A book of whatever kind and in whatever physical form is a thing, a mere material object; yet it is not just a thing. A book presupposes an ensemble of interwoven recursive processes embedded in human culture that turns out to be both interestingly intricate and of vast socio-cultural importance.

For thousands of years now, books have been rumbling through the collective life of humanity in ways too numerous even to list in a mere essay. Suffice it to say that in their capacious diversity and various physical-technical forms, from scroll to codex and now to e-screens, they have reshaped human self-consciousness, socio-economic orders, and political life along with them. This has happened because deep literacy, the verb-like dialectical process that begs books into existence to be read and to call forth the great historical waves they create, has reformulated the circuitry of the human brain itself.¹ The epigenetic revolution in the brain, set within the very mind of the species, touched off a generative engine of cultural transformation of which books are justifiably the preeminent symbol as both the products of this revolution and subsequent contributors to its path and power.

Of course, not all reading is deep reading and not all deep reading involves books. Reading lists, menus, and street signs – anything without the need for verbs – is not deep reading. Reading serious essays qualifies as deep reading, but even essays collected into book-size magazines are mere piers compared to books that form true bridges between writer and reader. Henry Kissinger quoted me in his final book, pulling out of a 2020 essay the essence of that bridging process: engagement with ‘an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author’s direction and meaning’ by bringing to bear one’s own resources to the silent, physically distanced, task to hand.²

In essence, Kissinger shrewdly used a mere essay to argue the case for a book’s superior status as a deeply written form. An earlier observation held that the discipline of wrapping one’s mind around an extended argument with evidence marshaled in support is essential to developing a capacity for critical analytical thought:

Kissinger would have added, had he been asked, that the same goes for the discipline required to write an extended argument with evidence marshaled in support. Obviously, if the benign habits of deep reading deteriorate, the necessary habits that go into effective expository writing will, too. I am also sure that Kissinger would have agreed with Pablo Picasso on a least one point: ‘Computers are useless’, Picasso said, ‘All they can do is provide answers.’ They both knew that books do not just provide answers; more important by far is that they incubate good questions, without which answers are, indeed, mostly useless.

The inherent recursivity of everything having to do with books is key to what they are and do. When any reader reads any book, he finishes the work started by the author, rendering books into transitive dialogic jewels that unite writer and reader in an unnatural but wondrously fertile trans-temporal dialectical relationship. Only with books could humans experience the possibilities of coherent intergenerational conversations as well as intercontinental ones. With books, we disembodied language from the limits set by face-to-face orality, an act that itself presupposed an advancing facility for abstract reasoning. With our newer, more plastic brain circuitry built up over the past six millennia we have thus achieved things our preliterate forbears could not even imagine. Far more than by discovery travel, far-flung conquest and trade, it is through books that we have in effect integrated the experience of the species both horizontally in space and vertically in time.

If we turn the scope around and look inward rather than outward, we find that deep literacy has also shaped our self-consciousness, bequeathing our sense of adult interiority. This is what David Riesman meant when he observed in The Lonely Crowd (1950), ‘To be alone with a book is to be alone in a new way.’ It is, too, what Marcel Proust earlier pointed to in On Reading (1905) when he described it as ‘that fertile miracle of communication that takes place in the middle of solitude.’

But we are not exactly alone when we deep read, particularly when we read a novel. We are together with the author, and particularly with the author’s characters, so long as the reading engrosses us, as it may do, William James taught us, ‘whilst it is attended to’. When we read in a novel of, say, a desperate woman on horseback galloping through the countryside on a moonless night, we not only grasp the literal, lexical content of the story, but our affect erupts as our adrenalin motors kick in to raise our pulse and rate of respiration toward the levels we imagine our intrepid heroine is experiencing. How do we do that? How does an imaginative tale invented far away and long ago by someone we never laid eyes on, taken into our heads via mere inky symbols printed on a page, manage to hijack our limbic and endocrine systems?

