What Happens When You Stop Reading

A global oral sensorium machine.

Reading is hard.

Certain corners of the internet prostrate themselves as we find ourselves in the soon-to-be-post-literate West. Much has been written about who isn’t reading anymore and how little. That, for example, at least 28% of the population is now functionally illiterate, up dramatically from 19% in 2017.

It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. The miracle that still needs explaining is why anyone, much less the majority of people, would spend their time doing something as difficult, tedious, and isolating as silently reading for the amount of time it would take to carefully read a wordy pamphlet, much less to grapple with a great work of literature.

Let’s repress our inner library-poster about the magic of books. If people aren’t going to read big difficult texts anymore, and that increasingly seems to be the case, and if we do have an intuition that wouldn’t be ideal, then we’re going to have to get a little more realistic about what exactly reading is and why people did it to begin with. We even need to be able to entertain the notion that reading may rightly go the way of the dodo as we invent new technologies to take its place. Why exactly is reading a book better than, say, a bunch of TikToks of roughly the same content? Suspend your disbelief.

Reading crams all five sensory inputs through the eyes, which produces a society that values rational, linear thought. Maybe that seems like a strange claim because you are doing it at this very moment. But, like a violinist trained from early childhood, you don’t recognize the enormous amounts of practice that has gone into the visual fluency that for example instantly transmutes “rotten egg” into a subtle olfactory response. You know on some level that other people are “illiterate” but have mostly forgotten the years of tedious and painfully self-conscious practice. Like a violinist, there are a thousand little movements you learned to make with your psychic “fingers” to silently produce the meaningful sounds of these symbols in your inner theater of imagination. You must deeply internalize the subtle glottal motions to make the sounds of each letter, and layer on top of that the contextual meaning of the combined sounds into words, and layer on top of that the ability to understand all that while composing the words into infinite possible meaningful sentences. You don’t learn all this by focusing on grammar, but on emotional images and stories and then, slowly, you begin to associate those emotions with rules for your particular language’s more granular syntaxes. You can even get away with never consciously learning many of the rules as I, to be frank, still don’t know what the hell present perfect is, but I can presumably still “do” it. These wordy fragments can then form into self-contained chunks like ideals and ideologies, which in some cases can totally detach from their source and float around from one person’s head to another.

So it’s clear that silent reading is hard and recent and mysterious. Much more so than speech, oddly. Children will learn to speak without a whiff of a formal lesson but will almost never learn to read unless you make them. Reading is like looking at the symbols of sheet music and being able to hear it all, from the oboe to the bassoon, in your head. How are you doing that? Not from memory, but being able to make new sounds that you’ve never heard before, in your imagination. As Beethoven went deaf, he relied more and more fully on his previously developed musical literacy to continue to “hear” the music. In fact, arguably his best stuff was written after he went completely deaf and could only work on the piece in his mind’s theatre, which is only possible by assimilating written musical language into an inner soundscape. It is a miracle that so many people had an analogous psychotechnology of silent reading in the modern world. Imagine a world where the majority of people could “hear” written music as well as Beethoven. That was the height of the West’s verbal literacy, at least for a while there. Literate consciousness floated in our air even for the less literate. It built the world as we know it, and why we intuitively fear losing it.

There is the tempting and obvious solution that doesn’t work:

