Engagement.

George Will on what we lost when we stopped reading ...

Modernity’s greatest blessing — individualism: the celebration of individual agency — depends on a sense of one’s interior, of self-consciousness. This is facilitated by deep literacy that, unlike the oral communication of premodern groups, requires solitude for the reader’s private repose. Modernity, and eventually democracy, advanced through Protestantism’s emphasis of individual engagement with writing — the Bible made accessible to personal reading in various languages.

Integral to liberal-democratic politics are, Garfinkle says, abstract ideas — “representation; the virtues of doubt, dissent, and humility; and the concept of a depersonalized constitutional order.” A society that loses the ballast of deep literacy is apt to become less thoughtful, more emotional and volatile. It will become impatient with the pace of refined, impersonal governance through institutions. It will seek “a less abstract, re-personalized form of social and political authority concentrated in a ‘great’ authoritarian leader.”

Deep literacy has always been a minority taste and attainment, but is always necessary, especially among elites, to leaven majoritarian politics. But because of today’s social media technologies, Garfinkle believes, there is increased, if superficial and emotive, participation in political discourse.

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