When being able to read and write was uncool

“The Greek aristocracy at first disdained the technology of alphabetic writing and remained devoted instead to the recitative tradition through which it acquired oral fluency with Homer and the few other “inspired” poets whom it sprinkled into daily conversation. Writing and reading may have been regarded as distasteful for any variety of reasons: because they were tasks and skills antithetical to the askêsis of military life that the typical aristocrat knew; because, in the face of a dramaturgical intensity of an established pedagogy that intimately linked theater, communality and religious devotion, the mechanics of writing and reading could only seem pale and impoverished; because the alphabet may have had its initial Greek invention among Greek merchants or the inscribers of pottery, whom the aristocrat could only disdain. The Greeks themselves – at least in the surviving archive – have remarkably little to say on the subject. Whatever the case may be, literacy in ancient Greece came to be the competency of precisely that stratum which had initially resisted it together with those who came to be their rivals in wealth. It never approached universality, even among the free-born male population.” (James D. Faubion, An anthropology of ethics, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p 63)

And here we ("we" as in contemporary Westerners) are trying to push literacy down the world's throat as the miracle cure for social unrest, poverty, violence and so on, and, even more interestingly, as the miracle push towards "development" and "progress". At least in the humanities, it would have been reasonable to expect a certain atheism by now in relation to the oh-so-worshiped  notion of progress. It's so nineteenth century... 

Of course, it is true that in the world of today, meaning in the social context that we create and maintain, not being equipped with literacy skills is a major drawback; the point was not to deny that. But we shouldn't forget that the context we choose to maintain at a certain point is highly volatile and the truths and "facts" we take for granted (like the intricate link between literacy and development in society or mental capability in the individual) can so easily change.

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But apart from this theoretical point I wanted to make, I can totally imagine myself back then, with the confident and somewhat distinguished attitude that a classy female smoker can arbor today in the grand hollywoodian setting, rolling my eyes at a certain someone who can read and write and looking condescendingly to him for being so vulgar... "No, you can't buy me a Ouzo [actually they didn't have that back then, so replace "Ouzo" with whatever else they drank in those days]... Girls like me don't even talk to boys like you...". Funny thought. Especially considering the contemporary Western (if not already globalized) sapiosexuality.