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The Erosion ofDeep Literacy

Adam Garfinkle

HOUGHTFUL AMERICANS ARE REALIZING

that the pervasive IT-revolutiondevices upon which we are increasinglydependent are affecting our society andculture in significant but as yet uncertainways. We are noticing more in part because,as Maryanne Wolf has pointed out, thistechnology is changing what, how, and whywe read, and in turn what, how, and why wewrite and even think. Harold Innis noted in1948, as television was on the cusp ofrevolutionizing American life, that "sudden

CU R R E N T IS S U E

extensions of communication are reflectedin cultural disturbances," and it's clear weare stumbling through another such episode.Such disturbances today are manifold, and,as before, their most critical aspects mayreside in alterations to both the scope andnature of literacy. As with any tanglebetween technology and culture, empiricalevidence is elusive, but two things, at least,are clear.

For one, the new digital technology isdemocratizing written language andvariously expanding the range of peoplewho use and learn from it. It may also bediffusing culture; music and film of all kindsare cheaply and easily available to almosteveryone. In some respects, new digitaltechnologies are decreasing social isolation,even if in other respects they may beincreasing it. Taken together, thesetechnologies may also be creating novelneural pathways, especially in developingyoung brains, that promise greater if

different kinds of cognitive capacities, albeitcapacities we cannot predict or even imaginewith confidence.

But it is also clear that something else hasbeen lost. Nicholas Carr's 2010 book, TheShallows, begins with the author's irritationat his own truncated attention span forreading. Something neurophysiological ishappening to us, he argued, and we don'tknow what it is. That must be the case,because if there is any law ofneurophysiology, it is that the brain wiresitself continuously in accordance with itsevery experience. A decade later, Carr'sdiscomfort is shared by growing legions offrustrated, formerly serious readers.

In her 2018 book, Reader, Come Home,Wolf uses cognitive neuroscience anddevelopmental psycholinguistics to study thereading brain and literacy development, andin doing so, helps identify what is being lost.According to Wolf, we are losing what shecalls "deep literacy" or "deep reading." Thisdoes not include decoding written symbols,

writing one's name, or making lists. Deepliteracy is what happens when a readerengages with an extended piece of writing insuch a way as to anticipate an author'sdirection and meaning, and engages whatone already knows in a dialectical processwith the text. The result, with any luck, is afusion of writer and reader, with thepotential to bear original insight.

Deep literacy has wondrous effects,nurturing our capacity for abstract thought,enabling us to pose and answer difficultquestions, empowering our creativity andimagination, and refining our capacity forempathy. It is also generative of successivenew insight, as the brain's circuitry forreading recursively builds itself forward. Itis and does all these things in part because ittouches off a "revolution in the brain,"meaning that it has distinctive anddescribable neurophysiologicalconsequences. Understanding deep literacy

as a revolution in the brain has potentialpayoffs for understanding aspects of historyand contemporary politics alike.

Deep reading has in large part informed ourdevelopment as humans, in ways bothphysiological and cultural. And it is whatultimately allowed Americans to become"We the People," capable of self-government. If we are losing the capacity fordeep reading, we must also be prepared tolose other, perhaps even more precious partsof what deep reading has helped to build.

BRAIN REVOLUTION

Scientists continue to debate the question ofaddiction to technology and its effects onmemory and social isolation, a questiontransformed anew in the dozen years sincethe June 2007 introduction of the iPhone.But beyond the addiction debate, fewcognitive scientists doubt that so-calledmultitasking is merely the ability to get

many things done quickly and poorly. Andno one doubts that heavy screen use hasdestroyed attention spans.

But more than attention spans are at stake.Beyond self-inflicted attention deficits,people who cannot deep read — or who donot use and hence lose the deep-readingskills they learned — typically suffer froman attenuated capability to comprehend anduse abstract reasoning. In other words, ifyou can't, or don't, slow down sufficiently tofocus quality attention — what Wolf calls"cognitive patience" — on a complexproblem, you cannot effectively think aboutit.

