By George F. Will Columnist The Washington Post April 17, 2020
Long before today’s coronavirus lockdown provided occasions for the
vice that the phrase denotes, “binge watching” had entered Americans’ lexicon.
Few, however, speak of binge reading. To understand why this is regrettable,
mute Netflix long enough to read Adam Garfinkle’s “The Erosion of Deep Literacy” in National Affairs. He believes that
because of the displacement of reading by digital, usually pictorial
entertainment and communication, “something neurophysiological” is happening to
individuals, and especially to the “neural pathways” of the young. And
something vital to democratic culture is waning. Garfinkle, founding editor of the
American Interest, elaborates on Maryanne Wolf’s idea of “deep literacy” from
her 2018 book “Reader,
Come Home.”
Garfinkle defines this (or “deep reading”) as engagement with “an extended
piece of writing” in a way that draws the reader into “a dialectical process
with the text.” This involves the reader in anticipation of the author’s
“direction and meaning.” Few scientists doubt that heavy
dependency on electronic screens has shortened attention spans. “We know,”
Garfinkle says, “that prolonged and repetitive exposure to digital devices
changes the way we think and behave in part because it changes us physically.” The brain is continuously rewiring
itself in response to changing stimuli, and 200,000 years of evolution did not
suit it to process today’s torrents of fleeting stimuli. “More items vie for our attention in a
given hour,” Garfinkle says, “than our ancestors had to handle in a day or even
a week.” Becoming comfortable with shallow attention to everything, people
become transfixed by the present, unable to remember, or to plan well. He
reports that high school guidance counselors say most students lack the social
skills to speak one-on-one with college admissions personnel. This, Garfinkle
believes, reflects “acquired social autism.” People immersed in digital torrents
acquire “self-inflicted attention deficits.” They become incapable of the
“quality attention” that deep literacy requires. Such literacy is, in
evolutionary terms, a recent innovation that changed brain circuitry. Garfinkle
says, “We are or become, cognitively speaking, what we do with language.”
Printed words, presented sequentially in sentences and paragraphs, are
demanding, but rewarding: Only they can present the reasoning required to
establish complicated truths. Garfinkle’s surmise is that government’s
problem-solving failures reflect not just hyper-partisanship and polarization
but also the thin thinking of a political class of non-deep readers who are
comfortable only with the shallowness of tweets. Instantaneous digital
interactions encourage superficiality, insularity and tribalism. Deep reading, like deep writing, is
difficult, hence unnatural. It is unpleasant to those who, tethered to their
devices, have become accustomed to lives that are surface straight through.
Garfinkle worries that “cognitively sped-up and multitasking young brains may
not acquire sufficient capacities for critical thinking, personal reflection,
imagination, and empathy, and hence will become easy prey for charlatans and
demagogues.” Modernity’s greatest blessing —
individualism: the celebration of individual agency — depends on a sense of
one’s interior, of self-consciousness. This is facilitated by deep
literacy that, unlike the oral communication of premodern groups, requires
solitude for the reader’s private repose. Modernity, and eventually democracy,
advanced through Protestantism’s emphasis of individual engagement with writing
— the Bible made accessible to personal reading in various languages. Integral to liberal-democratic politics
are, Garfinkle says, abstract ideas — “representation; the virtues of doubt,
dissent, and humility; and the concept of a depersonalized constitutional
order.” A society that loses the ballast of deep literacy is apt to become less
thoughtful, more emotional and volatile. It will become impatient with the pace
of refined, impersonal governance through institutions. It will seek “a less
abstract, re-personalized form of social and political authority concentrated
in a ‘great’ authoritarian leader.” Deep literacy has always been a minority
taste and attainment, but is always necessary, especially among elites, to
leaven majoritarian politics. But because of today’s social media technologies,
Garfinkle believes, there is increased, if superficial and emotive,
participation in political discourse. Yet even among young people in higher
education, many professors will not assign entire books, or substantial
portions of challenging ones. Deep readers can “deploy shields of
skepticism” against those who, lacking the reading habit, are “locked in
perpetual intellectual adolescence.” And then? “Populism of the illiberal
nationalist kind is,” Garfinkle believes, “what happens in a mass-electoral
democracy when a decisive percentage of mobilized voters drops below a
deep-literacy standard.” Garfinkle’s essay – mental calisthenics
for a confined nation – deserves at least the grudging gratitude of even the
most egalitarian Americans. It requires what it describes – deep literacy – and
might be a spur to binge reading.