Beg people to read more books. We feel that this is of mortal importance, even if we can’t quite say why. Henry Oliver has taken up this crusade, urging more people to read great literature and bemoaning that an editor of the New York Times book review hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't consider that a problem. What’s funny is that I heard Henry reporting this on an audio-visual podcast from Ted Gioia’s Honest Broker, not in some post-post modern novel about how nobody reads novels. Now, as far as pushing a few people to read Dante and Shakespeare who otherwise might have re-read Game of Thrones or something, I think that’s a noble enough cause. As far as righting the larger cultural ship, however, it won’t work. Firstly, what’s “novel” about postmodern novels has almost fully worn off. They rightly spelled out the culmination of the highly literate Gutenberg West. It was an amazing artifact of prophecy, but not viscerally interesting anymore because we are living out a more extreme version of their insights: the atomization and then deification of the Self. People aren’t motivated to read modern novels, not because they’re not great or because people are illiterate morons, but because the tantalizing sparks that would help a person overcome the great heft of reading a thick novel are played out and old news. Maybe it will be interesting in a hundred more years, but not at this epoch. We’re entering a new age and leaving the modern one behind, and it’s difficult to see that from within it. It’s more readily apparent in our behavior than anything we can easily verbalize, hence why Henry is more prone to express this concern in a podcast rather than via the next great American novel, despite himself fearing the implications of that.

On that podcast he pointed out how impoverished he thinks modern media like prestige TV is compared to, say, King Lear. This, I think, is Henry’s highly literate mind anachronistically applying golden-age literary aesthetic standards to more oral media. Henry is an outlier, and is therefore more literate than almost anyone, but especially compared to an average TV viewer. This does not necessarily make him more sophisticated in his thinking, just that his favored medium has trained him in its tropes and more broadly to be very linear and rational and highly individualistic in his ability to and taste for verbalizing inner experience. When judging something like Succession, he is going to be less “fluent” in the standards of quality from an oral storytelling perspective. He focuses on the clichés in the script and impoverished realistic dialogue as compared to the best of great literature. He is less able to assess the “vibe” of the show, the music, the non-verbal humor, the in-group signaling, and so on. I get it because I also don’t like it, and he did say that he might be wrong. But for us to judge secondary orality by literate standards is to miss the point a bit obtusely. Like it or not, we are leaving behind the modern novel and entering an age of vertical content. One that we don’t yet know the shape of, and one full of dangers and opportunities.

Socrates, as I too often point out, says in Phaedrus that the written word would be bad for people because they would no longer bother to remember anything. I love that anecdote because, like Socrates himself, it annoys you into thinking. As the father of our highly literate society, his dislike of the written word produces a delicious contradiction that can’t be neatly resolved. I like that. A little self-sufficient Zen Koan; Escher’s impossible geometric shapes that make you pause long enough to look beyond them.

Modern consciousness depends on language so deeply that linguistic intelligibility is fundamental to our ability to perceive the cosmos the way we think is a given. Paradoxically, it also seems that language is not the same thing as reality and if you stare too long at its glittering refractions, you will lose touch in some extremely dangerous way. “I think therefore I am” could only have emerged in a highly literate society, somehow abstracted enough to pull “I” clear out of body, place, and other people.

Before written language was orality; wild and beautiful and paradoxical was poured into our awareness through memorized myths, long before anyone thought to devise a way to mark it down for ghosts of the future. What makes the stars in the sky and the distant mountains “awesome” is the primal meaning your ancestors gave to them as symbols all the way to you and how you take in the world. They are the reason you can even “see” the stars, much less be impressed by them. Have you ever noticed that your dog doesn’t care about the stars in the sky even though the photons are certainly tickling their optic nerves, same as you? Spoken and sung language is so enveloping and involuntary (you don’t have ear lids) that it suggests a power beyond yourself that you must stop and listen to. Take in. It makes the world for the consciousness formed by that medium enchanted and brimming with meaning.

Widespread deep literacy begins to move the dominant mode of perception from passive listening to active seeing. At first only a devout elite of strange prophets, visionaries, and hermits were able to do it. That was what made them “visionaries,” in fact. Socrates was wrong that they would stop remembering things because of their strange practice. He just had no way of foreseeing how they would transfer embodied memories of shared myths about places into a new ability to create and memorize abstract landscapes. His student Plato had this idea about a palace of Forms and his strange hatred of Homeric poetry is explained by him being the transition point from oral to literate. The written word gives rise to those visual, abstract, linear, logical thoughts. The music of the old myths remain, but more hidden, soft, and sealed off into the “inner world” of the buffered self. You can still hear shouts of the old myths in poetry, which retains the ancient ways of speaking by, for example putting effects before causes, inverting the sense of linear cause and effect made so strong by literacy. It ushers our minds back to the pre-literate. We still feel this temporal inversion to be “poetic:” the ashes fell / the city burned.

