Could a decline in reading habits be leading to a regression to an “oral culture?” Could we be losing the critical thinking essential for liberal democracy? Levitz takes a rational, academic approach to these questions, considering the complexities of media evolution and its multifaceted impact on society.
Writing isolated ideas from social context — or, in Ong’s words, “the arena where human beings struggle with one another” — thereby enabling the reader to evaluate claims more impartially, in the privacy of her own mind. And when readers did this, text encouraged them to prize logical coherence: Writing inherently promotes sequential reasoning because it is processed linearly, as the eye moves across the page.
By facilitating such introspection, literacy heightened self-consciousness, laying the foundation for individualism. And by encouraging abstract, systemic thinking — and enabling ideas to disseminate widely across space and time — writing spurred the development of universalistic worldviews, in which general rules, rights, and moral precepts apply to all peoples or contexts. Taken together, these features of writing made the advent of science and liberal democracy possible.
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