Bildung and Literacy
And upcoming Interintellect salons hosted by yours truly.
Last month, I hosted an Interintellect salon with writer Alastair Benn on the topic of “Bildung and Literacy,” and the full video is now available online.
Bildung is like strength training for the soul: using resistance in a variety of weighty exercises to cultivate a holistic ideal. It’s the lifelong journey of unifying key qualities of a cohesive self, including education, cultural refinement, the capacity to introspect, one’s relationship to society, and the pursuit of virtue. The process is necessarily individualized, but never isolated, as the self learns by interacting with its surroundings.
Though not sufficient in and of itself to develop bildung, accumulating intellectual knowledge is still required. Traditionally this involves a lot of reading, but by many accounts, literacy is in decline throughout the Western world today. If true, what are the implications of a society-wide drop in bildung?
The decline of literacy has been a hot topic of late, as in Rose Horowitch’s story for The Atlantic this month, “The End of Reading is Here.” We seem to be living through the rise of an audiovisual culture. It’s a topic that I touched on last year in my Idea Worth Drawing For about Claire Lehmann’s argument that we should be concerned about this transition because long-form texts uniquely benefit knowledge accumulation and accuracy:
On Claire Lehmann’s “Feelings, Facts, and Our Crisis of Truth”
Long ago, when the arms race between truth and lies was just beginning, the invention of literacy made the truth durable. Of course, lies would also propagate and persist within the written word. But Lehmann explains how long-form texts uniquely benefit knowledge accumulation and accuracy.
I have two upcoming Interintellect salons, as well, which I hope some Fashionably Late Takes subscribers might like to attend:
On July 30 at 7pm NYC time, I’m hosting an online workshop to teach participants how to “Vibe Code Your Editor.” This is built off my essay for Interintellect about how I built my own bespoke editor in Claude Code, and it’s for anyone who’d like hands-on advice about getting starting with vibe coding from a non-technical background.
Beginning on September 6 at 12pm NYC time, I’m hosting an online book club for John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. The book is divided into four parts, so we’ll meet once a month for four months to cover each in turn. This became my favorite novel after reading it for the first time last year, and I’m eager to re-read it again more closely. In my last essay for Quillette, I illustrated the final scene of the novel to use as an example of how art works. You can read about that here, but be warned — I do spoil the ending of the novel.
