It frustrates many parents. The kid is off in a corner, head down, hunched over, totally absorbed in what he or she is staring at, oblivious to anyone who may be speaking, totally uninterested in going out to play with other children or even to get some fresh air, and likely to stay withdrawn that way for hours. Then there are the nights the kid spends doing the same secretly under the bed covers (as if you didn’t know), escaping into some other reality.
The addiction is, of course, to books.
Many of us remember being told to get our noses out of the books, to go outside and play, to turn the light off at night, and to hand over contraband reading.
That reading should be so absorbing and satisfying is paradoxical given how totally unnatural it is. Its artificiality is relevant to the long and wide debate over “human nature.” The specter of “Natural Man” [sic] has strode powerfully through American intellectual and public thought since at least the mid-19th century when Darwinism challenged the biblical model of Man as Adam. The ape-who-stood-up image remains perhaps stronger today than ever. It is not just the popularity of fads like the Pleistocene diet and herbal remedies, but more powerfully the idea that we can best understand 21st-century human beings by looking back to the moment when homo sapiens emerged from the forests. It is their Pleistocene brains that we are born with and with which we must confront modern times.
But those early humans did not read. And we do.
The brains of the first humans in what evolutionary psychologists call the “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness”–the Pleistocene from about 2,000,000 BCE to about 10,000 BCE–are presumably the brains we have today. Natural selection so many eons ago gave us, the argument goes, very specific, wired instincts–from language structure to an understanding of cause and effect to specific kinds of sexual attraction to innate fear of snakes.
Ignoring or tinkering with these evolved predilections–be it in diet, sleep, gender relations, child-rearing, power, aggression, or just about anything–supposedly invites problems. Eating refined sugar, which never existed in the “EEA,” ruins our guts. Similarly, fiddling with presumably evolved psychological or social patterns–say, by altering the roles of men and women–is to risk ruining families and society.
But then, there is reading.
Unlike eating, sleeping, sex, and other animal activities we enjoy, reading (and coming to enjoy reading) requires strenuous training over many years. Young humans are taken from their parents for several hundred hours for each of several years at the cost of trillions of dollars to be forcibly molded into readers. (This does not even count the extracurricular time and money devoted to the same task, all those hours watching Sesame Street, all those enrichment activities.) Training humans to read actually changes the physical structure of their brains.[1] It is that much unnatural.
You are reading now. And you have read most of your life. You have read books, pages, paragraphs, even short sentences that have provoked you to be amused, bewildered, concerned, depressed, exhilarated, furious, generous, hot, inspired, joyous, kvetchy, lachrymose, mobilized, narcoticized, optimistic, pessimistic, quiescent, religious, skeptical, timorous, unhinged, vexed, worried, xenophobic, yearning, and zzz’ed out. Reading entails looking at tiny designs and through them virtually seeing the material world–say, a dog lying on a rug–and apprehending total abstractions– say, the “Big Bang.” We react viscerally to the imagined world reading creates. Reading is that much a part of our lives and yet is not a part of essential “human nature.”
Reading is unnatural in the sense that Pleistocene people did not do it; no one did it until about 5,000 years ago. Unnatural in the sense that there is no pre-human analog; primates can be trained to respond to signs, but that is not reading. Unnatural in the sense that it is not clear that better reading skills–unlike, say, better hunting skills–led to greater reproductive success; indeed, in contemporary society, effective readers have lower reproductive rates than poor readers. Unnatural in the sense that there is tremendous historical and cultural variation across the species in what is read, from hieroglyphics to symbols evoking sounds, or in whether reading exists at all. Unnatural in the sense of the amount of artifice it takes to make us read, to learn what those scratches mean and that “the cat in the hat” is not the same as “the hat in the cat.” Unnatural, then, in not fitting well with explanations of human action based on genetic evolution. (But fitting well with new ideas in cultural evolution.[2])
This thoroughly unnatural activity is also central to modern society–to its management and functioning–and to modern competition for success. From competitors’ early childhoods to adulthoods, modern societies largely select economic winners based on reading ability and its consequences. (There are other routes to success, for sure, like athleticism, beauty, and especially having rich parents, but they are exceptions.) Those who read poorly usually end up poorly.
There was an era in American intellectual thought, roughly between the turn-of-the-twentieth-century fascination with Social Darwinism and eugenics and the late-twentieth-century rise of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology (E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, etc.) in the mid-20th century, when the upper hand was held by those with a more cultural than biological understanding of the species, scholars who stressed the variability of human arrangements (Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, Clifford Geertz, etc.), scholars for whom the notion that a totally unnatural activity could emerge and evolve through human learning seems obvious.
If the intellectual wheel turns again in favor of that latter view, you’ll know about it because you’ll read about it.
NOTES
[1] See, for example, Wolf, Proust and the Squid; Dehaene, et al., “How Learning to Read Changes the Cortical Networks,” Science, 2010; Hutton, et al., “Home Reading Environment and Brain Activation,” Pediatrics, 2015; Ritchie, et al, “Does Learning to Read Improve Intelligence?,” Child Development, 2015.
[2] E.g., Heyes, Cognitive Gadgets.
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