We have asked a good question, so now we will answer it. It is a neuro-cognitive fact that when we read, we use our visual sense, and especially so when, most commonly, we read silently. We see the words on the page or on a screen (though reading on a screen is not the same as reading on a printed page⁴), but what we see is a progression of arbitrary man-made symbols whose basic purpose is to capture oral language. Reading is thus a unique hybrid of our visual and auditory senses, and that hybridization is recognizable to cognitive scientists as our brains activate in a more integrated way when we read than when we just look at something other than written language or just listen to language. That is how we can read about sounds not ever actually made, and have them nevertheless affect our motor functions as if we had just heard them.

Reading – and reading includes deciphering musical notation as well as ‘soundless’ mathematical symbols and schematic drawings like those used to assist architects and electrical engineers – is thus a super-stimulus to an integrated consciousness. Reading even a single word is, as Ezequiel Morsella put it, ‘no trivial process… [A] single written word can reliably and insuppressibly activate two different kinds of mental representations (one based on vision, one on audition), involving different brain areas and yielding two separate conscious contents, each of which is activated insuppressibly.’⁵

Deep reading, in particular, integrates the brain, driving its remarkable six-layer cytoarchitecture to its fullest functionality like nothing else we do. It does so for the individual brain, the social brain, and likely the species’ brain over time as filtered through cultural filtering and adaptations. The epigenetic revolution in the brain that produced mass literacy has thus supercharged our journey, as phenomenologists have put it, as a self-completing, or autogenic, species. ‘Social life takes up and freezes into itself the conceptions we have of it’, wrote Erving Goffman. Clearly, the reservoir of conceptions at our disposal to take up and freeze has been expanded by orders of magnitude by literacy, by books.

Even in a mere essay, it is easy to illustrate Kissinger’s argument about the superior benefits of a book. For example, reading books certainly does exercise our capacity for self-discipline, patience, and attentional focus. It also builds our sense of sequentiality and so enables us to form timelines of a concrete past, the better to plan imaginatively and creatively into the future, both as individuals and in cooperation with others.

Reading books also broadens our theory of mind and expands our capacity for empathy. That is why a literate culture possesses a potential for human cooperation in ways closed to a pre-, non-, or lapsed-literate culture. Indeed, without deep literacy, and the books produced by the process of intergenerational communication through literacy, we cannot conceive any abstract concept of history, so can learn nothing from our past to succor our future. Without books we cannot sustain schools, libraries, archives, or any of the cultural artifacts through which we preserve and expand knowledge in science or the humanities. Without literacy and a sustained life of learning we do not readily develop, understand, or deploy abstractions at all: so not only can there be no history without books, there can be no concept of humanity.

Reading also affects the nature and capacity of memory and thus shapes identity; as already suggested, deep literacy is the font of our mature sense of interiority. How so?

Oral communication unites people in groups whereas writing and reading, as Walter Ong put it, ‘throw the psyche back on itself’ and as such cultivate individuality^.6 Literacy provides a mediated, back-reflected image of the self in that person’s own consciousness, such that the person becomes simultaneously subject and object. Reading and writing thus together create a kind of mirror that enables each person to see him or herself closely, carefully, more or less at will, and at whatever speed may be desired. Self-reflection enabled by indwelling in the pages of a book led to the portal of a deeper philosophical awareness. It is how we acquired and still acquire greater texture and nuance in our theory of mind.

Without this nurturing of individuality we could not have achieved modernity, the core of which is the elevation of individual over communal agency. Without that, classical liberalism, or democracy, or their joining together into liberal democracy, could not have arisen. Without books and the literate mass culture they enable, neither can we sustain governmental institutions in harmony with human reason. Why? Because the logical syntax of orality differs from that of literacy.

Orality privileges emotion compared to written forms of communication, so only in a writing-based political culture, a book-centric culture, can protection against demagoguery, conspiracy-theory peddling, and regression toward authoritarianism and tyranny be reasonably assured. Remember, too: it was mainly books in the form of samizdat that kept the light of liberty alive during the totalitarian nightmare that enshrouded Eastern Europe, and Russia itself, for more than half a century. That is not, as the Marxists used to say, a coincidence.

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