The Unique Power of the Printed Word

 

Several days ago, I read a Substack article that was pretty dire in its diagnosis and prognostications. The Dawn of the Post-Literate Age is not uplifting, but it is thought-provoking and therefore worth reading. Whether or not you believe the case is as bad as the author postulates, he does make some interesting points, in particular that a post-literate society makes the future of democracy questionable. Here are some quotes:

“Reading enriches creative work by giving men and women of genius access to the vast and priceless trove of knowledge preserved in books — “the best that has been thought and said”. The discipline of reading equips them with the analytical tools to interrogate, refine and revolutionise that tradition.”

This is the starting context. Keep it as the backdrop for the other quotes.

“For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence.
“The classics have been preserved over the centuries because they contain, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, ‘the best that has been thought and said’.
“The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading non-fiction — science, history, philosophy, travel writing — we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.
“Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations. ... 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.”

“Cut off from the cultural riches of the past we are condemned to live in a narcissistic eternal present. Deprived of the critical tools to question and develop the insights of those who went before us, we are condemned to endlessly repeat and pastiche ourselves, superhero film by superhero film, repetitive pop song by repetitive pop song.
“Most of all, this increasingly trivial and mindless culture is a calamity for our politics.” (emphasis mine)

“Politics in the age of short form video favours heightened emotion, ignorance and unevidenced assertions. Such circumstances are highly propitious for charismatic charlatans. Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the post-literate world. ... The rational, dispassionate print-based liberal democratic order may not survive this revolution.”

His article reminded me of Northrop Frye’s essay, The Renaissance of Books,available in the collection entitled Spiritus Mundi. Frye argues that the permanence of books is the defense of democracy. The article ends with this argument and since it is so well-reasoned and articulate (Frye never fails to be both), I quote it in full here below.

It is dated. He mentions Watergate as happening “recently.” But I found that to give more weight to what he says. It is a snapshot, and we can compare and contrast our own time and situation. There is a lot of overlap. There always is when dealing with human society. But there are notable differences. Living post-smartphone, Frye may seem a bit too optimistic about society’s response to television. Perhaps there was a time that society was “beginning to bring it under control,” but the smartphone wasn’t around then and no-one, outside the pages of science fiction, could have predicted such a device would ever exist or would take over the culture like it has. On one hand, Frye proves Marriott’s point that, “this increasingly trivial and mindless culture is a calamity for our politics.”But on the other, Frye’s larger point rings true: the printed word remains, and remains unchanged.

We live in the white water rapids of 24-hour news coverage. It is a deluge. Trying to follow a news situation often gives me the feeling of not knowing which way is up or down, like when you swim near a waterfall and are caught and spun by the weight of water hurtling down. This river of information that is constantly rushing at us is truly liquid, always changing, always moving, formless and chaotic. It is “print [that] has a unique power of staying around to be read again, presenting, with unparalleled patience, the same words again however often it is consulted.” The printed word has more of the quality of stone. It is information cooled and made solid. It can be consulted again and again and does not change, and this is why it can be the great help to perspective that C.S. Lewis talks about in his Introduction to The Incarnation by St. Athanasius.1 The solidity of books and the ideas they contain are why they make democracy and open society “continually possible.”

The question that James Marriott’s article seems to ask us to consider is, will there be anyone left who will read them?

I think that, yes, there will always be a remnant who wants to educate themselves, who preserves books, collects books, reads books, and is as a result an intellectual elite - elite in the sense of a select group superior in reading skills and the slow build of knowledge that comes from long years of reading. It might be an elite that is unpaid and unpraised, akin to the Irish monks who copied literary classics in spite of troublous times and cold, stone scriptoriums, doing it from love because they believed it to be important work.

A question I am left asking after reading Marriott and then Frye is, if it’s true that readers will continue to slowly die out and if because of that that we loose the thread of tradition and knowledge, will society become a parody of the Ethiopian in the chariot, with no Philip present to ask, “Understandest thou what thou readest?”

I’m not sure I know the answer.

...the more fully a communications medium is concentrated on the passing show, on recording events as they occur, the more it tends to become a one-way street of messages in which the ordinary consumer has a passive role. In our day radio and television tend naturally to become monologues of this kind, despite the efforts made through cable and open-line programmes to give the consumer each a chance to talk back to his set. The electronic media are in any case so set up that, given a revolutionary situation, it is relatively easy for the group in power to seize control of them. Wherever there are dictatorships, the radio is the main instrument of ex- in pression: it is, in fact, highly significant that everything we regard as anti-democratic should be summed up by the word “dictator,” that is, an uninterrupted speaker, who can expatiate for five hours on the glories of his regime and have the same speech bellowing from every street corner. Television is sometimes thought to be a “cooler” medium, but it isn’t: we may compare the role of the “”telescreen” in Orwell’s 1984. In the democracies, of course, radio and television reflect the economic anxieties of selling and making profits through consumer goods rather than the political anxieties of censorship and thought control, but the cultural consequences have many parallels. Newspapers also become one-way streets in proportion to their preoccupation with headlines and deadlines: however, the competition of television is now forcing them to become something more like journals of opinion. Even Time, the most dictatorial of all journals, was recently startled by Watergate into producing an editorial.

In this situation it seems clear that, however important it may be to have a ‘free press’ and extend the principle of that freedom to radio and television as well, the main battles of freedom are not fought on the news front. They are fought further back, in an area where issues have acquired some temporal dimension and some historical context. If it were really true, McLuhan and others have urged, that print is a “linear” medium, carrying the eye forward and hypnotizing any responses except the purely visual one of reading, there would be no difference between print and any other medium. But this thesis confuses the reading process with the consulting process, and overlooks the fact that print has a unique power of staying around to be read again, presenting, with unparalleled patience, the same words again however often it is consulted. It is therefore public access to printed and written documents that is the primary safeguard of an open society. ...

We are brought back to the book, more particularly the book which is an expository treatise, as the ordinary means of expressing and understanding the general conflict of opinion in society, so far as that opinion is not simply a snap response to current events but a sustained and supported argument. The written expository treatise looks at first sight like a dictatorial monologue, but this is a misunderstanding. Nothing of the hypnotic rhetoric of speech to a present audience is left in it: the author is forced, by the nature of his medium, to put all his cards on the table, to take his reader into his confidence, to appeal to nothing but the evidence of the argument itself. And so, however often it may fail in meeting the standards prescribed by its own physical shape, the expository or thesis-book remains the normal unit of impersonal social vision, and the normal medium by which communication draws us together into a community. Now that society, after some years of reeling from the impact of television, is beginning to bring it under control, we can see more clearly that the book the chief technological device that makes democracy and the open society continuously possible.

Northrop Frye, The Renaissance of Books

1

“…if [the ordinary reader] must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why – the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance.

“…Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny.

“They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.”

- Introduction to Athanasius’ On The Incarnation. — by C.S. Lewis