James Marriott on How Reading Made Us
Reflections on James Marriott's BBC podcast series
Can you really read? Are you able to get lost for hours in a book with no knowledge of where your phone is? Can you emotionally inhabit a character in the book you’re reading?
At a moment when anxieties about reading seem to be everywhere — disappearing novels in school curricula, smartphone bans, declining attention spans — James Marriott’s recent podcast series arrives at exactly the right time.
Is this time different???
This is the question Marriott opens the series with. (TL/DR, he thinks it’s not; I’m inclined to agree.) He follows with a more interesting question: “Could reading disappear, and what would happen if it did?” Marriott invites a slew of experts to help him tackle these questions over the course of four episodes.
The real question is not whether people can still decode words on a page. It is whether reading still cultivates the kinds of attention, empathy, reflection, and conversation upon which liberal culture depends.
How Reading Made Our Brains
First up is cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolfe on how we teach children to read. She reminds listeners that it took 2,000 years for humans to move from hieroglyphs to an alphabet. By contrast, children today have only a few thousand days to master the alphabet and learn how symbols on a page become language, meaning, and thought. This is a complex cognitive process linking what is seen to what is known, building cognitive network connections. We’re wise to not underestimate this cognitive challenge. As you’ll see, part of their message of this episode is that both becoming a reader and trends in individual reading are best seen as long-term propositions.
Reading is a fundamental part of human development; Marriott and friends argue that our brains actually change via reading. It seems obvious that your brain changes in terms of adding content to your neural network (inputs!), but Marriott is looking at a deeper sort of change. Reading allows for interiority. Part of the process of reading is inhabiting the thoughts and feelings of those you read about.1 As Marriott says, “reading is itself a creative act,” certainly as compared to consuming video, for example. And as I have expressed before, the process is best completed through conversation with others.
John Burn Murdoch has been watching the data on reading trends for decades. He notes that time spent reading has been on the decline for some time, and he agrees the trend accelerates around 2010. Murdoch argues we are absolutely witnessing a clear and fast change in people’s use of their leisure time. It’s not that people don’t want to read, Murdoch counsels, but that the world around is making it harder. The reason, however, is murkier than it may first appear.
It’s not “just the phones,” Murdoch says. How we relate to digital technology as a whole has changed dramatically in just the last decade. The information environment we now inhabit is both ubiquitous and passive. When was the last time you took out your phone to do something, not to kill time, he challenges? Today’s technology doesn’t prompt our brains into reflective mode the way that reading can do. Similarly, if you aren’t in a reflective mode, “conversation” becomes broadcasting rather than dialogue.
I mentioned the importance of taking a long-term view above. Marriott also reminds us that the cultural shift the brought reading into mainstream culture took millennia, not morphing into widespread literacy until after the invention of the printing press delivered economies of scale and rendered books an asset for the common man, not just the elite. The time we’ve lived since is an historical blip. Still. reading has wrought significant changes to society.
Enter Joseph Henrich (economist!)2 who argues that literacy reshaped not only cognition but social attitudes, fostering greater individualism as people learned to read earlier in their lives and more independently. He also points to widespread literacy as evidence of skepticism to authority, particularly with the dawn of Protestantism, giving permission to adherents to read the Bible themselves rather than mediated via clergy. Literacy then followed the spread of missionaries, and competition among orders bred ever more literacy. Henrich also notes the popularity of commonplace books, emphasizing that a burgeoning writing public spurred greater communication, and ultimately the Republic of Letters.
Ever the economist, however, Henrich points us to some of the losses that came with widespread literacy- way before the advent of the smartphone. He suggests that as people became more adept at decoding texts, for example, they lost some aptitude with facial recognition. He also points to widespread schooling as one of the first harbingers of declining literacy. He’s not wrong, and “lower scores” are not a new educational phenomenon.
So maybe, just maybe, the shrill cries warning of a post-literate society, while not wrong, may simply be too late.
