Before the printing press, only a small, literate elite, largely confined to the Church, had access to books, ideas and learning. The power of the Church was rooted in its exclusive access to scriptures and through them to the word of God. This gave the clergy unrivalled control over the people’s minds. The printing and distribution of books unleashed a voracious appetite for literacy and disseminated ideas across national and cultural boundaries on a scale that was previously unimaginable.
Sir Ken Robinson – Out of Our Minds
The most significant reading insight of 2022 (war in Ukraine, social unrest, elections, conspiracies) is the perils of trying to access “unrivalled control over the people’s minds” through disruptive articles, books, or social media posts where untruths or half-truths are presented as truth. I wrote more about disinformation in my article How to Counteract Disinformation.
Another insight about reading is the magic quality of books, as remarked by the fantastic science communicator and astronomer Carl Sagan. In the eleventh episode of the tv series Cosmos, written and produced by Sagan, he says:
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.