We know that prolonged and repetitiveexposure to digital devices changes the waywe think and behave in part because itchanges us physically. The brain adapts toits environment. The devices clearly can beaddictive; indeed, they are designed to beaddictive. Technology companies know thatswiping "trains" the brain in certain ways;designers know what produces quick bursts

of dopamine and oxytocin. They also knowthat two-dimensional representations on ascreen do not match the sensory richness ofdirect, unmediated experiences, and theyknow the implications — which is whymany cyber-technologists strictly ration theiruse among their own children. Asneurologist Richard Cytowic put it, "Digitaldevices discretely hijack our attention. Tothe extent that you cannot perceive theworld around you in its fullness, to the sameextent you will fall back into mindless,repetitive, self-reinforcing behavior, unableto escape."

Thanks to roughly 200,000 years ofevolution, the human brain is an extremelyefficient change detector. Any sudden andatypical image, smell, or sound could signala threat or an opportunity, so the brain hadalways to be on alert, even during sleep.(Some refer to this evolutionarydevelopment as the brain's "novelty bias.")And we are still on alert; our brains are not

anatomically much different from what theywere in Neolithic times, even if some of thecircuitry is different.

Maintaining constant vigilance consumesmuch of the brain's power supplies, andswitching attention, in particular, eats up lotsof calories. Even a century ago, life was farless frenetic than it is today; more items viefor our attention in a given hour than ourancestors had to handle in a day or even aweek. As Cytowic puts it,

We ask our stone-age brains to sort,categorize, parse, and prioritize torrentialdata streams it never evolved to juggle,while in the background we have to stayever vigilant to change in every sensorychannel....Screens of all sorts serve uprapidly changing images, jump cutsbetween scenes, erratic motion, and non-linear narratives that spill out infragments....Is it any wonder peopletoday complain of mental fatigue?Fatigue makes it even harder to sort the

trivial from the salient and navigate theglut of decisions modern life throws atus.

The knock-on issue thus becomes clear: It ishard to sustain the attention necessary fordeep reading when we are distracted andexhausted from being both sped up andoverloaded — what tech writer Linda Stoneaptly calls "continuous partial attention."And many, particularly those who havenever inculcated the discipline that comeswith a serious education, have become, asSenator Ben Sasse puts it, "addicted todistraction." The neuroscientist DanielLevitin explains it more specifically:"Multitasking creates a dopamine-addictionfeedback loop, effectively rewarding thebrain for losing focus and for constantlysearching for external stimulation"(emphasis added).

A sadder and more troubling knock-on effectalso reveals itself: If you do not deep read,you do not cultivate a capacity to think,imagine, and create; you therefore may not

realize that anything more satisfying than avideo game even exists. Fully immerseyourself in digital "life," and timelines willflatten into unconnected dots, rendering aperson present-oriented and unable to eitherremember or plan well. That permanently"zoned out" person will become easy preyfor the next demagogue with an attractivepromise and a mesmerizing spectacle.

Mediated electronic interactions also createforms of what could be called acquiredsocial autism. Any experienced high-schoolguidance counselor can attest that most oftheir students do not have the social skillsnecessary to, for example, speak to college-admissions personnel one on one. There isalso growing empirical evidence of social-media fatigue. Our gadgets createexhaustion, isolation, loneliness, anddepression, which track with the rise ofsuicide rates in younger age cohorts. In afew extreme cases, when isolation sharply

diminishes the influence of peer standards ofacceptable conduct, it can lead to violentanti-social behavior.

In science fiction, the typical worry is thatmachines will become human-like; the morepressing problem now is that, through thethinning out of our interactions, humans arebecoming machine-like. That raises thepossibility that the more time we spend withmachines and the more dependent on themwe become, the dumber we tend to get sincemachines cannot determine their ownpurposes — at least until the lines crossbetween ever smarter AI-infused machinesand ever less cognitively adept humans.More troubling are the moral issues thatcould potentially arise: mainly ceding tomachines programmed by others the right tomake moral choices that ought to be ours.

