In the twenty-first century we are so used to reading that it does not seem remarkable to us. We live, as the historian of reading Steven Roger Fischer has observed, in a world plastered over with text. Every street junction, every cereal box, every fruit juice carton and every shopfront bears its obligatory fragment of writing.1 The modern compulsion to cover everything with words is probably one of the things that would seem oddest about us to an ancient time traveller. But we barely notice it at all. In fact, we read almost without meaning to, as our eyes unconsciously flit over advertising hoardings, street signs and product labels that surround us. In this environment it’s easy to think of reading as a kind of innate or inevitable human capacity. In fact, learning to read is one of the most extraordinary feats of which the human mind is capable. ‘More than any other single invention,’ writes Walter Ong in his book Orality and Literacy, ‘writing has transformed human consciousness.’2
Spoken language comes naturally to us. Reading and writing do not. Nobody has ever encountered a human community without language. But in the entire 300,000-year history of our species, writing has been invented on only four (some argue as few as three) occasions: in ancient Sumer around 3400 BC, in ancient Egypt around 3250 BC, in China around 1250 BC and in Mesoamerica some time in the first millennium BC. ‘Nothing in our evolution could have prepared us to absorb language through vision,’ writes the cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene. ‘We take delight in reading Nabokov and Shakespeare using a primate brain originally designed for life in the African savanna.’ Employing eyes which evolved to seek out the tracks of prey and watch the horizon for predators, we make rapid imperceptible motions to scan across rows of tiny black symbols and absorb meaning from them.3And where we learn to talk mostly without formal instruction, by listening to our indulgent parents chat away to us, reading and writing are skills that must be drilled into us, often painfully and usually by institutions. Indeed, learning to read and write proficiently is so difficult, so time-consuming and so important, it may be that our ideas about the human life cycle have been reorganised by literacy. Some historians have argued that after the advent of print the impossibility of participating in modern society without the ability to read necessitated the introduction of a trainee life stage, which we call ‘childhood’. A new separate culture of spelling manuals, picture books and easy-to-read texts had to be invented to initiate children in the literate culture of the adult world. In a non-literate society, the argument runs, everyone can sit around listening to and learning from the same songs and stories.
As we undergo the difficult process of learning to read we reorganise the architecture of our minds. ‘Your brain has been altered,’ as the evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich puts it. Learning to read ‘thicken[s] your corpus callosum, which is the information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres of your brain’,4 implying, Stanislas Dehaene writes, a ‘massive increase in connectivity’ across the two hemispheres.5 Literate people think differently: less holistically and more analytically, Henrich tells us; they ‘rely more on breaking scenes and objects down into their component parts and less on broad configurations and gestalt patterns’.6
As the cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf explains, reading of the kind that immerses you in the printed page, so called ‘deep reading’, is a mental performance of extraordinary complexity. When we read deeply we engage in a number of highly sophisticated mental processes, including ‘connecting background knowledge to new information, making analogies, drawing inferences, examining truth value, passing over into the perspectives of others (expanding empathy and knowledge), and integrating everything into critical analysis’. Reading is not a passive process but an imaginative and creative one. As we absorb the information on the page in front of us, we are connecting and interpreting it in the context of what we already know. This is why, as Wolf puts it, reading is ‘our species’ bridge to insight and novel thought’.7It explains why, when you browse in a second-hand bookshop, you find so many of the books are filled with the underlinings and scribbled marginal comments of previous owners. People tend not to take notes in this way when they are watching television or scrolling on their phones. Watching a video is a relatively passive experience. But reading is a kind of thinking. In an interview with Wolf about the value of the hours of uninterrupted reading time afforded by a long flight, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein put it very well: ‘my thinking becomes expansive and associational … I seem to get flashes of insight that can unlock whole problems or open whole new avenues for myself.’ He disembarks reflecting that ‘I got like three months of intellectual work done in four hours.’8
This participatory aspect of reading is the reason the cliché that we ‘immerse ourselves’ in a book has some literal truth to it. As Wolf writes, when we are lost in a work of fiction ‘we activate regions of the brain that are aligned to what the characters are both feeling and doing’. For instance, reading Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary: ‘When we read about Emma Bovary’s silken skirt, our areas of touch are activated, and when we read about Emma stumbling from her carriage to run in pursuit of Léon, her young, fickle lover, areas responsible for motion in our motor cortex activate.’9 This almost literal participation in the life of a fictional character, and the empathy it triggers in us, is an important part of the intellectual and emotional richness of deep reading.
