“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

—T.S. Eliot

We are not reading as we used to. Does it matter? Before the arrival of television and modern media, reading books from beginning to end was a major activity both for learning and relaxation. Nowadays most people reading on the internet have an attention span of five to seven minutes. There was never a television in my parents’ home, only BBC Radio. I read one book a week, unrelated to school, until university, plus the Bible was read daily. I didn’t recognize the importance of reading Scripture to children from day one until Bruce Waltke drew my attention to it in my 40s. Hopefully most Christians know the central insight of Judaism: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5, ESV). Leviticus 19:18 commands, “…love your neighbor as yourself…” but Deuteronomy 6:6-7 continues with, “And these words that I command you today shall be upon your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children…” (ESV). The centrality of God’s Word as the ultimate guide to the good life must be imprinted on your children by your example of passionate commitment.

Several years ago in Texas, I was being entertained right royally, and I commented to my hosts it was far beyond the call of duty. The response was beautiful. “Watch this,” said Dad, and then he said to his preschool daughter, “What’s the name of Moses’ sister? Is it, Marjory?” The response, “Daddy, you know it’s Miriam.” She knew the story of what Miriam did too. Before she started school she knew about moral consequence—before those words were part of her vocabulary! Her parents credited me with guiding them into serious Christian parenting in a lecture on Deuteronomy 4-6, and they had put it into practice for her before she could read and write.

We rightly put reading and writing into a prominent place in our ideas about education, but we are usually thinking in purely utilitarian terms. The faculty of education wants to make reading a means of propagandizing, such that society puts minor virtues of diversity, inclusion and equity above the ancient truth, justice and freedom of speech and religion. How should we respond? Only in the last few centuries has proficiency in reading and writing come to be considered as a minimum foundation for success in the modern world. Before that the skill in fixing things was much more important. For most of human history only a very small percentage of the population could read and write, but they were way better than us at remembering (“Remember to remember” is one of the most repeated commands in the Old Testament). It is difficult to know exactly when writing began, but the Kish tablet thought to be from around 3500 BC is a clay tablet recording financial data that appeared to be used as a promissory note. It is largely pictographic. Early Hebrew emerged by the time of the Exodus around 1500 BC, but a truly alphabetic language with vowels did not happen until the time of the Greeks in 900-1000 BC. What is certain is human culture, with drawings, songs, poetry and oral memories of the past, had been passed on by recitation long before writing began. This is still the case in the so-called primitive places like the Itumbi Mountains, which we love. The teller of the received version of village history is usually young, because of the superior memory of the young. It does not go a long way back, but the teller must be perfect when he is called upon to recite. Everyone knows the story is important to their village. Community is not produced by sociologists but by living with the same story of meaning into which everyone is introduced as a child.

The Bible filled this function in the West for at least 1,500 years. This is why removing the Bible from school but allowing in drag queens does not increase acceptance for everyone; instead, it merely legitimizes the narrative of a small subgroup of society whilst destroying the rich tapestry of meaning everyone previously had from the Bible.

In the older story of our culture, diversity was allowed, the culture flourished and the court jester was even allowed to make fun of the ruling elite. It’s a contrast to today when the ruling elite takes umbrage at the smallest failure to bend the knee to cultural commandments. In the past, Christmas pantomimes usually had a “dame” who was a man obviously dressed as an old woman to the amusement of all, especially children. Traditional humor always had an element of offense built into it but was not vicious, although it pilloried what would now be attacked as giving offense and utterly unacceptable by the politically-correct elite. Interestingly, many jokes do not work in print but can be hilarious when spoken by a talented actor. More seriously, the point of this paragraph is to underline how spoken truth goes deeper than written truth in its immediacy. Christ tells us all to go and tell the world what He did for us. Peter said we should be ready to give reasons for our faith, but he also warns against wanting to win without gentleness. Jesus wrote nothing, but His parables and miracles are treasured by all in whom the Spirit has produced what the Gospels call a new birth, thereby emphasizing this is an experience rather than merely a rational decision. It is not irrational so much as suprarational. French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal knew this when he wrote in Pensées, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”

It is by no means clear if literacy is the essential foundation of great cultures. The first culture of the world was based on the book of nature that has no written language, yet Psalm 19 can say its voice is heard throughout the world. Societies based on the book of nature seem invariably to be dominated by fear of evil spirits and fatalism. There were probably numerous pagan geniuses, but nothing is known of them. The Zimbabwean stone culture is a good example of extraordinary builders of which we know nothing.

God allowed His creatures several centuries of doing what was right in their own eyes, but our extraordinary tendency to be full of pride led to disasters. Humans seem to be compulsive narcissists, as with the Tower of Babel episode. Eventually God gave the Israelites a literary foundation for living, which He said they must teach to their children by narrative (see Deuteronomy 6-12 and particularly Deuteronomy 12:8).

Nevertheless, extraordinary intellectual feats of insight happened. Creative ideas are often not acceptable to the literate elite if they challenge their pet nostrums. Nevertheless, inventions and discoveries eventually force change in scientific understanding. What is even more upsetting to several “educated” people is that science does not always grow step by step. Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev had an encyclopedic memory for the properties of elements as well as an addiction to solitaire and was working obsessively on combining the two. He knew he was close, then fell asleep at his desk and dreamed the periodic table. He woke up and wrote it out on the nearest coffee-stained piece of paper, even predicting missing elements!

Just this week I came across a wonderful example of an arrogant dismissal of Pascal’s faith and its role in his wager. British author and journalist Christopher Hitchens rightly dismissed it as a way to faith because it portrays God as a cheap bargainer. In doing so, he entirely missed the point, but his followers on YouTube thought he was brilliant. The wager described by Pascal shows if we believe in God and He doesn’t exist, we lose very little except that we live a lie, but if we believe He doesn’t exist and He does, we go to hell. What Hitchens missed was that Pascal knew God comes to us subjectively often with deep emotion on our part (Pascal describes a night of fire in his own case). His wager is not to persuade us into the kingdom but to show the rationalist atheist he is not rational because the wager is rational and rationalists should accept it, but the problem with Hitchens is that he doesn’t want to believe! They all want to do everything their way.

In conclusion, reading matters. At least three levels of reading are to be considered: the first level is reading for information that directly affects us and we can evaluate personally. However, when we cannot integrate statements into what we already know for sure, what do we do? How do we measure the reliability of so-called scientists? Ends justify means for numerous identity groups, so it is important to be suspicious of information that may be disinformation. The only truly safe way is to have a network of people who do not think ends justify means and are also competent in the field of information at issue. This is not easy. For example, I have only recently discovered Alex Haley, in his book Roots totally failed to be truthful about Benin, a country that trafficked slaves for profit on a large scale. (See Thomas Sowell’s work on slavery, conflict and culture for an extensive documented discussion.) Haley has now acknowledged his misrepresentation, saying he wanted to build the black self-image and, with that purpose, judged it was better to ignore these facts. This level of reading requires a solid base of necessarily specific knowledge (e.g. case law for lawyers or long experience with specific diseases or operations for doctors), but it must be combined with high moral integrity, so how do you find that essential knowledge?

This brings me to wisdom, but that must be deferred to the next column.