Thinking about reading and its ties to thinking

Here's an issue that should unite left and right, but that would require candor

Let me start by describing two pivotal moments in my academic career.

The first is an anecdote that I shared two months ago in a Rational Sheep post that ran with this headline: “Stop reading? Then democracy will fade — We live in an age in which it is countercultural to read books with your children.”

Keep the first half of that headline in mind as we proceed. Now, here is that personal anecdote, again:

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.

I wondered, at that moment, why I heard that question in a classroom at a major public university, as opposed to encountering it while earning two degrees (mixing history, journalism, theology, mass media and church-state studies) at Baylor University, a powerful Baptist institution of higher learning. But that, my friends, is a topic for another day.

The second moment that I need to describe took place during the decade that I led the full-semester Washington Journalism Center program, which drew students from campuses across the national Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. I will not be specific about the year and semester for reasons that will become obvious.

This was, I will stress, a program built on constant reading and writing — since those two skills are impossible to separate. In Washington, D.C., the ability to carefully read documents and speech texts is a requirement, or it used to be.

Near the end of the semester, students faced two major assignments built on reading. In the first, I asked students to select a book from a list of popular “non-fiction novels” and write a report in which they described, in detail, how the book was reported — the hardcore research inside it. The book list included “In Cold Blood,” “The Perfect Storm,” “Into Thin Air,” “The Devil in the White City” and about 20 more.

At the same time, students were doing early work to propose a final term paper, one requiring references from periodicals, books and, if possible, one-on-one interviews. We were located in D.C., after all.

Just before the book assignment was due, a very nervous student from a major school asked for a private talk. The bottom line: This student told me that, in her academic work over the years (high school and college), she had never been required to read an entire book for an assignment in which it would be obvious whether the book had or had not been read. On a related issue, this student had also never been required to write a term paper (as opposed to research projects in which several students worked together).

To be honest, I did not know what to do. For example, I had no idea how someone could read the first few pages of this particular book (I think it was “Into the Wild”) and not keep reading. But that was the issue — reading an entire book.

I did what I could do to help.

It will not give too much away to note that this encounter took place during the first few years after the cultural earthquake known as the iPhone.

But that was not the issue that I, and many of my colleagues, were encountering in our classrooms. An increasing number of our students could read, but they could not focus on serious reading. They were, to be blunt, increasingly post-literate.

At one point, I asked the members of the Washington-based CCCU programs team — as a hook for in-depth discussions — to read Mark Bauerlein’s “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30).”

It was depressing, but we did it. That book was published in 2009, after the iPhone was released in 2007. Bauerlein has now written a 2022 sequel, “The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults.” Yes, I imagine that I will need to read that one, as well.

That brings me to two think pieces for this weekend. I think that I will send this one to the whole list of Rational Sheep readers, since it is rather fundamental to the age in which we live and work.

Remember that first headline I asked you to remember? I thought about it because my former GetReligion.org colleague Ira Rifkin sent me a URL to a James Marriott essay (via Substack, of course) with this bold headline: “The dawn of the post-literate society — And the end of civilization.”

Rifkin and I are about as different as two men can be when it comes to politics, religion and culture. But we share basic old-liberal DNA on issues such as the First Amendment and, yes, literacy. We are pro-books, to say the least.

Here is half of the basic equation in this complex piece:

The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

You can tell where this is going.

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.

More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying.

Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record.

Now, this book blames the smartphone for this development, more than any other factor. What I would like to note is that the tragedy described by Bauerlein — the educational reality that sent me students who were bright, but struggled to read a book — began a decade or two before the iPhone. Let me stress that the majority of my students in Washington were fierce and ready readers. But the percentage seemed to slide over the years.

I will offer one more key quote from that essay, one that references a book that we studied closely during my graduate work in Urbana.

This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.

As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacy, certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points.

Yes, that does sound like some speeches I have heard during the past decade or two in American public life, and I am not just talking about the reality-TV star who currently lives in the White House.

Hours before I heard from Rifkin, I read this Substack piece — the top item in one of his newsletters — by Andrew Sullivan: “Our Post-Literate, Post Liberal Era.”

As you would imagine, Sullivan is upset about Orange Man Bad and the illiterate age. However, his piece also reminded me of something — once again — that I heard during graduate school. In this case, I cannot remember who said it. Perhaps I took a remark and then expanded on it myself. Who knows?

Anyway, here is the remark: Yes, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but different people viewing the same picture will come away with very different sets of words. In other words, the grammar of the visual is hostile to the communication of absolute truths and accurate information. You cannot put the Nicene Creed into a photo collage.

Thus, Sullivan opens with this:

I’m sure some of you had something like this moment if you were an adult in the 1990s, but this conversation has stuck in my mind over the succeeding years. At The New Republic when I was editor, one day the business manager, if I recall, decided to bring up a weird subject at the weekly editorial conference. He didn’t usually say much. But he nervously cleared his throat, and stiffened his sinews to ask: What did we think we were going to do about this new thing called the Internet? If discourse went online, as everyone seems to think it will, what would happen to the magazine?

Various dismissals and grumbles followed. “But is it good for the Jews?” was the final, sardonic response, and we all laughed. But I remember saying that if the web was what it seemed to be, then magazines would surely cease to exist, because they depended on a weekly or monthly group of writers and articles, held together, by paper and staples. Take the paper and staples away, and nothing coheres in the same way. So we’re doomed, I confidently said.

But something else soon became pretty obvious to me: if images and video could be as accessible online as words, they would always win any contest for eyeballs. Visuals carry more visceral punch than sentences and paragraphs, and require less reason and effort. Words would endure, of course, but they would increasingly be spoken and heard, not written or read. The Internet, in other words, held the power to return us to the pre-literate culture from which a majority of humans had emerged only a few hundred years ago: images, symbols, memes.

Now, the irony of this is that in my case I use platforms such as X, day after day, to find links to articles and even books that I need to read.

I also use the Internet as a way to stay in touch with hundreds of people who help me write, which is directly linked to what I read. My son often says, when asked what I do: My father reads for a living and then, every few hours, he writes. That process also shaped my work in academia, of course.

Yes, the Sullivan piece (#DUH) was inspired by the Marriott essay quoted above.

Now, what happens when people go to college and then graduate as post-literate “adults” who essentially swim in digital images, opinions and chopped up information all day? Sullivan adds this:

No wonder that Gen Z and younger — having been denied the solace of knowing actual history, experiencing serious religious faith, and being transported by big, complex novels into other distant minds and places — feel adrift, searching for meaning and perspective, lost in phones, prey to cults. Trans-furries and budding neo-Hitlers: an emotive, irrational, grievance-obsessed generation of lonely souls — increasingly prone to violence.

Depressing, right? Well, here is the irony. Some of those young people are — week after week — walking through the doors of Eastern Orthodox parishes and other traditional worshipping environments look for something that is missing. In part, they are looking for clearly stated truths, but they are also looking for (#WaitForIt) truth in premodern forms, such as rituals and iconography. Even, as we say: “Oh taste and see that the Lord is good.”

That’s all for now. It’s time to go to church.

FIRST IMAGE: Flickr photo of empty bookshelves at the Library for the Faculty of Philology at the Free University Berlin, Germany