Have you read any good books lately? I have and I would like to recommend one: “The Light from a Thousand Wounds.” This is Corey Hatfield’s intense spiritual memoir about the impact of raising a child with profound autism (click here for my “On Religion” column on this subject).
Why start there? If you are as old as I am you may be used to people asking you about new books or even suggesting the titles of books that they think you should read. It is an ordinary part of social discourse.
Is that still true in our culture? What about the young?
Well, that depends. When our grandkids have birthdays — one just turned 14 and another will soon be 12 — we always “FaceTime” them and ask questions about what they did that was special on their big day. There is nothing unusual about that.
However, one of the questions we always ask is this: “What books did you get for your birthday? Are there any that you are really excited about?”
We know that their stacks of presents will include books, often because we will have given them one or two. We know that they will have new books that excite them because — for years — we have talked about their favorites and the new authors and the new “old” authors that they are discovering.
You see, we are “books” people. Our grandchildren are reading shelves of books — classics and modern works — that we read to our children when they were young. I mean, our son’s middle name is “Lewis.” Want to guess the link?
This book thing can be contagious. After one epic road trip, our Latin teacher son-in-law cleaned out the family minivan and it contained approximately 100 books.
None of this is surprising. My wife is a librarian. I am a journalist and mass communications professor. My mother was a language arts teacher for elementary and middle-school students. My father was a pastor with an office full of books.
Now, let’s take another step toward this weekend’s think piece.
Through the years, I told my students that the most important moment in my academic life occurred in 1981 at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, at the start of a seminar on the history of media technology. This class was taught by the legendary professor James W. Carey, dean of the School of Communications. He focused on the cultural revolutions linked to the printing press.
On the first day, Carey walked into the classroom (facing rows of awed students) and asked this question: Would the Protestant Reformation have happened without moveable type? Then he walked out. This had precisely the impact he wanted — minds locked onto that dramatic question.
This leads me to a First Things essay by Mary Harrington: “The King and the Swarm.” I think Rational Sheep readers will see the connection to what I have said about the culture of books and Carey’s question that day in Urbana. Prepare for some hard reading:
The printing press did not just change how people shared information. It changed the normative patterns of consciousness itself. After those changes came a period of chaotic upheaval, out of which emerged the worldview and political settlement characteristic of modernity. In England, that upheaval reached a crisis in the seventeenth century, in a series of convulsions that birthed not just a new political settlement, but also a reality-picture that would in turn shape the cultural, scientific, and technological imaginary of the modern era — and, in time, give rise to our modern democratic norms.
This story is generally presented as one of ineluctable progress, sometimes called the “Whig version of history.” Named in 1931 by the historian Herbert Butterfield, after a faction in English seventeenth-century Restoration politics that played a crucial role in the dispatch of absolute monarchy, Whig history conceives these events and all that followed as a one-way ratchet toward modern freedom and progress.
Though many still believe in Whig history, it is already over — a casualty of the post-print counter-Enlightenment. For while believers in Whig history generally recognize the contribution made by the printing press to their story, most assumed the advent of digital culture would continue this trajectory. They were wrong. The digital revolution is profoundly reactionary. The transformations it brings are less revolution, in the laudatory Whig sense, than putsch — one that critically undermines every presupposition underpinning Whig history.
The end of print culture is already upon us. With its end, we are already witnessing the disintegration of modernity’s load-bearing foundations, including the valorization of facts and objectivity, and a conception of the individual subject as a universal model of human personhood. This reality-picture, which crystallized in the seventeenth century, is already well on its way to dissolution in the solvent bath of digital media, a process radically accelerated by the spread of AI.
Yes, this is complex stuff.
