solution isn’t discipline. It’s architecture. Build different defaults. Create different spaces. Establish different rhythms. Make depth as easy as distraction currently is. Make thinking feel as natural as scrolling currently does.
What if, instead of mourning some imaginary golden age of pure text, we got serious about designing for depth across all modes? Every video could come with a searchable transcript. Every article could offer multiple entry points for different levels of attention. Our devices could recognise when we’re trying to think and protect that thinking. Schools could teach students to translate between modes the way they once taught translation between languages.
Books aren’t going anywhere. They remain unmatched for certain kinds of sustained, complex thinking. But they’re no longer the only game in town for serious ideas. A well-crafted video essay can carry philosophical weight. A podcast can enable the kind of long-form thinking we associate with written essays. An interactive visualisation can reveal patterns that pages of description struggle to achieve.
The future belongs to people who can dance between all modes without losing their balance. Someone who can read deeply when depth is needed, skim efficiently when efficiency matters, listen actively during a commute, and watch critically when images carry the argument. This isn’t about consuming more. It’s about choosing consciously.
We stand at an inflection point. We can drift into a world where sustained thought becomes a luxury good, where only the privileged have access to the conditions that enable deep thinking. Or we can build something unprecedented: a culture that preserves the best of print’s cognitive gifts while embracing the possibilities of a world where ideas travel through light, sound and interaction.
The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.
The civilisations that thrive won’t be the ones that retreat into text or surrender to the feed. They’ll be the ones that understand a simple truth: every idea has a natural form, and wisdom lies in matching the mode to the meaning. Some ideas want to be written. Others need to be seen. Still others must be heard, felt or experienced. The mistake is forcing all ideas through a single channel, whether that channel is a book or a screen.
Your great-grandchildren won’t read less than you do. They’ll read differently, as part of a richer symphony of sense-making. Whether that symphony sounds like music or noise depends entirely on the choices we make right now about the shape of our tools, the structure of our schools, and the design of our days.
The elegant lamenters offer a eulogy. I’m more interested in a fight…
Reunderstanding reading: “Books and screens,” from @carloiacono.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
* Oscar Wilde
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As we turn the page, we might note that we’ve been here before, and celebrate the emergence of a design, an innovation, a technology that took on a life of its own and changed reading and… well, everything: this day in 1455 is the traditionally-given date of the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed from movable type.
(Lest we think that there’s actually anything new under the sun, we might recall that The Jikji— the world’s oldest known extant movable metal type printed book– was published in Korea in 1377; and that Bi Sheng created the first known moveable type– out of wood– in China in 1040.)
“Seeing comes before words”*…
Five years ago, (R)D featured John Berger’s award-winning– and more to the point, hugely-influential– television series Ways of Seeing (in some ways a response to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation series). The broadcast was followed by an adaptation of Berger’s scripts that became a book of the same name.
Now that hugely influential work is available in a gorgeous web version…
Based on the 1972 BBC series and comprised of 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictoral, Ways of Seeing is a seminal work which examines how we view art…
A beautiful new way to enjoy (and learn from) a classic: “Ways of Seeing“
* John Berger (the first line of Ways of Seeing)
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As we ponder perspective, we might pause to celebrate the induction, on this date in 2005, into the the National Toy Hall of Fame of a plaything that invites constant creativity– the cardboard box.
“Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite”*…
As Rodrigo Pérez Ortega reports, that admonition has a very long history…
Long before rats roamed sewers and cockroaches lurked in kitchen corners, another unwelcome guest plagued early civilizations. A new genomic study published today in Biology Letters suggests that bedbugs—the blood-feeding insects that haunt our hotel stays—were the first urban pests, proving an itchy menace for tens of thousands of years.
“This is really amazing,” says Klaus Reinhardt, an evolutionary biologist at the Dresden University of Technology who was not involved in the new study. “I think the hypothesis is quite solid.” Still, other researchers quibble over whether bedbugs can indisputably claim that title.
Many species of bedbugs depend on us—and our blood—to survive, but long ago, their prey of choice was probably exclusively bats. Genetic evidence suggests that about 245,000 years ago, some bedbugs made the jump to early humans.
