Thinking about the Post-Literate World
What does it mean when we hear that incoming Harvard students don't read? Should this concern us? What kind of things will change if people no longer read books?
Just before Christmas I listened to an engaging discussion between
and .
As happens with these sorts of discussions, it spurred a number of thoughts for me that I thought worth sharing with you. I encourage you to listen to the whole interview. Its excellent and it’s much better heard first hand than mediated through a summary here. In short, Mary and Johann discuss the post-literate world and what it might mean. We should be dwelling on these changes happening right before us because they will have a significant impact on the world around us, perhaps as much as the printing press had in creating the literate world. Mary’s thesis, which I think has merit to it, is that there is a possibility that digital media, with its combination of text, image and video, is re-teaching us to “notice” patterns in ways that are reminiscent of the pre-literate though patterns of someone who lives in a world of primary orality, that is, without the technologies of writing and print.
The technological world that we know today was generated in large part because of the changes in cognition effected by widespread literacy. As argued at length by Iain McGilchrist, the profusion of printed materials and the widespread emphasis on reading tends to emphasize linear thinking, abstract concepts, and analytics over raw perceptions, undifferentiated intuitions, and grasping things as wholes. A literate world wants knowledge to be streamlined, rational, and condensed into its most efficient and useful forms. It tends to emphasize left hemisphere brain activity over that of the right hemisphere. Reading McGilchrist’s “The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,” I came away with the conclusion, as a man of faith who is deeply invested in the future of the Christian community, that the price of modernity has been that it has, at a minimum, atrophied our abilities to intuit the divine presence in the world around us; or maximally, has, over the last 500 plus years, acted as a selection event, breeding out of the population those with the most innate ability to sense God. We are left with the craving for the divine, but are functionally crippled when it comes to communing with him.
The problem with speculating on things that are happening now, in real time, is that we don’t have any sort of distance from them. And because the changes are happening now, much of this discussion is speculative. That said, we do know enough to make reasonable projections as to the pathways things might take. If these changes in media, the shift from writing to digital mixed media, what we call “social media,” this combination of text, music, the spoken word, pictures and video, do have an effect on out patterns of cognition, some of the things we have learned about the effects which literacy specifically and the technological society more generally have had on us, we can also then extrapolate from this what might be the effects as the culture of reading and writing recedes. I think Mary is correct when she speculates that this will result in an increase in intuitive “noticing.”
But I wonder if this new turn to the intuitive can be the same as that of the pre-modern person. Ours is an abstracted, deconstructed, rationalized, technologized world. We are enframed within mass society by the technological and the propagandistic. Few of our experiences are direct. They are mediated through various media, through the mechanistic nature of our society. We don’t encounter the world organically, through direct intuition, story, myth, and living archetypes. We see the world through the lens on our smart phone. Something isn’t truly real to us unless it shows up on the six o’clock news or it becomes viral TikTok video. In this regard, Ellul notes that in the shift to the technological society, the old sacral, supernatural and superstitious world in which meaning was derived from God and the patterns of creation, we now live in the world of “history” in which meaning comes to us by means of the technological management of society. Politics replaces religion as the state becomes the expression of the great technological impulse towards utopia. The state becomes god, the reality within which we live and move and have our being. Enframed within this reality, what is being intuitively noticed? Is is the deeper mysteries of “the state” — i.e. god — as it expresses itself throughout our lives? Are the memes and avatars of social media an expression of something we can no longer access directly? Or are they a manifestation of this new divine reality, of the state writ large? When these memes directly attack and undermine the religion of “historical progress” are they actually able to break free and enter a truly new reality as happened when Christianity was undermined to make way for modernity? My sense of it is that this will merely deepen the nihilism of our society.
To the extent that people are able to break through the architecture of modernity and the technological society, to encounter both God and the created world directly, intuitively and organically, it will necessitate a change in Christian practice. One of the distinctive characteristics of Protestantism is its emphasis on “The Word” and the correct exposition of scripture. There is a strong emphasis on the rational, discursive nature of the faith. In many ways, Protestantism is a product of the wide spread literacy brought about by the printing press. Some might bristle against this, but without this technology there likely would not have been this thing that we know today as the Protestant Reformation. Recognizing that literacy and the printed word are big part of Protestantism, we also need to confront the realization that as the influence of literacy recedes, so too will the Protestant characteristic of the Christian faith.
