Democracies depend on reading

Just where on earth are flying cars, wondered American anthropologist David Graeber 12 years ago. Like all of us who grew up in the 1960s watching The Flintstones, he believed that flying cars would become part of our adult life by the year 2000. But instead, he lamented, 60 years later, we have technologies that can simulate reality but have no direct impact on the quality of our daily lives: we may indeed be able to fly around in space in video games, but at least in the West, a world is emerging in which after decades of technology-driven economic progress, today’s children are worse off than their parents. The technology has just gone in the wrong direction, he writes, and our childhood dreams have gone south.

But Graeber failed to see that some tools that simulate reality are an even greater miracle than flying cars. Smartphones have compressed all the communication devices of the 20th century – typewriters, cameras, telephones, books, magazines and newspapers, televisions, radios, record players and tape recorders – into a single, universal communication device, smaller than a pocketbook. What’s more, with the right subscriptions and access to the internet, I can use this device to access all the knowledge of this world, no matter where I live.

Yet Graeber is right that many people are using these brilliant new technologies only for trivial things: they yammer, cavort, buy and sell goods, bully each other, get a glimpse of others’ lives and happily expose themselves. In doing so, they entangle themselves in the webs that the czars of global online empires have woven to capture and market their attention.

This new media reality corelates with political regression. Namely, those who believed in the early 1990s that personal computers and the internet would become tools of global democracy were foolishly naive: fewer people live in democracies today than they did before the end of the Cold War and the invention of the internet.1 If we had a time machine (another great technology from my childhood dreams that failed to emerge!) and somebody were to teleport me from the early 1990s to the early 2020s, I would not have believed my eyes: the populisms that back then roared across my Yugoslavian homeland, which we falsely believed could emerge only in peripheral, cultural and political backwaters, are now sweeping through countries that back then we believed to be robust democracies, such as the US or Italy. Even worse, it seems likely that France, the Netherlands, Germany and even some Scandinavian countries might follow suit.

But what has caused this civilizational slump? Indeed, how did this happen in times when every human being has unlimited access to knowledge and information, a situation which, technically speaking, creates optimal conditions for the development of democracy?

I have no illusions that this question can be answered in a relatively short article. I would just like to point out a marginal yet important fact: for all the glamour of screen technologies, we are also being dragged into this social, political and cultural mess because we are, as a society, giving up reading longer and complex texts. I will illustrate this point through a brief overview of the history of information tools, which will show that humans have grown socially and culturally in close interplay with the technologies that they have made, but that there is an information device – the book, or more precisely, the long, complex text – that most effectively supports the development of abstract and analytical thinking. Without this ability, there is no democracy and no science – and bias, prejudices and conspiracy theories win.

Exponential evolution

Let’s start at point zero. The ancestors of humans learned to use simple tools a few million years ago. This in itself didn’t set them apart from some other animal species: New Caledonian crows are able to fashion multi-part tools from grass and wood to enhance their dexterity, and some apes and monkeys can crack food open with rocks. The function of these proto-tools was simple: they enhanced the physical strength and precision of the creatures using them. Because these tools were simple, the knowledge of how to use them was passed down from generation to generation through observation and practice.

Then, about half a million years ago, something miraculous happened: Hominins upgraded their tool-making abilities and started to make symmetrical axes. At the same time, their brains got bigger. What made these tools different from previous, simpler ones, was that the knowledge of how to make them could only be learned through verbal communication that included – let’s use modern jargon – technical instructions on how to work on a stone in order to make it sharp and symmetrical. Around the same time, humans learned to use fire for cooking, hunting and staying warm, and this too would not have been possible without verbal communication.2 Instead of communicating by tweets, chirps and roars like other animal species, humans developed speech, using words that had clear-cut meanings.

We don’t know why the enlargement of the brain, the leap from simple to complex tools and from roars and tweets to speech, happened only in humans. It is undoubtedly one of the greatest miracles in human evolution. The hypothesis that this happened due to dramatic climatic changes in the Pleistocene, to which humans adapted behaviourally because genetic changes were taking place too slowly,3 describes this evolution in some more detail, but does not explain its causes. We therefore leave the origination of this miracle aside: this big known unknown awaits its Darwin or Freud to decipher it. What is important for our purposes is the observation that from the very beginning, the evolution of speech in humans has been closely linked to the evolution of tools. Let us hazard the hypothesis that we became speaking creatures by making tools which, through a feedback loop that we do not yet understand, have shaped our cognitive abilities in a way that facilitated the refinement of our vocal communication. The tools we made also made us.