How Reading Made Our Feelings
Or, why can’t we read just to have a good time? As I suggested above, Marriott’s main concern with the apparent decline in reading isn’t about literacy rates so much as empathy rates. In the second episode of the series, he digs deeper.
Books, Marriott insists, change the way we see ourselves and others. The process creates empathy; it allows us to create intimate and sometimes intense relationships with people we may bever meet and may not even exist. Steven Pinker calls reading “a technology for perspective-taking,” a phrase I love. He credits popular reading as a causal factor ushering in the “humanitarian revolution” of the second half of the 18th century, coincident with the European and American enlightenments. He notes the barbaric customs widely abolished during this time- slavery, many forms of corporal and capital punishments, and absolute despotism, to name a few.
Pinker resists the common explanation of widespread affluence, staying the timing just doesn’t work. Instead, Pinker argues the environment changed with the economies of scale to be found in printing and the subsequent widespread rise of literacy. This humanitarian revolution also needed free speech and conversation among citizens to be realized- both in large part made possible by literacy and engagement with the printed world.
Pinker notes two forms of empathy honed by reading- cognitive and telepathic. The former is the sort one achieves by reading a book like Machiavelli’s The Prince, a thinly veiled handbook on sovereignty and governance. The latter can be experienced via such classics of the time as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the novels of Charles Dickens.
While reading no doubt has all these salutary benefits and more, Marriott also cautions that the same processes may work toward what we consider “bad.”3 He also notes that video may have even more empathic effects than text, as it offers the opportunity to “see” those with whose thoughts and feelings ewe are engaging. The whole series, as witnessed first with Henrich, is very much a good news-bad news performance.
But reading can also isolate us, he cautions. Marriottt recounts how reading has become a much more solitary pursuit over the centuries. Indeed, “reading” in the ancient world generally meant someone reading aloud to an audience. The notion of silent reading had not yet emerged. If one follows this train of thought, the current malaise about our lack of civility may have started with the book, not the smartphone. I wonder is reading aloud is ripe for a comeback? It’s a project we’re thinking about for GoodRiches Books. I mean, witness Patrick Stewart reading all of Shakespeare’s sonnets if you’re not convinced, You’re welcome.
Alternatively, we could view books as primarily a technology of connection, and the online world (Substack!) as only a continuation of this trend. Pinker, in particular, draws a distinction between social media and other forms of digital connection. (Pinker has a Substack, too!) While a book is an exercise in perspective taking, he says, social media is an exercise in perspective hating. Social media he sees as inherently biased toward rage and partisanship, obsessed with the external versus the internal world.
Soon I will post on the other two episodes in this podcast series. In the meantime, I wonder what your thoughts are on books as agents of connection versus isolation, and the potential of real conversation in online spaces and/or social media.
Thanks for reading!
\While Marriott doesn’t mention Adam Smith, I am of course reminded here of Smith’s notion of the impartial spectator.
If you’re interested in more on Henrich, Arnold Kling has a great review at Econlib.
I was reminded of this as I was reading Evan Friss’ wonderful volume, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. His chapter on The Aryan Book Store and its ilk in the mid 20th century. Like markets, reading doesn’t always produce only “goods.”
A general question: What would you say about somebody who does not like reading, who finds it hard, but does it because it is, besides conversation, the only way to learn about most things? (And conversation is very resource-intensive in time and transaction costs.)
Let's celebrate reading out loud! I often read passages out loud and have students follow along. Reading skills are a full grade level weaker than they were in 2015. It certainly doesn't mean students don't want to learn or hear the information, only that they struggle with it as institutional schooling process has let them down. Every bit of assistance with language, writing, reading practice is increasing their potential enjoyment of future reading.
I remember sitting on a hard linoleum floor with other students circling the chair and Mrs. Mock's feet, as she read Charlotte's Web to us spellbound first graders. It was magical.