Becoming Truly Literate

Dutch fashion house Byborre creates a basic wardrobe based around the principles of the Dominican habit.

Byborre plans to make the patterns for each garment open-source, so that each piece can be produced with local materials – also making them suitable for the climate they're worn in. 

...Byborre plans to make the patterns for each garment open-source, so that each piece can be produced with local materials – also making them suitable for the climate they're worn in.

This is an interesting project, and the clothes have the simple elegance of well-constructed streetwear. And that is what they are: streetwear. This is not an actual redesign of the Dominican habit, nor does the order have anything to do with the project. (In this sense, it's reminiscent of an article we linked to some time ago, about a designer who created a fashion collection based on her habit design for an order of Anglican nuns. The designs are not the actual habit.)

It's dangerous to fully gauge the mind of the reading public by the comments on an article, and yet it was rather startling to see how many people were up in arms because they thought that Byborre was actually redesigning the Dominican habit for the order.

In The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers bemoaned this inability of many people to actually interpret what they read:

The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns. They are literate in the merely formal sense -- that is, they are capable of putting the symbols C, A, T together to produce the word CAT. But they are not literate in the sense of deriving from those letters any clear mental concept of the animal. Literacy in the formal sense is dangerous, since it lays the mind open to receive any mischievous nonsense about cats that an irresponsible writer may choose to print -- nonsense which could never have entered the heads of plain illiterates who were familiar with an actual cat, even if unable to spell its name. And particularly in the matter of Christian doctrine, a great part of the nation subsists in an ignorance more barbarous that that of the dark ages, owing to this slatternly habit of illiterate reading. Words are understood in a wholly mistaken sense, statements of fact and opinion are misread and distorted in repetition, arguments founded in misapprehension are accepted without examination, expressions of individual preference are construed as occumenical doctrine, disciplinary regulations founded on consent are confused with claims to interpret universal law, and vice versa; with the result that the logical and historical structure of Christina philosophy is transformed in the popular mind to a confused jumble of mythological and pathological absurdity.

I sit beside my eight-year-old son as he reads aloud, in part to listen for and correct technical errors like skipping letters in words or guessing at a word based on the beginning, but also to discuss with him the meaning of what he reads. My job would be poorly done if I ensured that he could interpret phonemes without giving him the mental resources and training necessary to interpret the sense of the words put together. (Indeed, sometimes I find that he can accurately recount to me the story he's working on even though he gets some of the individual words wrong -- something akin, I guess, to those mind games in which 5-10% of the letters in a paragraph are scrambled, but you can still make sense of it.) Without being able to understand and engage with ideas, to confront them and refute them if necessary, an education in literacy prepares children for little more than a lifetime of reading Dan Brown novels and outrage "news" sites.

This kind of education is necessary, critical even, to prepare children to become adults, and to prepare adults to fulfill their duty of participating in the political life of the country. Without being able to interpret what is read, a person can not engage in the basic discussion necessary to maintaining the polis. This election cycle and administration have moved us several giant leaps for mankind away from any standard of reasoned discourse, but it isn't unique in enthroning rhetoric. Even Socrates, back in times BC, was calling out rhetoric as a form of flattery, a fine content-free smorgasbord of words mimicking reason and virtue in politics just as "health food" and fad diets and artificial sweeteners mimic actual healthful practices in eating.

  Brandon Watson puts it elegantly: 

The first and most basic and most essential form of politics is reasoned discourse. This follows directly from the fact that human beings are rational and therefore social creatures; it is the actual structure of functional civilization; and it is a requirement for any just society. If you have any political view -- and I mean any political view, however clever the sophistry and rhetoric with which you fancy it up -- that does not treat reasoned discourse as the heart of civilization, then your view is a politics of coercion and violence, based on a principle that might makes right. At this level there is no third option: either politics is, in its foundations, by reason or it is by force.

...It is by interacting rationally that we receive common good as a legacy; it is by interacting rationally that we form common good as moral progress; it is by interacting rationally that we protect and preserve common good against political corruption. If you have any political view, if you perform any political act, that does not recognize rational communication as the fundamental kind of politics, you are not on the side of justice, no matter how loudly you insist that you are. Indeed, you are not on the side of justice even if you are advocating a thing that happens to be just; you are simply a snake in the grass. In anything and everything, the just will give shared reason its due. Anything else is sophistry -- literally, in fact.