Then, about 100,000 years ago, another miracle happened: out of speech and tools, a symbolic culture evolved. First, people began to decorate objects with ornaments, and then, around 70,000 years ago, cave paintings appeared. As with the origin of speech, we do not know why this happened. What matters for our line of thought is that through cave paintings, humans created abstract messages that testified to their existence even in their absence or after their death. This was another huge evolutionary leap, as face-to-face proximity was no longer necessary for relatively complex communication. This makes cave paintings the first information tools to allow people to share information and stories beyond the constraints of time and space. Thanks to this new communication ability, humans become capable for the first time in history of forming and sharing information in communities larger than the small bands in which they had lived before.

From here on, the evolution of humans and of their information tools became fast and furious. Just over 70,000 years passed between the first cave paintings and the emergence of writing. Then, some 7,000 years after the invention of writing, humans started to reproduce texts mechanically by printing. About 400 years later, they figured out how to mechanically reproduce sound and images. A hundred years or so after that came personal computers and the internet, and then, in only 30 years, artificial intelligence became part of everyday life.

In parallel, knowledge storage devices have become more and more efficient. Ancient scrolls could store more text than clay tablets, a codex more than a scroll, and a cloud server more than any library of printed books. The price of such devices has also been falling: whereas in Gutenberg’s time a copy of a printed Bible cost as much as a house in Mainz,4 today a printed book costs as much as a cheap lunch. Computers and smartphones (computers in pocket format) are relatively expensive (although cheap in comparison to a house!), but when one considers their communication possibilities and the volume of information one can access with them, their cost becomes negligible.

In short, throughout history, access to information became increasingly easy and the amount of accessible information has grown exponentially. If ancient and medieval scholars had to make pilgrimages from library to library to access all the important works of their time, the basic concept of the Library of Alexandria – to gather all knowledge in one place – become the concept of university libraries from the 18th century onwards. Unlike medieval scholars, my ancestors, who were the first in the family to get a university education some 120 years ago, had to leave the Slovenian backwaters for a large European metropolis in order to access knowledge, usually Vienna, but sometimes also Prague or Paris. There, most of the knowledge they needed for their study was available to them in the university library; even more, without needing to crisscross Europe, they could meet people there who helped them to learn and were willing to share their knowledge.

For me, access to knowledge is even easier: with a laptop and the help of the internet, I can, at least in theory, access (almost) all the knowledge in this world from anywhere, at zero variable cost, through my academic identity. On top of that, I can communicate with anyone who uses the internet and computers. My new best friends, ChatGPT and Deepl, have helped me to overcome language barriers and analyze data in ways I could not dream of a decade ago.

The cognitive exoskeleton

The history of humanity is therefore also the history of ever cheaper and more efficient information tools; tools that store our rapidly expanding knowledge outside human heads. Additionally, these tools enable a fast-growing number of people to participate in the creation and consumption of this knowledge and information, regardless of geographic and cultural constraints. For the purposes of this text, we will refer to all these information tools as a cognitive exoskeleton.

As this exoskeleton has grown, along with the number of its users, human knowledge has grown exponentially, as have other technologies that have drastically pushed us beyond our bodily limitations and enabled us to adapt nature to our purposes. Just 3,000 years after the introduction of the alphabet, we are venturing into space and can produce enough food to feed 30 times more people than we could 1,000 years ago.

But the growth of the cognitive exoskeleton does not guarantee human betterment per se: as well as spreading knowledge, it can also be used to create and spread stupidity, bias and prejudice. By doing this, the cognitive exoskeleton can even become self-destructive. Think of how antiquity imploded into the Dark Ages, and how liberal Europe at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, like a continent of sleepwalkers, marched into World War I, resulting in a death toll unprecedented in history. The coming of the printing press in the 15th century not only accelerated the development of science and culture, but also made possible witch-hunts, the first example of pan-European mass hysteria based on a conspiracy theory, with a death toll that ran into the thousands. Later, in the 17th century, the printing press made possible Europe’s first real ideological/religious war, with devastating consequences, and 200 years later, audio-visual media, in combination with economic and social crisis, became the main propaganda tool of Nazism, fascism and Bolshevism. The death toll from these information tool-enhanced ideologies and populisms runs into the tens of millions.

Today, it seems, we are trapped in a similar duality. On one hand, we are capable of investigating the very beginnings of the universe with space telescopes; we are unravelling the human genome and tinkering with quantum mechanics. On the other hand, some of us, with their beliefs that the Earth is flat and the world is controlled by secret societies, are mentally stuck in the early Middle Ages. Even more alarmingly, the denial of climate change may render us incapable of facing environmental challenges, which even our ancestors in the Pleistocene were able to adapt to successfully. In politics, a set of newly bred political populists, imbued with religious fundamentalism, are embroiling the world in bloody wars (I am referring here to Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin and many others, all of whom seem to have taken classes in Slobodan Milosevic’s elementary school of populism), as if nothing was learned from the collapse of Yugoslavia.