HABITS OF MIND

The human brain is genetically hardwiredwith the ability to understand and articulateoral language, but no gene exists for reading

and writing. Literacy is a culturalachievement long in the making, though, onan evolutionary timeline, it is a fairly recentinnovation. It is a development that, bychanging the very structure of human braincircuitry, "transformed the nature of humanthought," as Wolf writes. What Carrdetected, even before iPhone marketsaturation, is that the plasticity of the humanbrain extends well beyond childhood: Weare or become, cognitively speaking, whatwe do with language.

There is no question that adult readinghabits have changed over the past fewdecades. The skimming and speed-readingin Z or F patterns that is characteristic ofsurfing the internet — the new norm formany — does not help enable criticalcontent, if there is any, to sink into workingmemory. As reading method goes, it is theanti-deep; one barely gets wet at all. Twitter,in particular, epitomizes the transition fromusing written language as a means to thinkto using language as a platform for micro-

designer spectacle — in some respects athrowback to oral culture, and certainly a farmore cognitively superficial activity, as L. M. Sacasas recently argued in the NewAtlantis. Skimming on the net also has ashadow effect: When one picks up a bookfor an afternoon or evening, the same patternthrows itself onto the printed page. That iswhat Carr noticed but did not perhapsunderstand.

Henry Kissinger noted one consequence ofthis development in the context of strategy:

Reading books requires you to formconcepts, to train your mind torelationships....A book is a largeintellectual construction; you can't holdit all in mind easily or at once. You haveto struggle mentally to internalize it.Now there is no need to internalizebecause each fact can instantly be calledup again on the computer. There is nocontext, no motive. Information is notknowledge. People are not readers butresearchers, they float on the

surface....This new thinking erasescontext. It disaggregates everything. Allthis makes strategic thinking aboutworld order nearly impossible toachieve.

Neil Postman put it succinctly, if morebroadly, in 1985: Only in the printed wordcan complicated truths be rationallyconveyed.

But Kissinger is getting at something elsehere: namely, the sources of originalthought. The deep-reading brain excels atmaking connections among analogical,inferential, and empathetic modes ofreasoning, and knows how to associate themall with accumulated backgroundknowledge. That constellation of sourcesand connections is what enables not juststrategic thinking, but original thinking morebroadly. So could it be that the failures ofthe American political class to fashion usefulsolutions to public- and foreign-policychallenges turn not just on polarization andhyper-partisanship, but also on the strong

possibility that many of these non-deepreaders are no longer able to think below thesurface tension of a tweet?

Absence of thought as a mode of cognitionlikewise stifles imagination and feedscultural insularity. Along with thetechnology-enabled prevalence of mediatedinteractions as opposed to face-to-face ones,insularity in turn conduces to the narrow"tribal" emotions of identity politics. The"echo chamber" effect, characteristic ofmediated electronic interactions, tends totruncate a person's ambit of empathy, asSenator Sasse has stressed, and not just asregards politics. It could be, in other words,that we skim now with respect to ouremotions as well as our thinking — how elseis it possible to degrade the beauty anddifficulty of friendship into "friending"someone instantaneously on Facebook?Deep reading, contrarily, deepens andwidens our theory of mind in both its

rational and affective aspects. Fictionreading, in particular, enables us to simulatethe consciousness of another person.

Indeed, our developing the ability to deepread is part of what made us human. Pre-literate cultures can be rich and imaginativewithout written language, but unless peoplecapable of mobilizing their imaginations tospin wondrous stories and discoverempirical truths about the world can getthem written down, there is a limit to howlong the power of those stories and insightscan endure. The writing processes we use toobjectify knowledge gained — processesthat make intersubjective sharing stable andlongstanding over generations — havebecome integral to who we are.

Literacy as a cultural achievement changedsociety because it enabled humans to learnfrom predecessors long-since deceased andto teach those who come long after, thuscreating skeins of intergenerationalconversation that no other animal can match.In other words, literacy enabled the sum of

education and schools, libraries andarchives, research and coordinated humanwork to generate a reality far more massiveand seemingly objective than what KennethBurke once called our bio-sensory bit ofreality, "the paper-thin line of our ownparticular lives." The rewards of deepreading are cumulative over time, therefore,not only in the individual, but also insociety. Deep literacy marks the birth ofuseful abstractions bearing profoundimplications for moral reasoning. AsHermann Hesse pointed out, "[w]ithoutwords, without writing, and without booksthere would be no history," and so "therecould be no concept of humanity."

