The other day I struggled with long division. Decimalize seven-thirteenths without my smart phone handy? – no problem, I’d do it the old way – only I found myself hopelessly entangled. Same happened two years ago when a five-year-old grandkid challenged me to ping-pong. For fifty years I’d connected racquets (or paddles) to airborne spheroids innumerable times weekly – I was pretty good at tennis and paddle tennis at a “club level” – only now (I cringe to confess) I whiffed. WTF!!! I doubt I can still ride a bike after a decade of desuetude: for sure I’m not going to try lest I harm myself. (“How did you break that arm?” “Don’t ask!”)
Age is less to blame than practice. With any human movement, voluntary or compulsory, rudimentary or complex, use it or lose it. After cancer surgery sixteen years ago, my guts had to relearn to digest and disgorge, a lesson as painful as the mutilation. My doc had warned me of this consequence, but oh, the wait was long.
This happens with reading. Each day, gratis screens and earphones, more adults lose their knack for decoding words on a page. Graduating from college we supposedly “know how to read.” Since “See Spot run,” we’ve been practicing daily. But during our busy years many get lazy, what the hell, let’s just insert earplugs or grab the remote and in no time words, grammar and syntax vanish. What’s “desuetude” mean, anyway? – I used to know!
Capitalism’s a whiz at reducing labor. But Newton’s Third Law applies to thinking as to everything else. (Hazy whether it was his third or second law, I had to query my laptop.) For every action, an equal and opposite reaction; for every gain, loss; forward equals backward. Labor-saving = capacity-forsaking. Couch potatoes become potatoes – yikes!
So what I can’t read, some shrug. Ask Google – or TV – or now (blessed genius of Man!) AI will advise me – easy as pi!
Words are the tools most humans use to think. True, there are specialized forms of intelligence – visual/spatial, musical, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, et al. – but it’s with language we’ve been taught to wrest our way to understanding. That’s how the trouble started in Eden:
Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.
By naming we possess – for what is ownership but an idea?
Gradually, inexorably, we are losing literacy to what we laughably label convenience. As practice makes perfect, disuse makes us dopes. Forgetting how to think, we deputize our brains to intermediaries, whose interest is to bend us in their direction. Fox News habitues, outfoxed, believe what they’re told – and when the court decrees Fox News lies, these victims shrug, what can they do about it, relearning thinking at this age would be too hard! The stupefied congregate and congratulate themselves on their convictions. Who you calling stupid, fella!
The less we think for ourselves, the greater our anxiety we’re being done to, the likelier we are to credit conspiracy hogwash. Non-readers turn credulous as troglodytes. “How can you think that!” alert onlookers gasp. We believe absurdities because we’ve lost our defense against them. Fail to pedal your brain as you might a bike and you crash.
How to reverse the Stupefaction of Mankind? I’ve no idea. That’s why I foresee our species slip-sliding to extinction. Soon Elon Musk will be doing my thinking for me. Good luck with that.