All this indicates that, regardless of the immense growth of the cognitive exoskeleton, humans still do not understand how their societies work and why they feel and think the way they do. The cognitive exoskeleton is both a device of wisdom and a tool of madness.

But what is the source of this duality? Let’s hazard two hypotheses. First, the ways in which people expressed their thoughts and feelings changed alongside the invention of new information technologies. As the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli has shown, alphabetic writing became the metaphor that Democritus used to formulate his theory of the existence of atoms. Words for many colours – which, with their symbolic meanings, are also information tools – only appeared in antiquity when people developed the technology to produce them, which gave rise to a whole new set of ways of expressing emotions: suddenly, sorrow was black, wisdom was blue and purity white.5 Without the library as a metaphor, it would have been difficult to formulate the theory of the human genome. More recently, the electrical circuit has become a metaphor for the workings of the brain’s neurons6 and the interface a metaphor for how human perception and consciousness work,7 while Wikipedia and YouTube have become metaphors for describing the workings of memory.8 Just recently, the Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Harari explained the difference between democracy and totalitarianism in terms of the workings of information networks.

Additionally, at least for the last 500 years, there has been a fairly clear correlation between the invention of new information technologies, the growth of knowledge and changes in human self-perception. If the invention of the printing press led to the knowledge that the Earth is not at the centre of the universe, the invention of the industrial printing press that doubled the production of printed materials and lowered prices of printing, coincided with the knowledge that humans are not God’s masterpiece, but the result of evolution, with monkeys as our closest relatives; and last but not least, the invention of electricity and audio visual communication tools coincided with discovery that we are not (only) masters of our thoughts, but (often) pawns of unconsciousness and of social forces that shape our thoughts and feelings. I believe it will be possible to empirically test this correlation hypothesis (and look for possible causality in it) relatively soon, thanks to the digitization of textual heritage and with the help of artificial intelligence. This bursts of growth of knowledge, together with changes in vocabulary, places a question mark over established beliefs and values. Consequently, the development of new information tools, with all the related changes, could be radically disruptive.

But – and this is our second hypothesis – new information technologies historically only took hold if they occurred in appropriate – let’s call them ‘change-prone’ – circumstances. The ancient Greeks, for example, knew how to make simple analogue computers, but knowledge about this disappeared because such devices were not a daily necessity in their societies in the time when they were invented.9 On the contrary, printing virtually exploded in the 15th century because the newly emerging market economy, with its decentralized nature, provided an ideal environment for its development, while at the same time the newly established modes of production and trade required more literate people, thus forming a market for printed products. Similarly, the development of audio-visual media coincided with – and simultaneously accelerated – the rise of the first wave of economic and cultural globalization that took place at the turn of the 20th century.

What’s more, as already mentioned, each step in the development of the cognitive exoskeleton increased the number of entry points into it, and thus enlarged the number of people that could be heard and wanted to be heard; the histories of printing, publishing and librarianship, of radio, television, telephone and telegraph, and finally, of the World Wide Web, testify to this. This growing cacophony of voices – think of the growing number of tabloid readers in the 1800s or social media users in the 21st century – is another moment that disrupts established political, economic and social relations.

Such simultaneousness of transformative social and economic circumstances, of media (r)evolutions and related vocabulary and identity changes, is rare. Yet it happens, and when it happens, there is a lot of rock and roll: all that is solid starts to melt into thin air, and what is sacred becomes profane, as a wise man observed about this kind of circumstances almost two centuries ago. In such complex, bumpy and jumpy times, it is only natural that many humans resort to simplistic answers (It’s all the witches’ fault! It’s all the Jews’ fault! It’s all the class enemies’ fault!), and populist merchants selling quick fixes start to thrive.

Yet seeking refuge in simplistic answers is not the only way to deal with such stressful disruptions and complex changes. There is another, democratic response to such challenges, and it is closely linked to reading books.

Training for analytical thinking

It is human nature that we think and communicate in different, often wordless ways; without words, however, our ability to communicate is radically reduced. From here on, the rationale about the importance of reading is relatively simple: the more words I master, and the more I am able to articulate my thoughts and feelings in complex sentences, the more complex issues I can discuss with my fellow humans, and the more complex and productive are my interactions with the cognitive exoskeleton. Consequently, the less likely I become prone to simplistic answers, permeated with bias and prejudice. Because no other medium contains as many different words and complex sentences as longform linear texts, reading books – fiction and non-fiction alike – is the best training for developing such cognitive abilities.

