We live in a world of visual illiterates. The majority of people living today have a visual literacy that is somewhat less than the verbal literacy of the average 12th century European peasant. This is a very irritating thing, for the visual ignorance of today's population is belligerent, an ignorance that is not content to fester in its own obliviousness, but which insists on perpetrating itself on the world and expanding to fill every available bit of space.
Gather a group of ten Americans into a room and ask them each to sign his or her name to a sheet of paper. Most of them will do it without trouble. Ask these same ten people to draw a credible self-portrait, and chances are that nine of the ten will reply with a helpless shrug of the shoulders. They can't do it, and this is a shameful state of affairs.
This is shameful because drawing a self-portrait is not more difficult than signing your name. It is, in fact, less difficult to do, for drawing a picture of yourself requires only that you use the natural imitative skills which are part of our cognitive makeup as a species. If you can't draw a sketch of yourself, it is because this intuitive skill was beaten or ridiculed out of you before you reached the age of ten.
It is not bad enough that so few among us have preserved their drawing instincts to adulthood. The situation is made worse by the fact that those who had their drawing abilities amputated early in life react defensively to this crippling experience by ridiculing and trivializing visual skills and the associated patterns of what they call 'visual thinking' as kid stuff. This is nothing but bigotry masquerading as snobbery.
Everyone I know has his or her own story of the teacher in early school years who stifled the early drawing instincts, with comments of the "you can't draw, so give up trying" variety. The experience seems to be universal in our culture, and this is one of the most serious complaints I have against the world I grew up in. In my own early education, drawing and art classes were held out by my teachers as 'fun stuff,' fluff classes that could easily be dismissed if time ran out at the end of the day. The drawing and crafts classes were given as rewards - if we behaved ourselves as a class, we got to spend an hour drawing, if we did not, we got an extra hour of long division.
The result is that we have adults with very lop-sided educations, whose verbal skills are extremely well-developed, but whose visual literacy is abominable. As a result, these same very intelligent and otherwise well-educated people are complete ignoramuses when it comes to the ambiguities of visual observation, and even profoundly sophisticated authors often make incredibly naïve and even stupid remarks when they discuss visual matters.
The frequently cited 'visual demonstration' of time's arrow is a case in point. This demonstration, often cited by physicists (notoriously symbolic thinkers) takes a series of photos of a sequence of events, usually an individual putting on clothing. These photographs are shuffled so the original sequence is lost, and we are given the task of putting these photographs back into their original sequence. Since we all know that we put our shirt on before we put on our jacket, we normally place the photo of the person wearing a shirt but no jacket prior to the photo of the person wearing both. Physicists are fond of citing this fact as a self-evident demonstration that time's direction. I have critiqued this demonstration in an earlier essay, but because I'm feeling a bit pissy on the subject today, I will take the gloves off here.
As any photographer can tell you, keeping the original sequence of a series of photographs is by no means an easy or self-evident task. Unless we take great pains to label each photo carefully, once the original sequence of photos is lost, it is often lost forever. Rarely will there be any visual evidence in a collection of pictures to indicate the original sequence. This is a common fact of life for photographers, and we are well used to dealing with it. Only in a very rare, very artificial and very contrived circumstances can we reproduce the original order of the photographs from a collection of prints, and then, in most cases, only when some form of symbolic data (such as a clock or a calendar) appears in the image.
Visual data works according to its own logic, its own forms of grammar, which have little to do with the logic of words and numbers. It is clear from the frequent misinterpretations of visual data that most people are completely unaware of visual logic, often attempting to impose the logic of words (which organizes data into linear and sequential strings) onto pictures (which presents data in a field, 'all-at-once' not sequentially).
In the case of the so-called 'visual demonstration' referred to here, since we already know that we put on our shirts before our jackets, the only thing being tested is our understanding of contemporary dress and costume. And since the author of this demonstration informs us that the person in the photos is putting on clothing rather than taking it off, the answers are handed to us along with the test. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that we should all arrive at the same conclusion. This conclusion has nothing to do with the visual data invoked, and the false interpretation that is traditionally offered happens only because the people involved in concocting this 'demonstration' are profoundly ignorant on the subject of visual data, and completely unaware of their own ignorance.
How this profound and shameful ignorance has influenced, or retarded, our development as a culture is something we can only guess at. But when even the most well-educated among us routinely give utterance to spectacularly pseudo-scientific crap based upon their ignorance of visual logic, we have grounds for being extremely suspicious. If the authorities are so completely and demonstrably wrong in this case, and if our own general level of knowledge is so abysmally low that we haven't called them on it, what other errors are we letting the experts get away with?
Whether this will change in our culture, I don't know, but there are a few hopeful signs. Some educators and a few authors, at least since the 1970's, have given evidence of understanding visual data. I do know that if we should begin teaching basic drawing skills to our children responsibly - at least, if we cease to stifle the visual instinct and allow it to flourish naturally - we will benefit profoundly.