This split led to two genetically distinct bedbug lineages. One kept feeding on bats and today remains largely confined to caves and natural habitats in Europe and the Middle East. The other followed humans into modern dwellings. Exactly how that scenario played out remained a mystery, however. That’s why Warren Booth, an evolutionary biologist at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and his team set out to study the genome of the common bedbug (Cimex lectularius) in depth…
… [Their findings make] bedbugs strong contenders for the title of the world’s first true urban pest that relies solely on humans, the researchers claim. Unlike more recent urban interlopers that feast on our stored food and enjoy our cozy homes—like the German cockroach (Blattella germanica), which formed a close association with humans just 2000 years ago, or the black rat (Rattus rattus), whose commensal relationship began about 5000 years ago—bedbugs may have started parasitizing humans just as our ancestors started building permanent settlements…
… the new findings underscore how humans have shaped the evolution of urban insects. Compared with their bat-feeding cousins, human-feeding bedbugs are smaller, less hairy, and have larger limbs—adaptations likely suited to navigating smooth walls and synthetic bedding. Today’s bedbugs also carry many DNA mutations linked to insecticide resistance, a relatively recent trait that reflects the pressures of modern pest control. “They’re a remarkable yet horrible species,” Booth says.
Understanding how these pests evolved together with us could help improve strategies for controlling them, especially as cities continue to grow—and as bedbugs now feed on the poultry we raise. Further research could also help us understand how our own immune system evolved, since some people develop allergies for bedbug bites. As a start, Booth and his team are analyzing centuries-old bedbug specimens in museums, to track how the insects’ genomes—and populations—have evolved over the past century alongside us.
“There’s a pretty intimate association, whether we like it or not,” Booth says. “That’s not going away anytime soon.”…
“Bedbugs may be the first urban pest,” from @rpocisv.bsky.social in @science.org.
* common children’s rhyme
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As we contemplate the chronicle of a co-evolved curse, we might recall that it was on thus date in 1789 that Richard Kirwan published his essay in support of the phlogiston theory (the belief, that dates to alchemical times, in the existence of a fire-like element (dubbed “phlogiston”) contained within combustible bodies and released during burning. Kirwan was among the last of its advocates.
A well-regarded scientist in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Kirwan met and corresponded with Black, Lavoisier, Priestley, and Cavendish. Indeed, while scientific history remembers him as a defender of an incorrect theory, his work probably spurred Priestley and Lavoisier, who respectively discovered and named the actual elemental agent of combustion, oxygen.
But Kirwan is also remembered for a personal eccentricity (one of many) relevant to this post: he hated bugs (especially flies). He paid his servant a bounty for each one they killed.
“Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences”*…
A report issued by International Chamber of Commerce late last year found that extreme weather cost $2tn globally over last decade; the U.S. suffered the greatest losses. As Damian Carrington reports, a leading insurance executive is warning that urgent action is needed to save the conditions under which markets – and civilization itself – can operate…
The climate crisis is on track to destroy capitalism, a top insurer has warned, with the vast cost of extreme weather impacts leaving the financial sector unable to operate.
The world is fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer cover for many climate risks, said Günther Thallinger, on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies. He said that without insurance, which is already being pulled in some places, many other financial services become unviable, from mortgages to investments.
Global carbon emissions are still rising and current policies will result in a rise in global temperature between 2.2C and 3.4C above pre-industrial levels. The damage at 3C will be so great that governments will be unable to provide financial bailouts and it will be impossible to adapt to many climate impacts, said Thallinger, who is also the chair of the German company’s investment board and was previously CEO of Allianz Investment Management.
The core business of the insurance industry is risk management and it has long taken the dangers of global heating very seriously. In recent reports, Aviva said extreme weather damages for the decade to 2023 hit $2tn, while GallagherRE said the figure was $400bn in 2024. Zurich said it was “essential” to hit net zero by 2050.
Thallinger said: “The good news is we already have the technologies to switch from fossil combustion to zero-emission energy. The only thing missing is speed and scale. This is about saving the conditions under which markets, finance, and civilisation itself can continue to operate.”
Nick Robins, the chair of the Just Transition Finance Lab at the London School of Economics, said: “This devastating analysis from a global insurance leader sets out not just the financial but also the civilisational threat posed by climate change. It needs to be the basis for renewed action, particularly in the countries of the global south.”
“The insurance sector is a canary in the coalmine when it comes to climate impacts,” said Janos Pasztor, former UN assistant secretary-general for climate change.
The argument set out by Thallinger in a LinkedIn post begins with the increasingly severe damage being caused by the climate crisis: “Heat and water destroy capital. Flooded homes lose value. Overheated cities become uninhabitable. Entire asset classes are degrading in real time.”
