Much to my chagrin, I have never lived in a house with a front porch. But when my family and I moved to Texas last June, we found a house with a glorious one. A few months later, with a little less Texas heat and a couple of Adirondack chairs, I was glued to the spot. The first book that I read there—as slowly as it deserves—was Jeffrey Bilbro’s Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope.
I could not have made a better choice. Bilbro’s book is a careful study through profound literary texts about how we live in a world that has no patience for careful study through profound literary texts. Bilbro shows us where that came from and why that’s a problem.
Words for Conviviality begins by unconcealing a strong parallel between nineteenth-century America and twenty-first century America when it comes to the impact of developing media technologies. Nineteenth-century Americans faced big changes from the rapid growth of printing technologies and literacy. Then, as now, the technology was heralded as liberating—which it was and is. But it also formed and deformed us. Printed texts gave the illusion of a unified nation when it was actually painfully divided. It also lent a mimicry of sacred authority to a wider number of texts, which paradoxically made readers more gullible to cons. “Where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase,” Herman Melville wrote in 1857. Bilbro explains that “under certain conditions, the printing press can indeed help to liberate a populace from wolfish authorities—the monarchy and the papacy are the two paradigmatic examples cited by print’s advocates—but in doing so, it renders people vulnerable to foxy predators, ones that rely on trickery and sleight-of-hand.” If you are thinking about how your mother-in-law gave money to a Nigerian prince who sent her a pleading email, or how your neighbor gets all their news from their “trusted sources” who are funded by the alt-Right, you are getting Bilbro’s point. The problem is not print itself (or email or social media or the internet) but the amplification of it.
The gift of Bilbro’s connection is that it encourages us to return to some very sophisticated and prophetic nineteenth-century writers who identified these problems first. Melville’s Confidence-Man, from which the quotation about wolves and foxes was taken, reveals how printed technologies lure us away from thick interpersonal relationships and toward the necessarily weaker bonds fostered through print media. Bilbro rightly notes that technology per se is not the main problem; we have always been in danger of becoming poor readers of texts and contexts. Print (and now, social media), which necessarily feeds us the Pop-Tarts we want instead of the bread we need, just makes it easier for us to operate within echo chambers without being challenged by different points of view.
This is why Herman Melville might be more important to read now than ever. He devoted all his work to uncovering America’s naïve optimism and our native self-righteousness. If Moby-Dick is too much of a challenge for you, try the short story “Benito Cereno” and you’ll see why it’s so easy to be a bad reader. Americans trust our quick judgments of appearances (the world is black and white) over deeper and more inscrutable realities (the world has an awful lot of gray in it). When this trust in our quick judgment is coupled with the tendency to treat texts—especially the Constitution—as sacred and self-evident in meaning, you can see why we are where we are today.
All this to say that twenty-first century media technologies, with their relentlessly exploitative algorithms, are the same song, second verse. The difference is that the tempo has sped way up. We’re living the part of Lou Reed’s song “Heroin” when the drug hits the speaker’s nervous system, except that our addiction is the dopamine that is always at our fingertips, a quick click away. Amped up this way, our discourse cannot but degenerate into soundbites and trolling. Anxiety and despair are inevitable. What can we do to converse together more convivially?
The primary solution, argues Bilbro, is awareness of the problem. We need to recognize that our current crisis of authority is paradoxically wedded to a (largely Protestant-born) predisposition to seeing texts as more reliable and authoritative than institutions. “Understanding how a previous era was shaped—and in some ways warped—by the assumptions that industrial print technology engendered may enable us to recognize more clearly how our own verbal habits and practices are formed and deformed by our enmeshment in digital technologies.” Bilbro’s book helped me to understand the paradox that as readers of culture we are both more critical and more gullible to exploitation than ever before. In a mass culture, the question of who to trust is paramount.
Thus it makes perfect sense that we trust our tribal communities to tell us the truth about things we cannot possibly know firsthand. But with digital technologies especially, those communities are no longer local. They are instead held together by evolving, diffuse, and often even anonymous bonds. Furthermore, those communities often have ideological agendas of their own that are antithetical to discovering truth. We are thus lulled into forgetting what my beloved high school English teacher seared into my brain: “paper doesn’t refuse ink.” We like to think we aren’t so gullible, but we really are. In the words of someone I love: “I know that chem trails are real because I read it on the internet.”
One of Bilbro’s most important arguments is that to identify the problem accurately, we must understand that metaphors absolutely dictate the way we think—and that their power to do so is largely concealed. For example, our culture’s metaphorical equation of the human mind to a computer is the most depersonalizing force of our age. The metaphor that rules our reading practices is the same: mind as information-processing computer. (We will never figure out how to use AI wisely until we recognize that reading and writing cannot be reduced to this—but that’s a topic for another day.) Consider how our digital culture has deformed us to view all reading as either product-oriented data gathering or entertainment. Bilbro writes that reading has become “a technique aimed to derive an individual benefit” rather than a “mode of participating in a community oriented toward understanding and practicing truth.” If you cannot recognize how encompassing of a change this is, perform an audit of your own reading for a week. Do you skim texts on your phone more often and for more total hours than you read an actual book? Do you read literary fiction? When was the last time you read poetry, the genre that is most committed to language as a challenge to received ways of seeing the world? Have you had a serious conversation with anyone through a book recently? When was the last time that a book changed your mind about something? Even those of us who are dedicated to the written word and can say that books have shaped us may find that we’ve slid into bad reading habits more frequently than we realize.
Thankfully the nineteenth-century writers who identified these problems can also help us imagine a different way forward. The rest of Bilbro’s book beautifully unpacks how. Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Thoreau, Fuller, and many others provide much-needed alternative metaphors for reading, thinking, writing, conversing, and inhabiting time well—all of which are wrapped together, and none can be rushed.
In my view, chief among these writers is Thoreau, whose Walden is a book that most Americans have no patience for. Bilbro honors this book by recognizing Thoreau as intentional provocateur. Walden’s poetic and often meandering prose forces us out of our usual ruts, even as he makes the argument that we must. You can’t read it while sleep scrolling, and that’s the point. We should approach reading, writes Thoreau, like athletes approach training. “To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.” How many of us read this way—even those of us who read and write for a living? No wonder that Thoreau predicted the thinness of our mediated gatherings when he wrote that “society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.” These days we have more “gatherings” than ever, and even mustier cheese.
I love Words for Conviviality because it does what all humanistic scholarship should do: it reminds us of why liberal education is indispensable for human beings. It gives me hope. This book stirred my deep admiration for colleagues who are sweating it out at this very moment in classrooms all over the country with undergraduates who think they hate Thoreau, Melville, Henry James, and all the other writers who make them work too hard for their riches. If you are one of those educators, thank you. And if you happen to be one of those undergraduates who finally learned that your soul needs these riches, please write today to that professor who patiently opened new possibilities for your life. It’s hard work, and they need your convivial words.
Image Via: Wikimedia Commons