Those reading this essay developed thesehabits of mind as children who learned toread and now continue to do so as adults. Inan odd way, that's the problem: We almostnever reflect on how unusual, and in manyways unnatural, deep reading actually is.Consider that the only time any of us can bealone with ideas brought by others is in

reading. It is, as Marcel Proust put it in OnReading, "that fertile miracle ofcommunication that takes place in themiddle of solitude." Otherwise, we are eachnecessarily engaged in dialogue with one ormore other in-the-flesh people: In otherwords, we experience the community ascontext, simultaneously with the ideas. Deepreading alone creates the possibility of aprivate internal dialogue with an author notphysically present.

More important, when we are immersed indeep reading, we bracket our sensorysurroundings and social context to becomeengrossed in worlds that exist only in ourheads. The power of this out-of-bodycapacity is quite remarkable. Wolf citesresearch showing that when a fictionalcharacter with whom the reader hasdeveloped an affinity is running in the text,the deep reader's motoric regions activate asif he were actually running instead of sittingin a chair reading. So we can be in our headsnowhere real, but being there imaginatively

creates real effects nonetheless. This tells us,among other things, that the kind ofintimate, silent dialogue that occurs onlyduring deep reading requires a considerablecapacity for abstract thought just for it tooccur at all. In deep reading, we separate themessage of the text from the author; wedecontextualize it, in other words, andtherefore necessarily abstract it.

For those who make a habit of deep reading,cognitive capacities for such abstractthinking expand to fill our appetites, or whatwe may call our pressing artificial needs.And those needs can become pressingbecause the material world, while expansiveand rich, has limits that the world of theabstract and the imaginative very likely doesnot. So once into that world, the appetite toexplore more of what we, with helpfulauthorial others, conspire to invent canbecome irresistible, at least this side of thedinner bell.

In order for deep reading to exist there alsomust be deep writing. The author also mustabstract the message being crafted because,usually, no specific reader can be readilyanticipated or held in mind. Classes or kindsof people can be identified as a writer'starget audience, but that is different and thattoo requires a kind of decontextualizedabstract thought. Thus, we have a writerprivately squeezing into an artificial,decontextualized "space" in order to conveysomething, fictive or not, to unknownreaders in unknown but theoretically verydistant times who are similarly situated, soto speak, in an artificial, decontextualizedspace. If this is not in some non-trivial sensean unnatural act for human beings to engagein, then what is?

And yet we typically overlook howsignificant this act is for us as individualsand to us collectively as a society. We onlyfeel uncomfortable when we sense, as didCarr, our earned capacities somehowslipping away — or when we worry that

cognitively sped-up and multitasking youngbrains may not acquire sufficient capacitiesfor critical thinking, personal reflection,imagination, and empathy, and hence willbecome easy prey for charlatans anddemagogues.

MODERN MAN

Deep literacy has often been overlooked as afactor in history because historians are sodeeply enmeshed in a world of deep readingthat they, like the proverbial fish in water,take its existence for granted. A poignantexample is that of Karl Jaspers, famous forhis theory of the Axial Age. Jaspersobserved that several civilizational zoneswith little to no contact between themnevertheless developed severalphilosophical themes seemingly in commonat around the same period, between theeighth and third centuries B.C. Why this wasso constituted a mystery for Jaspers and themany interpreters his 1949 study attracted. Itseems not to have occurred to them that theadvent of literacy for a critical mass of

people during the period in question mightaccount for the commonalities Jaspersobserved.

What Jaspers saw was less the similarcontent of the formulations of differentancient cultures and more the similarity ofthe level of abstraction at which thoseformulations took shape by dint of thecultures having recently become literate. Inother words, phenomena that many saw ascauses of the Axial Age were actuallyconsequences of something else that wentunremarked: the spread of deep literacy in astill-small but critical share of thepopulation.

