Writing: More Basildon than James

Back when I was still living in the UK, I had a place near the new town of Basildon, created largely in the 1960's and with a reputation seemingly more based on the under-age pregnancy rate than on reality. I rather enjoyed my time there, and the town centre including some architectural elements I became almost proud of - not including the town square which became a miserably bleak prairie in winter, hardly encouraging the casual shopper. Basildon, though, has no apparent links with that brand of letter writing paper available almost everywhere while I was growing up of Basildon Bond, the poor man's posh paper, staid and blue, everything that James Bond wasn't.

Today I would like to explore reading and writing, those core elements of any school program, although from many a pupil's perspective, chore components might be more apt. Why do we need to learn to read and write, isn't the power of speech enough? The two prime arguments for it seem to be, and fair enough arguments they are, their use in the workplace and the ability to expand one's imagination through the reading of books. What, though, if these reasons were based on an arbitrary reality and in holding them we were slowing or preventing the development of human culture? And what, while we are at it, has the non-brothers Basildon and James have to do with it?

Writing is dominated by the intelligentsia, the middle to upper IQ people and propounding the belief system of this group, the beliefs of lower IQ people are generally quashed, their systems of belief discarded like an empty hamburger box. One of my best and oldest friends, while we were still at university, had authoritarian right-wing views, and he believed, for example, that people who were unemployed were essentially lazy. He was the product of a middle-class farming family, middle class at least in views and intelligence if not in money. This is a good example of not understanding how other people think, a common phenomenon we all fall for sometime or other. How much people can be different I showed in my James Bond Theory. If you think it is difficult to understand people from other cultures around the world, how much less do you understand people with a lower or higher intelligence? We often think of geniuses as being a little strange, but how strange are we to them, and how strange are people of middling intelligence to those of low?

Assuming that we have our ideas of learning and culture, how do they compare with those of other intelligence levels? Is what we feel to be interesting or useful an alien imposition on the culture of others? Perhaps we are not even right about ourselves? If you are an authoritarian, then now or soon you could be getting a little warm under the collar as I threaten what you hold dear, but bear with me.

If we just examine reading on its own for a while, we read to learn what is happening in the world, to do our jobs, to expand our imagination or simply for pleasure. A great deal of our reading is entirely passive, it leads nowhere because we do little beyond absorb it or pass it along. We absorb ourselves in pleasure and knowledge, and feel we understand the world better because we have widened our ability to compare what we see with what we know. However, while we absorb and share, what are we adding? Do we let ourselves become nothing more than a culture consumer, in our appreciation of 'great' books we become nothing more than the owner of the latest mobile phone, pair of shoes, video game or car? All are nothing more than the products of other people's minds. Going to art galleries if you do not create your own art is consumerism of the educated classes.

So, at last, we come to Basildon Bond. One of the battle cries of sections of the educated classes is that culture is deterioating, because people do not write letters any more. Who wrote them in the past - well, the educated classes, so if the educated classes no longer write letters, is this the fault of the illiterate or the semi-illiterate, or even the literate? If we go back a step to a time before reading and writing were available to the masses, what did people do then? Did language and culture crumble?

When there were no books available, what were the choices? The very fact that we have language in an advanced form, and in a form that has hardly changed since the advent of literacy, suggests that we were doing somerthing with it beyond grunting across the field. How about telling stories, stories are hardly a product of the literate age, we can be fairly sure that the day the first cave painting was made, someone somewhere was telling a story. Most of those stories have been lost, as a normal loss as new stories replaced old, but this proces has accelerated with the advent of the printed word, where standard versions of traditional or new stories have mown down the infinite variations that once existed. Remember I said that reading the 'greats' was nothing more than consumerism, well, just as manufactured products largely replaced their individual handmade counterparts, so the printed book has replaced the hand craft told story, words repeated precisely as the stamping of a machine.

In a world where we sell the idea of the printed 'greats', is it any surprise that many people do not write letters? Why write letters when anything you write is going to be compared to a standard 'great'? Other forms of letter writing content, such as gossip and my-life, has transferred to other more convenient forms of comunication, such as the telephone, something more closely resembling individual human communication than the learned third person style that is writing.

Let us assume that we all start writing letters, what are we prepared to sacrifice in order to give us the time to write all these letters, plus read all the incoming including those to family that are intended to be read by a number of people? How long before you run dry on ideas or get bored with endless letter opening and start to simply scan the contents as you do with endless reports at work? Most of what anyone would write would be gossip and about-me, to create anything more adventurous would require more time and there is no guarantee of anyone reading it, like creating a painting that never gets hung. There is always the question, like painting, whether you have the ability to produce writing beyond the gossip or informational level, and if you cannot then why the pressure to write?

Reading and writing are largely taught as a way of communicating information, despite what one's own memoroes of schooling may be, the fact that so few people engage in it as an art. There is very little left in the way of individual story telling as a respected part of culture, stories swopped at work, at home or at the local bar are mere informalities. Reading itself is a way of gathering knowledge and pleasure, and writing a way of distributing, but for most people the addition of original thought is minimal outside of recording professional opinions. The value of reading and writing to different segments of society is little understood, and certainly not part of the common core of written work. What, then, is all the fuss from the educated reactionaries?