To read a great nineteenth-century novel like Madame Bovary or George Eliot’s Middlemarch is a not inconsiderable cognitive feat. Written texts are usually significantly denser than spoken language and contain more unusual words. Readers must repeatedly decode long and complex sentences. To take a passage from the beginning of Middlemarch:
[Dorothea] was open, ardent, and not in the least self-admiring; indeed, it was pretty to see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia with attractions altogether superior to her own, and if any gentleman appeared to come to the Grange from some other motive than that of seeing Mr. Brooke, she concluded that he must be in love with Celia: Sir James Chettam, for example, whom she constantly considered from Celia’s point of view, inwardly debating whether it would be good for Celia to accept him.10As you read long sentences like these you are looking out for complicating devices such as irony (is this meant entirely seriously?) or free indirect discourse (is another character’s point of view subtly inflecting this passage of narration?). You have to swap regularly from perspective to perspective: how does Dorothea feel about this? How does Mr Casaubon feel about it? How does Will Ladislaw feel? You must use your imagination to fill in the gaps left for us by the author: what does Mr Casaubon’s study look like? And on top of all this you must draw on your accumulated historical knowledge to interpret the text: what exactly is a phaeton?
To really grasp the importance of reading to the way we think, it helps to cast our minds back in time to the very first literate cultures. The invention of writing in the ancient Near East was arguably the greatest intellectual revolution in human history. Writing was crucial to the emergence of the earliest civilisations, transforming the way that those societies were organised and run.
For Walter Ong perhaps the most fundamental impact of writing was that it freed ancient peoples from the burden of memory. The significance of this fact is easy for modern people to miss. We live in a world that is almost compulsively archival. In the twenty-first century, everything is recorded. Every draft of every irrelevant unsent email is automatically saved. Our phones are packed with thousands of pictures of holidays, nights out and pointlessly photographed dinners (the same salad from five slightly different angles). But in a world without writing, every piece of information you wish to preserve must be stored in your head. Anything you fail to remember is lost forever, vanished irretrievably into the great ever-present void of forgetting that haunts all pre-literate cultures. As Ong wrote, in these circumstances, the only way to preserve information is to ‘think memorable thoughts’.11This is why pre-literate societies tend not to preserve their histories, genealogies and social customs in dry lists, or carefully remembered etiquette manuals, the mnemonic equivalents of Burke’s Peerage or Debrett’s. Lists of this kind can be preserved easily in writing but they tend not to stick very well in the human mind. If you want to store knowledge in your head, it has to be exciting enough to remember; to last in memory, knowledge has to live.
It’s why societies without writing have an inclination towards the vivid, the violent, the grotesque and the monstrous. This is the starkly lit world of Greek myth with its heroes, giants and legendary beasts, products of the oral culture of the ancient Aegean. Indeed, the stories of the ancient Greeks are among the most effectively memorable of all time. Thousands of years later their tales still shine out in our minds. We still remember Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world; Achilles, the fastest of the Greeks; Odysseus and Circe and the Sirens and Polyphemus the Cyclops. The classicist Eric Havelock went so far as to argue that the Iliad, Homer’s famous epic poem about the Trojan war, was not just an exciting story meant to thrill its first listeners; it was also a kind of vast information-storage device. Homer’s poem, he argued, was a huge memorisable encyclopaedia, preserving vital knowledge, wisdom and information about Greek culture in the form of one of the most exciting narratives ever told. The stories in the Iliad charged knowledge about Greek civilisation with the vivid life essential to its preservation. So in the Iliad, when priests perform sacrifices or use ritual objects and when men go into battle or instruct their wives or launch ships, their actions are not only elements of a story; they serve as paradigms, guiding how listeners should behave in their own lives.12 This sounds like a bizarre use of poetry to modern readers. But it is perhaps not as alien as it seems. Older generations of English speakers still sometimes use poetry in the same way, quoting aphorisms from Shakespeare as a way of explaining and interpreting their lives: ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’, or ‘all the world’s a stage’.
All this also means that societies without writing tend to be conservative. If the only way to preserve information is to remember it, you must devote a great deal of mental energy and attention to the past: thinking about it, repeating it, retelling it. If you don’t regularly think about the past, you risk losing all the precious knowledge your community has so carefully accumulated over the decades. This gives little space for deviation and innovation, for questioning or reworking the status quo.