“We are fast approaching temperature levels – 1.5C, 2C, 3C – where insurers will no longer be able to offer coverage for many of these risks,” he said. “The math breaks down: the premiums required exceed what people or companies can pay. This is already happening. Entire regions are becoming uninsurable.” He cited companies ending home insurance in California due to wildfires.
Thallinger said it was a systemic risk “threatening the very foundation of the financial sector”, because a lack of insurance means other financial services become unavailable: “This is a climate-induced credit crunch.”
“This applies not only to housing, but to infrastructure, transportation, agriculture, and industry,” he said. “The economic value of entire regions – coastal, arid, wildfire-prone – will begin to vanish from financial ledgers. Markets will reprice, rapidly and brutally. This is what a climate-driven market failure looks like.”
No governments will realistically be able to cover the damage when multiple high-cost events happen in rapid succession, as climate models predict, Thallinger said. Australia’s disaster recovery spending has already increased sevenfold between 2017 and 2023, he noted.
The idea that billions of people can just adapt to worsening climate impacts is a “false comfort”, he said: “There is no way to ‘adapt’ to temperatures beyond human tolerance … Whole cities built on flood plains cannot simply pick up and move uphill.”
At 3C of global heating, climate damage cannot be insured against, covered by governments, or adapted to, Thallinger said: “That means no more mortgages, no new real estate development, no long-term investment, no financial stability. The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.”
The only solution was to cut fossil fuel burning, or capture the emissions, he said, with everything else being a delay or distraction. He said capitalism must solve the crisis, starting with putting its sustainability goals on the same level as financial goals.
Many financial institutions have moved away from climate action after the election of the US president, Donald Trump, who has called such action a “green scam”. Thallinger said in February: “The cost of inaction is higher than the cost of transformation and adaptation. If we succeed in our transition, we will enjoy a more efficient, competitive economy [and] a higher quality of life.”…
It’s time, if not past time, to act: “Climate crisis on track to destroy capitalism, warns top insurer,” from @dpcarrington.bsky.social in @theguardian.com.
Further to the point: “Get ready for several years of killer heat, top weather forecasters warn.”
See also: “Q&A: Kiley Bense on Climate Journalism in a New Information Environment.”
(Image above: source)
* Robert Louis Stevenson
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As we contemplate craziness, we might recall that it was on this date in 2011 that the Wallow Fire started. A wildfire that started in the White Mountains near Alpine, Arizona, it was named for the Bear Wallow Wilderness area where the fire originated.
The fire eventually spread across the stateline into western New Mexico. By the time the fire was contained on July 8, it had consumed 538,049 acres of land, 522,642 acres in Arizona and 15,407 acres in New Mexico. It was the largest wildfire in Arizona history and did an estimated estimated cost was $109 million in damages. Smoke from the Wallow Fires and others in Arizona and New Mexico extended through Texas and Oklahoma up into the Great Lakes region, affecting air quality for large areas east of the Rocky Mountains.
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful”*…
On the rise of organized religion in human life: our species has, for thousands of years, been affected by widespread belief in a watchful presence above us. But did moralizing Big Gods spark a surge in cooperation, or did they simply grow out of complex civilization? Brian Klaas explores….
… For most of human history, our species lived in small bands, often groups of fewer than a hundred people. Then, suddenly, around 12,000 years ago, complex civilizations began to pepper the landscape, as cooperation and coordination surged. This presents a puzzle: why the sudden shift in our behavior?
Some have argued that “Big Gods”—complete with their watchful eyes gazing down on us from above and threatening to punish us for sin—were the key component in social cooperation and the rise of civilization, moving us from our simple hunter-gatherer roots to sophisticated, sprawling empires. But is that true?…
… Intellectual historians often point to two major divergent explanations for the emergence of religion. The great philosopher David Hume argued that religion is the natural, but arbitrary, byproduct of human cognitive architecture.
Since the beginning, Homo sapiens experienced disordered events, seemingly without explanation. To order a disordered world, our ancestors began to ascribe agency to supernatural beings, to which they could offer gifts, sacrifices, and prayers to sway them to their personal whims. The uncontrollable world became controllable. The unexplainable was explained—a comforting outcome for the pattern detection machines housed in our skulls.
By contrast, thinkers like Émile Durkheim argued that religion emerged as a social glue. Rituals bond people across space and time. Religion was instrumental, not intrinsic. It emerged to serve our societies, not comfort our minds. As Voltaire put it: “If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.”
