Joe Cruz is the chairman of the philosophy department at Williams College, a private liberal arts school in Massachusetts (tuition $76,000, housing $9,830, meal plan $9,490, value minimal). In late September, Cruz wrote a New York Times op-ed arguing that we are “mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought.” The evidence for this is, Cruz claims, “thin at best.” The notion that writing is the best way of developing thought is, he thinks, a “fairly recent idea,” dating to the “teach-across-the-curriculum movement” of the 1970s. Instead, we should speak to one another.
There are times when the fish passes us the 12-gauge as it climbs into the barrel. Before we blast Cruz in the fins, we should acknowledge that, historically speaking, he has a point. It is a point that Socrates made when reciting an Egyptian myth about the origins of “the letters.” The bird-god Theuth tells Thamos, the demigod king of Thebes, that literacy is “an elixir of memory and wisdom.” Thamos replies that it creates “forgetfulness” by slackening the memory and false wisdom, because the “ignorant” will read “without instruction.”
We know that because Plato wrote it down in Phaedrus. Historically, literacy was not essential to literary art until it was. Homer, whose work is much on our minds and screens this year, was an oral poet. Hear the cantillation of the Hebrew Bible, and its oral roots are obvious. As late as the 1600s, Shakespeare was a hit with mostly illiterate audiences. It’s likely that around 750 copies of the posthumous “First Folio” were printed. A laborer took a month to earn its cover price, $1.37. For that, he could have rented a cottage for a year or gone to the Globe every week and had change for two pints of beer at halftime.
Our hod-hoisting, bibulous Bardolater would have noticed, however, that the write stuff was not just a luxury product. It was a political instrument, essential to the spread of state-mandated Protestantism and the Puritanism that would shape revolutions in England and America. It was a scientific instrument, as Francis Bacon realized. A century later, it was the organizing principle of what we now call the “public sphere.” On a good day, reading and writing communicate complex ideas in clear and stable form. They made possible the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and, ultimately, liberal democracy.
Cruz allows that writing can be “useful cognitive scaffolding” for memory. Unlike the man-god Thamos, he approves of its use for “self-regulated learning.” But Cruz also allows his students to use AI in their final papers. He thinks that they did not make “substantive, objectionable” use of AI because when they discussed their papers, they made “sharp” and “deft” use of their arguments. This is what the philosophers call the post hoc fallacy. Post hoc ergo propter hoc: If it’s like this now, it was like this before. But it wasn’t like this before, and what it’s like now is empirically not the same. As logic goes, Cruz is not exactly Bertrand Russell.
The MIT philosopher Sally Haslanger might call Cruz’s argument a conceptual amelioration, an attempt to reshape language to serve social and political values. Here, Cruz is dumbing down in the hope of staying cool. But instead of ameliorating his concepts, he’s making them blunt and vague.
There is no universal standard for “objectionable” and “substantive” AI usage. These are adjectives, and their addition of value cuts both ways. Cruz is unused to adults talking back, so he may find this column objectionable. I think it’s substantive. I also think that while young people have always been “sharp” at fooling the parents, anyone who spends his days in a classroom should know that the kids are wired to AI, so, of course, they seem “deft” at working with it.
Writing is more than “useful cognitive scaffolding” and an aid to memory. “Writing is thinking,” the historian David McCullough told Bruce Cole in a 2002 interview for Humanities magazine. “To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”
There is no writing without reading. Writing is an antidote to the soft-brained passivity of AI. Reading is an antidote to the demotivating, demoralizing effects of digital consciousness. Deep literacy cannot guarantee eudaemonia (philosophical happiness) or decency: interwar Germany was nothing if not literate. Still, literacy is a precondition of our way of life. Lose it, and we lose ourselves. The failure of our teachers arises from and accelerates that loss. As Socrates says in Plato’s Cratylus, “if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the change occurs there will be no knowledge.”
Dominic Green (@drdominicgreen) is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.