Understanding deep literacy can also take usfrom Jaspers's Axial Age to the modern age.The rise of individual agency — one of thehallmarks of modernity — depends on thedevelopment of a refined sense of interiorityin a person: that sense of the inner consciousbeing that defines one's individual, essentialself. In short, very likely, the advent of deepliteracy, by enabling a new sense of

interiority, is the proximate source ofmodernity via the rise of individual agencythat it allowed.

Unless provoked to think about it, weusually assume that this sense of interiorityhas been an invariant aspect of being human.But that is not obvious. The growth of ourinner voice to articulate maturity probablydepends on our developing languagecapacities, from that of the child before hedevelops a theory of mind to that of theadult capable of seeing the self as an object — capable in other words of asking the firstquestion of philosophy: Who, or what, am I?After all, what need has anyone for aparticularly articulate inner voice if thatvoice never has anyone else to "talk" with,which is an activity done silently only inreading? Thus, our adult sense of interiorityseems closely linked, perhaps inextricablyso, to our gaining literacy competence.

The mature "narrator" likely arises from theaforementioned complementary pairing ofunnatural acts, as the necessarily dialectic

reading/writing process that defines deepliteracy continues over time. The maturenarrator in our heads is thus a cognitiveartifact of culture, of the revolution in thebrain, not of neurobiology alone. As WalterOng put it, "[o]ral communication unitespeople in groups" whereas writing andreading "throw the psyche back on itself"and thus cultivate individuality.

So the silent narrator in the minds of non-readers must be, at least in some ways, anarrator different from our own — andsocieties made up of the latter must, at leastin some ways, differ from societies made upof the former. The slow movement fromoral/communal to written/private uses ofnarration has indeed ultimately beenepochal. It is hard to disagree with Ong'sconclusion that, "without writing, humanconsciousness cannot achieve its fullerpotentials."

In this light, consider a typical child in asociety with widespread deep literacy andthe development of the relationship of

narratives to thinking in his mind. Theprocess starts when books are read to a childbefore he can decode them, creating a linkbetween the written word composed ofmorphemes, the phonemes the words makewhen the morphemes are sounded out, andthe symbolic meaning carried by them. (Asfar as we know, this link can be created onlyby shared attention between at least twohuman beings; it cannot be fashionedbetween a child and a television set, an e-reader, or any other machine. That is onemain reason why the best predictor ofeventual reading proficiency is how manyhours adults spend reading to youngchildren.)

Then a child learns to decode writing andpronounce it, but usually only aloud. Asdecoding matures into true reading, a childwill still usually not be able to read silently;there is often an intermediate stage on theway to deep literacy when a child iswhispering or moving his lips while reading.(Some adults who have yet to achieve full

deep literacy do this, too, as can sometimesbe observed on buses, trains, park benches,and so on.) Only later can the more maturechild advance into truly silent reading, andgain the ability to meet an author halfway inthe complex dynamics of deep literacycommon to adults. Only then does thechild's narrator develop into a mature form.

This development is true on the historicalscale as well. Ponder the language of prayerand ritual over the millennia. Ancient prayerwas and most ritual prayer is still communal,so liturgy is meant to be spoken aloud,chanted, or sung. But even individual prayer,whether it takes place in a group setting oralone, is not usually supposed to becompletely silent even today; lips need tomove. This tradition, at one point itself anovelty as illustrated by the exchangebetween Hannah and Eli at Shiloh in ISamuel, is a remnant of an earlier time whentruly silent prayer, and silent reading, was allbut unknown — a time when nearly all

writing that went beyond mere lists wasintegrally related to and arose from withinreligion.

The rise of Protestantism has everything todo with Martin Luther's key insight that theessence of a person is the soul within. Hencehis view that the priestly rituals of theChurch were in vain because they could notpenetrate into the interiority of the soul — could not directly engage the inner person,could not converse with the narrator. In hisview, the ritual was functionally mute andthus useless. But (probably) unbeknownst toLuther, his own deep literacy likely formedthe portal of his sense of interiority, andtherefore presaged his theological discovery.Protestantism's focus on scripture in the newtheological dispensation was notcoincidental, to put it mildly.

