The Reading Paradox
The Hemispheres Create Paradoxes. One is Brewing Right Now: We're Reading More Than Ever But Reading Reading Less Than Ever
Thomas Jefferson amassed the largest library in America. Fifteen thousand volumes, according to Paul Johnson.
Books were expensive: expensive to produce and expensive to import from Europe.
Jefferson paid for the books by accumulating massive debt, which he repaid with his slave’s labor and, upon his death, his slave’s bodies: his executor was unable to free the slaves like Jefferson wanted but, instead, had to sell them to pay the debts, in the process breaking up married slaves and their families.
“A literate population is important.”
That premise has soaked into our bones more thoroughly than blood at the grounds of Gettysburg.
It’s so engrained, it’s criminal not to be literate, or at least not to make sure your kids are literate.
But what does literacy gain us?
Very little, if that second face on Mt. Rushmore (reading left to right) is any indication.
Mao Zedong’s Little Red Books is the most printed book in history after the Bible. Uncle Joseph Stalin referred to authors as “engineers of the soul” and justified the Red Army’s mass rapes during WWII by invoking Dostoyevsky. Every reprobate at 4Chan is literate. The comments at social media torture literate teenage girls. AI uses its massive literacy—“large language models”—to threaten an upheaval the likes of which haven’t been seen since my corpulent uncle vomited Cold Duck all over the room on Christmas Eve that one time. America’s most literate man never did free those slaves; he f***** one of them, but that’s not quite the same thing.
Americans are reading more than ever now, and like never before, we’re prompted to read constantly. Words are all around us and text messages, the crack cocaine of literacy, jitter our pockets.
But at the same time, talking heads are ringing alarm bells about the decline of reading. Econtalk alone dedicated two consecutive episodes (link and link) to it last month.
What gives?
It’s the same old: the left hemisphere’s illicit rebellion against the right hemisphere.
The right and left hemispheres of our brains do the same things, even though they attend to the things differently.
And both read.
But they read differently.
The left hemisphere attends to the written word to sift, sort, and stack (15,000 volumes worth). The right hemisphere to ponder, reflect, and absorb.
The left hemisphere is content with being literate. The right hemisphere needs to read. “Being literate” and “being able to read” aren’t the same things.
Literacy rates are at all time high levels, and our left hemispheres are taking in words faster than delegates and VIPs at national political conventions take in cocaine.
Meanwhile, our right hemispheres—sitting there all retarded and shit—aren’t reading.
And now AI is coming for our minds.
That’s why the the alarm bells about the decline of reading are sounding even as we’re reading more than ever.
I’ll be flushing all this out in a series about reading and how to put our right hemispheres back into the driver’s seat at the library.
Link to same essay at Substack
Eric Scheske