One interesting symptom of the preoccupation oral cultures have with the past and with memory is their reverence for the elderly. The oldest members of the community have the longest and therefore the most precious memories. As the anthropologist Jared Diamond writes of his experience working with hunter-gatherer peoples, ‘Older people know the tribe’s myths and songs, who is related to whom, who did what to whom when, the names and habits and uses of hundreds of species of local plants and animals, and where to go to find food when conditions are poor.’ In a traditional community, ‘caring for older people becomes a matter of life or death, just as caring for one’s hydrographic charts is a matter of life or death for modern boat captains’.13
The invention of writing transformed this world. Importantly, writing allowed people to externalise their memories. Writing allowed you to outsource a part of your mind to a clay tablet or a potsherd. And as information began to be written down, it changed what kinds of knowledge societies could preserve. As we have seen, the human brain is not adept at recalling lists or sums or long numbers. It’s hard to remember who paid what tax and which merchants owe what goats to whom. Writing meant that for the first time in human history these difficult-to-remember kinds of information could be accurately conserved. Written records enabled the development of new forms of sophisticated social organisation: large-scale tax collection, bureaucracy, trade and the waging of long-distance wars. The first complex states and empires in the ancient Near East owed their power to their ability to mobilise armies of ‘notaries, stenographers, accountants, archivists, secretaries and bureaucrats’ to control and manage information about everything from ‘grain shipments to temple tributes, from simple messages to lengthy accolades’.14And writing brought an intellectual change too, vastly expanding our range of possible thoughts. To Eric Havelock, ‘the invention of the Greek alphabet … constituted an event in the history of human culture, the importance of which has not as yet been fully grasped … divid[ing] all pre-Greek civilizations from those that are post-Greek’.15 Not all historians of the ancient world would put it quite so strongly. After all, most ancient Greeks outside the social elite were illiterate. But Havelock makes a compelling case.
As traditions and legends could be written out on papyrus, people were freed from the burden of remembering the past and were increasingly able to devote more of their cognitive energies to forming new ideas. Literacy also enables thinking to become more analytical, more complex and more critical. Difficult and abstract ideas are harder to pursue without writing. Just try doing formal logic in your head. Unless you are a savant it is not possible. But once people had a means of setting thoughts down on the page to interrogate them and build on them, a whole new revolutionary way of thinking was born, one that would go on to shape our entire civilisation. When we write our ideas down we externalise part of our minds. We can look at our thoughts from the outside. And that means we can walk around them: adding to them, criticising them and refining them. Writing meant that traditions and received ways of thinking could not only be passed on but also pinned down where they could be analysed, challenged and improved. This was our species’ cognitive liberation.
Walter Ong argued that many of the ways of thinking that seem natural to literate people are actually highly artificial and created by the technology of writing. An oral culture, he suggested, ‘does not deal in such items as geometrical figures, abstract categorization, formally logical reasoning processes, definitions, or even comprehensive descriptions, or articulated self-analysis’. All of these intellectual activities derive ‘not simply from thought itself but from text-formed thought’.16None of this, it’s worth emphasising, is to suggest that literate cultures are superior to so-called ‘oral cultures’ without writing. Or that illiterate people are inferior to literate people. Literacy involves losses as well as gains. For instance, Joseph Henrich tells us, becoming literate diminishes our ‘ability to identify faces’; when our brain rewires itself for literacy it impinges ‘on an area that usually specializes in facial recognition’.17 And a person raised in a literate society will never know the intense participatory experience of watching an oral poet improvise a vast epic poem from thousands of remembered passages, fragments and epithets. Ong believed that ‘oral cultures can produce amazingly complex and intelligent and beautiful organizations of thought and experience’. And it is true that, for all the achievements of literate civilisation, it has never produced a work of art with quite the same quality of heroic starkness as the Iliad or Beowulf. But the kinds of complex logical and abstract thought we value in the modern world are impossible without reading and writing. The philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the history of Herodotus and Thucydides, the mathematics of Euclid – all these are achievements inseparable from literacy.
To grasp how fundamental writing is to the kinds of sophisticated thought we value in the modern world, think of somebody trying simply to speak a famous work of philosophy or history or political thought. Imagine, to pick a deliberately extravagant example, trying to extemporise Immanuel Kant’s 800-page philosophical masterpiece the Critique of Pure Reason in the form of a speech. It would be impossible to do. And, frankly, impossible to listen to. To produce his great work, Kant had to write down his ideas, criticise them, refine them and then rework them over many years. Writing enabled him to preserve his best and most complex thoughts and then develop and arrange them in a persuasive and logical system.