The rise of deep literacy in enough people inearly modernity — mightily aided, ofcourse, by Gutenberg's invention of movabletype — was a precondition ofProtestantism's firm establishment and rapid

growth, and its establishment was in turn amajor accelerator of deep literacy in thesocieties in which it became the principalfaith community, in large part becauseProtestants ordained compulsory schoolingfor all children. The Reformation found avery powerful engine in the establishment ofthese schools: Wherever Protestant beliefsspread, state-mandated education soonfollowed, each reinforcing the other.

This rendered the Reformation a twintheological-political movement, based onthe idea of "conscience" as the fulcrum.Conscience was central to arriving attheological truth through reading Scripture,and theological truth led to a socialconsensus on the importance of consciencein the political arena as well. The simpleunderstanding here was that the capacity formoral reasoning is essential for an individualto come to religious truth, and moralreasoning collected into a social ethos is theonly foundation for a morally just political

order — the individual and socio-politicalfacets of conscience reinforcing each otherin a virtuous cycle.

The eventual consequences of thisdevelopment, for the West and in due coursefor the world, have been huge. TheProtestant way of thinking about therelationship between the individual andsociety is quintessentially modern because itstarts with individual, not corporate, agency.As far as political thought goes, this is theorigin of our "We the People": God's will isimplemented upward through popularsovereignty, not downward from the divineright of kings. This is where the moral basisfor modern liberal democracy comes from,and without the spread of deep literacy, itlikely doesn't come at all. It is simply notpossible to build a bourgeois economy andsociety without enough people who areliterate and numerate to operate them.

LITERACY AND POPULISM

The capacity for abstract reasoning, too, isintegral to liberal-democratic politics: Theconcepts of representation; the virtues ofdoubt, dissent, and humility; and the conceptof a depersonalized constitutional order areall very abstract ideas. Is it possible that anemotionally more volatile post-deep-literatesociety may at a certain tipping point regressto accommodate, and even to prefer, less-refined and -earned forms of governance?

We know what such a regression wouldbasically look like: a less abstract, re-personalized form of social and politicalauthority concentrated in a "great"authoritarian leader. On the left, that looks atthe extreme like a brave new world orderthat enforces diversity and radical,undifferentiated egalitarianism from aboveby dint of brainwashing and coercion. Onthe right it looks like an extreme form ofconservative nationalism, the nation definedas white Americans and tolerated non-whites, in which the state provides socialand economic security to the

Volksgemeinschaft while strictly policingboth its literal and figurative borders. In anyevent, neither dispensation can stand toomuch liberalism, and possibly not muchmore democracy either.

We know that a significant decline in asociety's deep literacy can matter because ithas happened before. Thanks in part to therevolutionary impact of the codex, maleliteracy rates in the Roman Republic andthen Empire were probably in the 30% to40% range, at least in urban areas. We evenhave records of slaves knowing how to readand write. After the collapse of the WesternRoman Empire in 476, literacy rates quicklydropped below 5%, and did not regain theirprevious levels until the 16th century at theearliest. Until they did, the advent ofliberalism as we understand the term couldnot happen.

One could argue that American history isreplete with majorities of non-deep-literatepeople in virtually every decade since 1776,and democracy endured and populist surges

were rare. And surely, whatever the recentdecline in deep literacy, more Americans aredeep-literate today than in 1919 or 1819. Butthis overlooks the fact that, at its 1776 birth,independent America probably constitutedthe most mass-literate society in worldhistory, notwithstanding the number ofslaves and indentured servants. Such a highrate of literacy was the consequence of thehighly scripturalist nature of Protestantismand the deeply religious character of mostcolonial-era American settlements.

Furthermore, populist surges were not rare;they merely expressed themselves mostoften in religious culture as GreatAwakenings rather than directly in politics — but the bleed-over from the former to thelatter was hardly trivial. Besides, throughoutmost of American history, politics has beenan elite affair despite its ever-growingegalitarian pretensions. That was true beforethe Jacksonian era, but it was basically truelong thereafter, as well. Most people showeda natural deference to educated folk, and the

further back one goes, the higher thepercentage of educated men (it was mostlymen) who went to divinity school. Protestantscripturalists showed particular reverencefor well-educated clergy, especially in "highchurch" circles.

