Love of books is more fragile than we realise
The best arguments come with an enlivening charge of contrarianism. Repeating widely accepted platitudes, as any writer soon discovers, is a poor way to draw a crowd.
This presents a difficulty to those of us who worry about the decline of reading. The evidence that there is a crisis of literacy is compelling. To cite the much-bandied statistics, a third of British adults say they have given up reading for pleasure and the OECD reports that literacy is “declining or stagnating” in most developed countries. If, like me, you believe that a literate population is one of the foundation stones of democracy, this is profoundly alarming.
The problem is that making the case for books can easily sound worthy and obvious, like making the case for eating fruit or being punctual.
Everyone knows reading is good for you. Many of us have spent a good part of our education being lectured on “the power of words” by unappealing authority figures. The very worst defences of reading are characterised by a kind of self-satisfied tweeness and come garlanded with sickly quotes of the “a book is a gift you can open again and again” variety.
I’ve spent the past few months making a Radio 4 series about how the rise of literacy shaped modern civilisation. The first episode of How Reading Made Us aired yesterday morning and there are two more to come. Making the show I was most struck by the sheer weirdness of reading. I think emphasising how bizarre and unusual literacy is will be crucial to those of us trying to make arguments about its importance.
Because we’re used to reading, we miss how odd it is to sit still, absorbing language through our eyes. Speaking and listening seem to come naturally to us. Nobody has ever encountered a human community without language. But in the entire history of our species writing has been invented on perhaps as few as three separate occasions: in Ancient Mesopotamia around 3400BC, in ancient China around 1250BC and in Mesoamerica sometime in the first millennium BC.
Making the case for books can easily sound worthy and obvious
Learning to read rewires our brains. The neuroscience of reading is better explained by experts than it is by English literature graduates.
But it is a process that seems to increase our skills of analysis, attention and abstraction.
One intriguing line of research into the relationship between literature and empathy shows that when we are immersed in a novel we activate areas of our brains associated with the actions performed by the characters we’re reading about, cognitively participating in their lives.
So, as the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has explained, when we read about Emma Bovary running after her lover, the areas of our brain associated with motion light up.
Most intriguingly (and perhaps dismayingly) as our brain rewires itself for reading, it repurposes an area used for facial recognition. On average, literate populations are worse at recognising faces than populations without writing.
Literacy has also changed the skills and people we value. Literate societies tend not to prize memory. Few would count a wide command of proverbs or tracts of epic poetry — among the most statusful intellectual attainments in the ancient world — a mark of special intelligence nowadays.
But in societies without writing, memory is vital. After all, whatever knowledge you can’t preserve in your mind will be irretrievably lost.
Information has to be stored in rhymes, songs and stories.
It is for this reason that pre-literate cultures are much more respectful of the elderly. As the anthropologist Jared Diamond observes of his experience working with huntergatherer communities in New Guinea, “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”. When memory is outsourced to writing, social status shifts towards younger, quicker minds.
For most of history, reading was a skill confined to a tiny elite
Reading as we know it today — silent, solitary, even antisocial — is a recent phenomenon and one that would seem strange to ancient readers. In the classical world, reading probably meant reading out loud, a practice partly necessitated by the fact that ancient texts were written without breaks between words. In a famous passage of his Confessions, St Augustine encounters his mentor Ambrose, Bishop of Milan reading silently to himself, something Augustine finds remarkable enough to be worth writing down. The writer Alberto Manguel has speculated that ancient libraries may have echoed to a “rumble and din” of readers.
Above all, for most of history, reading and writing were skills confined to a tiny elite minority of the population. The historian Steven Roger Fischer has estimated that in some Mesopotamian city states there may have been only a “few score literates” alive at any given time.
Literacy in Ancient Rome may have been as low as 10 per cent. Ordinary people became part of the story of literacy very late in history.
The crucial factors in the diffusion of reading into the wider non-elite population were Protestantism and the printing press. Martin Luther’s emphasis on faith founded not on the doctrines of the church but on personal study of the Bible was such a powerful spur to reading that its effects could be observed centuries later. As late as the 19th century, Protestant areas of Germany had higher literacy rates than Catholic areas.
Genuine mass literacy arrived very recently indeed, with the introduction of compulsory education at the end of the 19th century. Most of us do not have to go back in time very far at all before we hit our first illiterate ancestor. Literacy is not only strange but fragile and recent, too. Let’s not lose it.
