A member of a democratic society, the media and the elites are all different groups and their “deep literacy” may or may not correlate. To me the decline of perceived “literacy” among the elites seems like a direct effect of democratization and doesn’t represent any change of the distribution of “deep literacy” in the whole population.
Exactly. Most polticial elites go to the same snazzy colleges as their forebearers where they read Homer and Thucydides. One of the big differences is the kind of public image politicians want to project.
Even still, a lot of this is just our perception. We don't dwell on the history of pugilists that slept in meat lockers or boys sloshing their father's pale of beer as the retrieve it up the street or the thousands of petty riots or the vulgar theater which was always popular. We ignore the masses and read exclusively of the elites or again of the most organized and well written of non-elites.
Yet we must live our present lives without the many professors and researchers having filtered life for us already. So it is likely we see a fairer sampling of common ideas.