Literacy rates in 19th-century America,notably female literacy rates, register a nearcontinuous rise, and the correlation withdemocratic participation is arguablypositive. All three major Americanantebellum social movements arose fromthis development: abolition, temperance, andfemale suffrage. But rising literacy rates didnot bring unvarnished blessings because toomuch democracy driven by scantilyeducated people rarely does: It constitutes adistributed mob, potential or extant, more orless of the kind the ancient Greeks warnedagainst. For example, higher rates of literacyand democratic participation in the 1850scorrelate with the brittle, abstract forms of

para-theological, Second Great Awakeningreasoning that infested political discourseand helped bring about the Civil War.

A kind of sine wave seems to run throughAmerican history, with each step-changeupward in literacy associated with a GreatAwakening, and each one rotating around anemotionally evocative and encompassingcentral idea. There was George Whitefield'sAwakening of the 1740s, with its core ideaof God, part rediscovered and part redefinedfrom the days of the Puritan pioneers. Thencame the Second Great Awakening of the1820s through the 1840s — the camp-meeting Awakening associated with CharlesGrandison Finney, Methodist circuit riders,and the rise of the Baptists. The core ideawas the nation, under the aegis of thefurther-redefined, far-more-democraticProtestant God. Then came the Third GreatAwakening, which spanned the 1880sthrough 1910s: the Awakening of theChautauqua movement, William JenningsBryan's Populists, and the Social Gospel.

The core idea was the Whig understandingof progress as annealed in the spreadingIndustrial Revolution.

Now, arguably, we behold a fourth GreatAwakening, which began in the late 1950s — just as the television entered every homeand commenced the draining of Americans'capacity for deep reading — and continuestoday. Its core idea is radical (and sometimesglobal) egalitarianism. It is roiling Americanpolitics with what we conventionally call theculture wars, but it obviously also affects ahost of policy zones, including immigrationand education.

Each successive Awakening wave hasmoved further from viewing church clericalleadership as its explicit font of authority.Each has been more democratizing invarious ways and less deferential toestablished hierarchy. Each has increasinglyinfiltrated and reified political discourse toone degree or another — the moral fervor ofthe Second Great Awakening that helpedproduce the Civil War was preceded by the

moral fervor of the First Great Awakeningthat arguably led to an earlier civil war,which Americans call the RevolutionaryWar. And now, unsurprisingly given thehistory, we live amid a (mostly) cold civilwar.

Put in the idiom of literacy, it could be that,all else being equal, literate people are lessdeferential to authority, and that would makesome contemporary Americans inclined todemand freedom from the state and others todemand equality enforced by the state. Thissounds self-contradictory because it is.Maximum freedom, or liberty, andmaximum equality are in tension. Thanks to"the natural aristocracy of talent and virtue,"as Jefferson put it to Adams, unconstrainedfreedom will produce economic, social, andusually political inequality. Attempts toenforce equality will put a crimp onfreedom. In a sense, the populist, Awakenedenergies in American politics today aretwinned, with populist demands for equalityof outcomes, not just opportunity, coming

from the left, and populist demands forfreedom coming from the right. Thechallenge is to figure out ways to reconcilethese two fundamental demands. But wewill have a difficult time doing that if theprocess is driven more by emotion than bythought — especially at a time when deepreading, and all that flows from it, has goneout of fashion.

CONCRETE THINKING

As it is, we now have greater levels of atleast superficial participation in politicaldiscourse, if not in politics itself, thanks inpart to social-media technologies. Vastnumbers of people contribute scantilysupported opinions about things they don'treally understand, validating the old saw thata little bit of knowledge can be a dangerousthing.

A greater percentage of Americans may bedeep literate in 2019 than in 1819 or 1919,but probably not than in 1949, beforetelevision, the internet, and the iPhone. We

have reached a stage at which manyprofessors dare not assign entire books orlarge parts of moderately challenging onesto undergraduates because they know theywon't read them. And while more Americansare graduating from four-year colleges thanever before, the educational standards ofmany of those institutions, and thedistribution of study away from thehumanities and social sciences, suggest thata concomitant rise in deep literacy has goneunrealized as the degree factories churn.