In the last two decades, a vibrant strand of scholarship has sought to reconcile these contrasting viewpoints, notably through the work of Ara Norenzayan, author of Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict.
Norenzayan’s “Big Gods” refer to deities that are omniscient, moralizing beings, careful to note our sins and punish us accordingly. Currently, roughly 77 percent of the world’s population identifies with one of just four religions (31% Christian; 24% Muslim; 15% Hindu; 7% Buddhist). In all four, moral transgressions produce consequences, some immediate, others punished in the afterlife.
Norenzayan aptly notes that the omniscience of Big Gods assumes total knowledge of everything in the universe, but that the divine is always depicted as being particularly interested in our moral behavior. If God exists, He surely could know which socks you wore yesterday, but deities focus their attentions not on such amoral trifles, but rather on whether you lie, covet, cheat, steal, or kill.
However, Norenzayan draws on anthropology evidence to argue that early supernatural beings had none of these traits and were disinterested in human affairs. They were fickle demons, tricksters and spirits, not omniscient gods who worried about whether any random human had wronged his neighbor…
… These deities may have fulfilled the conditions outlined by Hume—they explained the unexplainable as machinations of supernatural forces—but they didn’t serve much of a social deterrence function, because you wouldn’t need to fear being struck down by a lightning bolt from above if you wronged a rival.
Every social species that thrives, from wasps to humans, requires a mechanism of stopping individual members from working against the group’s interests. In complex hives, specialized “police wasps” serve as enforcers, seeking out and destroying any wasps producing larvae that may lead to an excess number of queens in the colony. When detected, any rogues are “beheaded or torn apart by the workers soon after they emerge from their cells in the brood comb,” explain Professors Francis Ratnieks and Tom Wenseleers.
Unlike wasps, early human societies didn’t have police forces. Without an enforcement mechanism, social complexity and large civilizations came with enormous risks of predatory, anti-social behavior that could undermine survival.
Over time, Norenzayan argues, divine forces shifted within these administratively weak human groupings. Thus emerged what Norenzayan calls “supernatural monitoring,” a belief in an omniscient presence that never averts His gaze from sin. Everything is tracked, monitored, then punished…
… It is now a nearly universal feature of religious belief systems that a divine presence prohibits certain behaviors—and rewards others. And that presence is always watching. In addition to the omniscient sky gods of today’s major religions, ancient Egypt was home to Horus of Two Eyes. The Incans were watched by Viracocha. Today, in modern Tibet and Nepal, Buddhist depictions of eyes are dotted across villages, reminding everyone that nothing can ever be truly hidden.
The “Big Gods” hypothesis argues that divine gazes provided a far more effective form of deterring anti-social behavior than any mortal police force…
Did the watchful gaze of moralizing gods produce the rise of complex civilizations? “Big Gods and the Origin of Human Cooperation,” from @brianklaas.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Seneca the Younger
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As we brood on belief, we might recall that on this date in 1349 a group of Christian guilds, fearful of the Black Death, carried out the Basel Massacre…
… an anti-Semitic massacre in Basel, which occurred in 1349 in connection with alleged well poisoning as part of the Black Death persecutions, carried out against the Jews in Europe at the time of the Black Death. A number of Jews, variously given as between 300 and 600 (according to contemporary Medieval chronicles) or 50 to 70 (according to some modern historians) were burned alive, after being locked in a wooden structure built on a nearby island in the Rhine. Jewish children were apparently spared, but forcibly baptized and sent to monasteries…
…Contemporary chronicler Matthias of Neuenburg describes the event with these words:
Therefore all the Jews of Basel, without a legal sentence [being passed] and because of the clamor of the people, were burned on an island in the Rhine River in a new house” (Cremati sunt igitur absque sentencia ad clamorem populi omnes Judei Basilienses in una insula Rheni in domo nova).
Similar pogroms took place in Freiburg on 30 January, and in Strasbourg on 14 February. The massacre had notably taken place before the Black Death had even reached the city. When it finally broke out in April to May 1349, the converted Jews were still blamed for well poisoning. The officials of Basel placed judgement on some baptized Jews, and on 4 July four of them were tortured on the wheel, “confessing” that they had poisoned Basel’s fountains (Juden … Offenlich vor gerichte verjahen und seiten, das sie die brunnen ze unserre state etlich vergift hettent).[4] The remaining converted Jews were partly executed, partly expulsed. By the end of 1349, the Jews of Basel had been murdered, their cemetery destroyed and all debts to Jews declared settled.
– source
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