I see two possible paths that this change will bring about, both of which we are seeing happening now. For some years now there has been concerns that Protestantism can be too theological and heady. One response has been to try to connect head and heart, to emphasize the need for a strong emotional response to the Christian faith. For those that have read Ong — I have written on this in the past — know that he argues that widespread literacy tends to have a feminizing effect on the person and on society. This desire to embrace the interior state of feeling and emotion can be seen as an extension of this feminizing effect of widespread literacy. The new intuitive awareness is directed inward to one’s emotional life. But this emotional awareness is mediated and enframed by the technological church, that deals in the reality of mass society and the techniques of propaganda. The large “seeker friendly” church and the corporate style “church growth” megachurch all use technique and propaganda to manage the emotional experience of the person-in-crowd. They participate in large Sunday gatherings that have more in common with a concert hall than what one might think of in the past as a church. People are engaged on an emotional level and are “lifted up” and “energized” for the week ahead in the technological society. Having been broken out of real organic communities they are reintegrated into a technologized form of the community, the small group, where they can gather around and share how they feel about the Bible and their lives. Few demands are made upon them. They feel the faith much more than they think about it. It is the post-literate environment prepared for by literacy and then its subsequent decay, that is, the world of the feminine, but without the constraints of rationality.
The other path would be the more masculine route. It is a questing for the mystical and the spiritual disciplines. We see evidence of this in the recent growth of Orthodoxy, especially among young men. As literacy, and its inherent feminine interiority, loses its grip, many young men are searching for a Christian practice that is much more masculine in character. They are not looking to argue over theology as men have done in the recent past. Rather, they are looking for personal discipline, hierarchy and, whether they know it or not, the mystical. The mystical path, what we can call “heroic Christianity” is an expression of the faith in which the primary battleground is the self. One goes to war knowing that victory means union with God. I sense with this also is a desire to break free from the mega-machine and reconnect with deep primal realities, that is, unmediated, unconstructed reality once again. Many young men, experiencing the alienation and nihilism of today’s world, again, whether they know it or not, are looking for a faith experience that is distinctly masculine, rooted in tradition and challenging: they want to meet God. This, as a not so young man, is something I deeply connect with. It is not that theology is unimportant. But there has to be something more than mere rationality. The emotionalism of much of today’s church is so feminine that it is off putting to young men in our nihilistic world. Christian mysticism, with its long tradition, its structure and discipline, and its emphasis on the battle with the self and the lofty goal of union with God does seem to offer something to men that they cannot find elsewhere. The idea of “heroic Christianity,” echoes of the path of the desert monk and this resonates with young men today.
Finally, we have to confront that the post-literate world will become significantly less technological. Our current level of technological sophistication comes as a result of pushing literacy and its resulting rationalism and abstraction to the very limit. The technological society was produced by literate men. This allowed the production, at scale, of several generations who were capable of engaging the world by means of the kinds of high level abstraction, rationality and analysis necessary to create a technological society. Today, in a post-literate environment, one must begin to wonder if we can produce the kind of men who can not only operate within a technological world, but can create it? And if we can still produce them, will we be able to do so in sufficient numbers to continue to drive modernity forward? Will technological progress stall as a result of the post-literate world? When you are no longer forced to read, when information comes as flood of images, videos, spoken words, memes and snippets of text, will people quickly lose the ability to deal with complex ideas which a sophisticated, literate mind to grasp them? Will the powerful algorithms that people call “artificial intelligence” exacerbate and accelerate this process? Will our own technological sophistication be the means by which the technological society itself is undermined? To what degree will “readers” have a decided advantage in this post-literate world? Maybe, more basically, will we be able to keep the lights on?
After all of this, we must again acknowledge that much of this is speculation on events that are happening now, changes occurring all around us that we are immersed in and from which we don’t really have distance. But because these changes are happening we do need to consider their implications. I welcome your thoughts on this. I am genuinely curious as to what others are thinking in this regard.
Right now, the tech elites are insulating their kids from the very apps that are making the next generation illiterate. Most likely we will see most of the population being dopamine addicted serfs ruled over by a class that either eschewed midern media or developed antibodies against it.
Thank you, this is an excellent and insightful article. It appears that the civil society Protestantism fostered has been co-opted by the Enlightenment, which actually divinised the state, throwing out the Logos which bound everything together, leading to this ‘post-literacy’ as you say. Dostoevsky criticised the US in this way; in its religious indifferentism, it actually demands faith in the state as God—an ideology now predominant globally. In his view, Russia ideally is to bear the standard of Orthodoxy and venerate Christ rather than the state.
I also think you’re right that the post-Reformation scholastic Protestant spirit finds itself very foreign in this increasingly uneducated and apostate world. Fortunately, our Reformed fathers such as Calvin, Knox and Bullinger actually realised the centrality of mystical union with Christ (a form of theosis), which is proclaimed in later hymns like ‘Be Thou My Vision’ and ‘Come Thou Fount’. I believe the Reformation was only possible by the grace of God and so we must retrieve its ancient spirit to address the world.