The philosophy of Kant – or anyone – is an achievement inseparable from literacy.18 And understanding this kind of philosophy is probably an achievement inseparable from literacy too. To properly get your head around a difficult concept about the ultimate nature of reality or the meaning of life, you have to be able to see the words in front of you so you can reread bits you don’t understand, check logical connections and meditate on important passages until you really take them in.
Conversation, by contrast, tends to be less precise and less intellectually rigorous than writing. Ong argued that if you can’t write your ideas down and perfect them on the page, you have to think as you speak, meaning you tend to ‘backloop’ and ramble as you work out your thoughts on the go. (This rambling conversational style is a kind of speech that is once again becoming culturally prominent thanks to podcasts.) In conversation we often assert things without proper evidence; we slalom illogically between irrelevant points, often without noticing what we’re doing. Speaking about politics with a friend, you might lurch casually between a series of disconnected gripes about the government, about potholes or about a politician’s annoying voice. You are unlikely to make a watertight logical political case. When we talk we are free to ramble, to make unsupported statements, to indulge in logical non sequiturs, to jump from topic to topic as the mood takes us (and if we are charming we will get away with this much more easily). Anyone who has had the salutary experience of reading a written transcript of their own conversation – a professional hazard of appearing on podcasts – realises how feeble talk looks when it is transferred to the austerity of the printed page. All your rich and humorous eloquence is revealed to be little more than a series of blunderings, hesitations, trailings-off and inane juxtapositions of irrelevant ideas.
But with writing, Ong writes, ‘the mind is forced into a slowed-down pattern that affords it the opportunity to interfere with and reorganize its more normal, redundant processes’.19 Writers painstakingly go over their thoughts until they have worked out the best version of what they want to say. And because readers have the words fixed in front of them they can subject them to more scrutiny.
Conversation is very far from useless. But improvised speech is incapable of sustaining the kind of precise, detailed thought associated with books. You could get the gist of Being and Nothingness through hearing Jean-Paul Sartre explaining it in a TED talk or discussing it on a podcast – all the available evidence suggests Sartre would have been great on podcasts – but it would be impossible to get a genuine and deep understanding of his ideas without his books.
All this is why Ong and many thinkers after him believed that the complex and elaborate forms of knowledge like history, philosophy and science are not inevitable parts of human culture. Rather, they depend on literacy. No medium other than writing can contain the same density of argument, the same level of abstraction or the same intellectual rigour. To lose reading would be to risk losing the complex and sophisticated kinds of thinking that underwrite our entire civilisation.
1 Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Reading (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), pp. 205–6 ↩
2 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 2002 [1982]), p. 77 ↩Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 4 ↩
3 Joseph Henrich, ‘Martin Luther rewired your brain’, Nautilus, 17 February 2021, nautil.us/martin-luther-rewired-your-brain-238129↩
4 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, p. 318 ↩
5 Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (London: Allen Lane, 2020), pp. 3–6 ↩
6 Maryanne Wolf, ‘Screen-based online learning will change kids’ brains. Are we ready for that?’, Guardian, 24 August 2020, theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/24/deep-literacy-technology-child-development-reading-skills↩
7 Ezra Klein, ‘Transcript: Ezra Klein interviews Maryanne Wolf’, New York Times, 22 November 2022, nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-maryanne-wolf.html↩
8 Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World(New York: HarperCollins, 2018), pp. 49–51 ↩George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin Classics, 1994 [1871–2]), p. 10 ↩
9 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 34 ↩
10 See Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (London and Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963) ↩
11 Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (London: Penguin, 2013), p. 219 ↩
12 Fischer, A History of Reading, p. 21 ↩
13 Eric A. Havelock, ‘The Preliteracy of the Greeks’, New Literary History 8(3), Spring 1977, 369–91, p. 369 ↩
14 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 54 ↩
15 Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World, p. 4 ↩
16 Some readers may remember that Socrates complained about writing, which he believed was eroding the ability of young people to properly internalise knowledge. Havelock’s answer was that Socrates may have disliked writing but his abstract and analytical thought was already the product of an increasingly literate culture – whether he liked it or not. In the same way I can feel depressed about smartphones and computers with a brain that has been shaped by smartphones and computers. ↩Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 39 ↩
James Marriott
THE NEW DARK AGES
The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society