And when it comes to fiction, no other medium invites us in such a compelling way to empathize – or mentally polemicize – with people who are different from us; when we read, we have to recreate the dynamics of the story, we need to visualize the characters and recreate their emotional relationships in our minds, whereas in films and TV series, all this is served to us on a platter. In addition, the pace of narration is decided by director of the film (or by the narrator in an audiobook), which leaves us less space for contemplation. When reading a book, however, we choose our own pace and when (and for how long) to allow our mind to wander or to contemplate what we have read. In addition, visual and audio media fix our attention with new visual and audio stimuli, whereas when reading, everything that happens unfolds in our minds. All this requires a deeper way of focusing and more self-discipline than audio and visual media.

In other words, their properties make longer texts the segment of the cognitive exoskeleton that most effectively trains us to develop a broad vocabulary, analytical thinking and focus, invites us to engage in self-discipline, self-questioning and perspective-taking, and helps us internalize rules of logic, thereby enhancing the ability to express ourselves. This is what the authors of the Ljubljana Manifesto have described as higher-level reading.

However, not all books are good in themselves. We need only to look at sociopaths like Hitler, Stalin and Mao, who masterfully enclosed the societies in which they lived in a huge single mental bubble full of conspiracies, hatred and prejudice. All three of them were authors and readers, as well as masterminds of simplistic answers. Yet they understood the subversive potential of higher-level reading, as they expelled, through state censorship, all information, texts and views that called into question the consistency of their ideological universe. Reading at a higher level can therefore only exist where it is possible to move between different systems of thought. Higher-level reading and democracy are birds of the same feather.

So, no need for despair: if we accept as legitimate the claims that the rise of populism makes our times comparable to the 1930s, it is right there that we can find at least part of the recipe for a solution. Namely, Nazism, Stalinism and fascism were not the only possible answers to the social, economic, cultural and media crisis of the time. There was also the democratic answer, invented in the US and called the New Deal. In addition to the many social measures that would have made Bernie Sanders look like a Republican back then, the authors of the New Deal understood something else: citizens with a democratic mindset are the most effective barrier against the rise of totalitarianism. In short, the basis of democracy is a citizenry that is able to think analytically and values the common good and compromise rather than ‘me first’ political agendas, that succumb to the demagogy of simplistic answers when dealing with new and unknown social and economic issues. Only a sufficiently large critical mass of people with the capacity for analytical and abstract thought and empathy, guarantees that, through dialogue and compromise, we will invent the social, economic and cultural policies that will – in radically changing circumstances – prevent us from being dragged into new forms of witch-hunts. Such skills – and back in the 1930s, Americans understood this too – are only developed in a demanding but accessible education system, and through reading longer, complex texts, which is why investments in education and public libraries also formed part of the New Deal.

In most western societies, we forgot this lesson and accordingly pushed higher-level reading to the cultural margins while reducing its scope in school and university curricula. Such a negative attitude seems even more unreasonable in the age of artificial intelligence. Unlike previous information technologies, which merely increased the size of the cognitive exoskeleton and the number of its users, AI can create new content on its own. In science, for example, AI can shrink years of laboratory work into a few months and look for patterns in vast amounts of data that would be impossible to see with the human brain alone. Consequently, AI holds great promise for new insights and discoveries, both in the natural sciences and in the humanities. But it can also lie in the blink of an eye, without any moral constraints, when it creates textual, audio and visual content. Therefore, AI is also an ideal tool for spreading madness, lies and prejudice. Even worse, AI bots are brilliant at bluffing that they are human when we chat to them.

This ease of producing content and simulating human proximity, together with changes in knowledge and vocabulary, is releasing forces much stronger than were released by previous expansions of the cognitive exoskeleton, eroding the ground beneath our feet. Combined with the global decline of democracy and the widening of social disparities, this puts us at an explosive point in history that begs for simplistic answers. No wonder biases, simplifications, conspiracy theories and prejudices are showing strong and healthy growth.

At the end of the day, I am an optimist and believe that humanity will successfully deal with all these challenges. But I doubt that all cultures will make it: as noted, civilizations come and go, and these days, we live in strange times in which the old dilemma of whether guns or butter come first has evolved into a paradigm in which guns are becoming extremely dangerous without books and books are useless without butter. And the way out of all this might end up being as complex as it was in the 1930s.

This article has been published in collaboration with Razpotja and Wespennest.