Now, we are developing more and more technologies that allow us to ease into the warm womb of our storytelling past: the radio, then the TV, and now the phones. That is comfortable and much more natural than the great effort of reading, but there are obvious problems. One, is that our state of nature for humanity is not as the Rousseau hippies predicted. Turns out, in the state of nature we are only kumbaya with the ingroup and extremely violent with everyone else. Two, our new oral environment is no longer the natural world but super-literate wizards of Oz who are A/B testing every jot and tittle for a little more of your attention and money.

People naturally sense that a drop-off in reading will lead to tribalism without being able to explain why. They tend to think it’s because of a lack of “knowledge” or something, but that’s too simplistic. As McLuhan now too-famously said, the medium is the message. The medium of written text trains us to harness our animal drives to think linearly and rationally. The all-surrounding medium of audio or audio-visual (reels, podcasts, TV) trains us toward a more holistic, natural and therefore tribal mode of awareness. Interestingly, it is best produced by highly literate people, and consumed by the entire spectrum of literate to illiterate. Ostensibly, the attention economy and the star system that preceded it rewards the oral-native high-charisma performers, but they have always been the tools of their more literate operators. Unlike a novel, a film can hit you in the limbic system and enthrall you for three hours without you or even the actors being able to explain why. If you go deeper still; learn to “read” the language of movies instead of just letting them wash over you, focusing on the literary quality as if it’s an acted-out novel, you will find that it’s a whole new world of a secondary oral culture to explore. My wife and I love movies, and we consistently find that some of even the most “dumb” movies can have extreme literary depth hidden in the non-literate languages like lighting, acting, sets, vibe, and so on.

The reason we involuntarily venerate auteur writer-directors is because they are masters of both the literate scripting and the oral/tribal performances, actors, settings. If you or I tried to make a movie, we would put our actor on a flat background and film him saying the lines, and then be appalled by the bland and ugly footage that has nothing to do with what we see in our minds’ eyes. Most of us will never understand the billions of choices that must go into making something real conform to a dream. As literate people, we cannot even begin to imagine the consciousness of oral people, much less project their waking dreams onto a screen, through the cellulose of great literature. We don’t know how Coppola changes the faux sun beams coming through the palms at the exact right moment to indicate “revelation” to the oral mind; we will just believe he somehow pointed the camera and got the sensor to receive the reality of his meaning.

What we rightly fear about most people no longer reading is that they will become tribal creatures living in a global oral sensorium machine, controlled by the elite few who can think clearly enough with language to ensnare them and get their attention and even worship by using their high literacy to scaffold hyper-salient oral media. Walter Ong calls this secondary orality. The larger the disparity becomes between the literate and the illiterate (the data suggests that the most literate cohort is remaining stable while everyone below them is dropping off quickly), the more there is a temptation for the literate to make things in bad faith: the less common people read, the fewer novels, essays, and films the elite bother to make, the more slop, reels, politics, and ads will easily make them rich.

So is reading going the way of the dodo? Maybe so. Maybe we will never have a majority of highly literate people the way we did in the modern age. But, like the pre-Gutenberg age, a highly literate minority will still retain all the power and influence, and those people will either be moral or immoral. You can either be one of the people to help order the passions of everyone upward, or we will leave everyone at the total and ever-increasing mercy of a global hyper-literate and amoral elite who, through no consciously malicious decision on their part, are ever-nudged toward more and more hyper-salient media for their increasingly illiterate masses.

Literacy is neutral. What’s really scarce are those virtuous literates who love to craft and enjoy the good, true, and beautiful artifacts of secondary orality. Without good literate people making good things, this will always end in the ultimate culmination of visual salience: porn.

Porn is easy.