The Illiteracy

  

The ILLITERACY is the state of mind occupied by all the people in this country who are either functionally or de facto illiterate. Sure there are those unfortunates who really can’t read. However, a good part of this modern nation state communicate freely and express their outrage and fantasies to one another on social media. So they're definitely capable of reading and writing. But the majority of this increasingly large demographic have been deprived of any sense of history. A large proportion have never heard of The New York Public Library, Shakespeare or Beethoven, the Cold War or utopia. Expressions like parliamentary democracy, economy of scale and conspicuous consumption are totally foreign. They have never heard of Pyongyang and hence have no idea that it's the capital of the insular and rogue state of North Korea whose youthful leader Kim Jong-un has made lots of wild threats. They may have heard that Syria is on fire but they don’t know why and they certainly have never heard of Mr. Assad or could care less. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, Werner von Braun, Einstein and certainly Niels Bohr all fall under their radar. Queen Victoria sounds familiar due to Victoria’s Secret, but no, they never have heard of Nelson Mandela, much less Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi or FDR. And no they didn’t read The Catcher in the Rye in high school and they never heard of  “Trane,” John Coltrane that is. They never got polio because they were vaccinated, but they never heard of Jonas Salk and certainly not Alexander Fleming, whose invention of penicillin spared them from infection. Ask a member of the Illiteracy, who is our current Vice President? If they fail ask about earth and what galaxy it’s in and failing that ask, if there is any truth to the fact that it was created in six days (and nights) and that on the seventh God was finished and took a rest.

The Afterlife Reified

Paradise of Bhaishaijyaguru

NYU has produced eminent scholars in the fields of philosophy and law. The late Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel are two of the most notable examples. In a recent Sunday Review, Samuel Scheffler, another NYU professor whose appointment bridges these two disciplines broached a question that is not often taken up by either lawyers or philosophers and that’s the afterlife (“The Importance of the Afterlife. Seriously,” NYT, 9/21/13). Scheffler isn’t dealing with the question of whether there is soul that lives on in heaven or hell. He is dealing with the life that goes on after we are gone and his premise is that many things wouldn’t make sense in this life, if we didn’t think human life was going to go on after us. It’s a little bit the notion that Beckett expresses humorously in Endgame when Clov asks “Do you believe in the life to come?” and Hamm replies, “Mine was always that.” Scheffler isn’t dealing with questions of heaven or hell. He avoids theology by materializing the question of the afterlife, in much the way that insurance companies do. From an actuarial point of view why would one want to expend energy on certain activities, if the world were coming to an end? “If you were a cancer researcher, you might be less motivated to continue your work,” he remarks. The end of the world would have a similar effect on “an engineer working to improve the seismic safety of bridges.” But when he brings up the question of novelists, playwrights and composers he’s on shaky ground. Sure most creatives dream they will produce classics that will live on forever. But the fact is that few do. Within a generation or two many well-known writers will fade into oblivion. Updike might have staying power, but few people today talk of John O’Hara, the author of Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8 who was a legend in his time. Ever hear of a writer named John P. Marquand who won a Pulitzer for The Late George Apley in 1938? How many Rembrandts, Beethovens and Tolstoys are there in recorded history? Must a writer maintain the delusion of immortality in order to function? Or is there something to be said for the fact that writing, composing and painting would have a function even if Chicken Little were right and the sky was falling. After all in the case of a doomsday scenario who is going to write the eulogy for the human race? Who is going to provide the music at the service? Who will provide the design of life’s final brochure?