The decline of deep literacy, combined withthe relative rise in status of the superficiallyeducated, may well be the main food stockfor the illiberal nationalist forms of thecontemporary populist bacillus not just inAmerica, but in much of the world at large.If so, it endows Ortega y Gasset's 1930radio-era observations in The Revolt of theMasses with new import. The common, notparticularly well-educated person, Ortega yGasset argued, has ideas in his head but didnot produce those ideas:

He wishes to have opinions, but isunwilling to accept the conditions andpresuppositions that underlie allopinion....To have an idea meansbelieving one is in possession of thereasons for having it, and consequentlymeans believing that there is such athing as reason, a world of intelligibletruths. To have ideas, to form opinions,is identical with appealing to such anauthority...and therefore believing thatthe highest form of inter-communion isthe dialogue in which the reasons for ourideas are discussed. But the mass-manwould feel himself lost if he accepteddiscussion, and instinctively repudiatesthe obligation of accepting that supremeauthority lying outside himself.

And this, he continued, gave rise to both theright-wing and left-wing extremists of hisday: "The Fascist and Syndicalistspecies...characterized by...a type of manwho did not care to give reasons or even tobe right, but who was simply resolved to

impose his opinions. That was the novelty:the right not to be right, not to bereasonable: ‘the reason of unreason.'"

The very notion of a right not to bereasonable is predicated on a discourse, ifone can even call it that, of untetheredemotion that rules out that mode of activitythat enables reasoning: deep literacy, andwhat follows from it. Indeed, amid all therecent confusion about what populismactually is, the deep-literacy prism in thelight of history can help achieve somedefinitional precision: Populism of theilliberal nationalist kind is what happens in amass-electoral democracy when a decisivepercentage of mobilized voters drops belowa deep-literacy standard.

Perhaps any literacy overshadows deepliteracy in democratic political life. Adultswho haven't read a book since high schooltend to become mobilized to vote forreasons that differ from those of moreliterate voters. This is not a new observation;political scientist Philip Converse wrote of

this phenomenon in 1964, a time whensocial science was just beginning topenetrate the mythology of a "pure"American democracy:

[M]oving from top to bottom of thisinformation dimension, the character ofthe objects that are central in a beliefsystem undergoes systematic change.These objects shift from the remote,generic, and abstract to the increasinglysimple, concrete, or "close to home."Where potential political objects areconcerned, this progression tends to befrom abstract, "ideological" principles tothe more obviously recognizable socialgroupings or charismatic leaders andfinally to such objects of immediateexperience as a family, job, andimmediate associates. Most of thesechanges have been hinted at in one formor another in a variety of sources. Forexample, "limited horizons,""foreshortened time perspectives," and

"concrete thinking" have been singledout as notable characteristics of theideational world of the poorly educated.

Could it be that the masses, referred to byHamilton as a "dreadful monster," arecomposed in the main of "concretethinkers," who think concretely because theylack a facility for, or a habit of, deepreading? After all, deep readers at least mayknow what they don't know, and hence arebetter able to deploy shields of skepticismagainst all forms of advertising, includingthe political kind that enchants populistmobs into being. Those who lack a readinghabit may be locked in perpetual intellectualadolescence, but they can still gather in thestreet, shout, and even shoot. The 16th-century English bishop John Bridges wrotethat a fool and his money are soon parted.He might have said the same about a non-reader and his political agency.

The phenomenon of deep literacy can be apowerful explanatory factor for a range oftheoretical and practical questions. No single

factor explains anything entirely when itcomes to the spiraling universe of social andpolitical life, and it would be a stretch toclaim that any of the above argumentsamounts to a proof. But to omit deep literacyfrom the range of considered variablesseems unwise. We should continue togenerate new and more interesting questionsto pose about deep literacy, and the meaningof its possible erosion, or transformation bynovel means, in our own country andbeyond.

Adam Garfinkle is founding editor of theAmerican Interest.