on lost skills

As concerns the earlier post on how knowledge and skills are not cumulative but are sometimes lost/forgotten. I was thinking of childhood, when I probably knew more about animals and certainly more about dinosaurs and chess than I do today. Others may have the same experience… And by the way, this is not an illusion…. Have you ever dug up a set of your old notes from 5 or 10 years ago? I’m perpetually shocked by how good and how voluminous my old notes are. Often I will find half-filled or entirely filled notebooks packed with observations on some topic that are far deeper and subtler than anything that has been on my mind recently on the topic. We forget it all.

As mentioned here repeatedly, I have detailed month-by-month summaries from August 2000 when I first moved to Egypt. And whenever I go back and review those, which isn’t all that often, it’s shocking how full life was. People’s names come up as important, and I haven’t even thought about those people once in 6 or 7 years. Or I read things that had a big impact on me and almost completely forgot that I read them. Or I was deeply worried or rejoicing over something that turned out to be a nullity in a matter of weeks. So, we do forget an awful lot, and surely the same is true of cultural memory. If we could be transported back in time even to 1995, we’d probably be laughing in shock over many forgotten usages and rituals that our world has now left behind. (Try going back to 1993, for instance, with no world-wide web. Any idea what your life was like back then? I can’t even remember clearly how I booked hotels, bought books, printed snail mail… Well, of course I can remember how I did it, but it’s hazy.)

That’s a long preamble for what was initially meant to be a one-word example of a forgotten skill: oratory.

I’ve been looking at some ancient Greek and Roman speeches today. And even if you’re a skeptic as to whether those were the actual speeches delivered orally at the time, then just take a look on YouTube for political speeches of your country in, say, the 1950’s.

Last year I went back and looked at JFK’s early campaign response to Harry Truman’s recommendation that he was too young and should withdraw. JFK’s speech was eloquent and crafty, and above the rhetorical level that you would get now even from Obama.

Political oratory is still three times as good in Britain as in America (we are not a nation of good oral debaters or impromptu speakers), but I’m assuming the general level has probably decayed in Britain as well.

Then there are even more obvious skills that have decayed– penmanship, for example. It was a subject still being forced upon us in my generation by ancient, oppressive older women teaching in our elementary schools. The word “penmanship” was literally my most hated word from ages 8-10 or so, because I never wrote in a very clear hand and was always being scolded for my poor handwriting. So, I’m glad that skill is lost, but it’s definitely lost. Or if people still have the skill, then it’s by chance, unless they do calligraphy in the form of artwork. (It’s a bit different in Islamic societies, where calligraphy has always been highly prized.)