Why I read books and yet illiterate

In an age of digital technology that controls our daily existence — mutual communication and human relationships by Facebook, Twitter, and above all massive electronically-manipulated messaging by sophisticated telephones and other digital means — someone like me with a doctorate from an Ivy League university in the US is utterly and absolutely illiterate in the said field. And this illiteracy is by choice — completely self-imposed. It is not because of any mental-psychological impediment or intellectual disability. In fact, I tend to enjoy my ignorance of the subject and the non-practice of it. The truth is that there is implicit uncomplicatedness and simplicity in not being involved with digital communication; it is this personal innocence that I cherish.

My philosophical and conceptual view on the subject is that I do not wish to snap myself away from the intimate community experiences that I have grown up with, known and encountered. I have no desire to lose myself in this digital chimera that replaces intimate human relationships with an addiction for a vast global network of auxiliary acquaintances that exist only in an abstract sense through Facebook, Twitter and other digital interconnectedness without phenomenological and contemplative reality.

My questions to everyone are: Where is the meaningfulness in these digitally-designed and fabricated relationships? Don’t the people involved in digitally-organised relationships across global horizons feel emotionally unfulfilled? Lonely? Distant? Alone while their digital equipment fill the personal void with fast-moving numbers, abbreviated messages, and half-language contexts by random and incomplete personas of other human beings? One does not know the other human being — it is only an image in the mind’s eye of the other that is revealed by electronic manipulation.

Where is the handshake in it? Where is the physical-emotional embrace in it? Where is the exchange of warm smiles when one comes across another person? Where is the unspoken warmth? Call my perspective, if you will, an old fashioned idea, and ignorance of the 21^st-century modernity, but sociologically and psychologically strong communities only exist when vigorous and energetic intimacy prevails among its members. The so-called global community of the modern digital age is a farce — it is an empty vessel; it’s a conceptually weak hypothesis.

For instance, consider the following scenario: My children are at a 7,000-mile distance from us with a nine- hour time difference. Every evening my wife and they prefer to exchange WhatsApp messages on their state-of-the-art smartphones. I lament on a daily basis: Don’t you want to hear their voices? Don’t you want to connect with them in a verbal dialogue in which there is joy sometimes, anger or despair on other occasions, or sadness? Don’t you want to experience a sense of belonging by hearing them talking back and forth?

But they think messaging is fun, and everyone is irrevocably busy trying to bring me into this modern world. My children are very kind to me in their pursuit to modernise me. The eldest gifted me a face recognition smartphone. I have given it to my wife. She has two phones now, practising her expertise in digital communication. The middle one sent me a Kindle so I can read all the e-books that I can get online. Thanks, but no thanks. I cannot write comments on the margins of each page with my fountain pens with black, red and blue ink. Neither can I go to a library to pick out my next book by standing before bookshelves containing volumes of books with different colourful titles and beautiful bindings. There is a sense of pleasure in holding a book in your hand, to browse through it, sensing its volume and smelling its ink and paper. “Try to understand it, my dear child,” I said to my daughter. The youngest one just smiled and sent me an iPad. Great.

But there is some good news. According to the Association of American Publishers, “Thankfully, the analogue world is still here, and not only is it surviving but, in many cases, it is thriving. Sales of old fashioned print books are up for the third year in a row…while e-book sales have been declining.” It appears our absolute obsession with digital technology is waning and we need to strike a balance between the digital and analogue world.

“In contrast with the virtual ‘communities’ we have built online, analogue actually contributes to the real places we live…Analogue excels particularly well at encouraging human interaction, which is crucial to our physical and mental well-being…learning happens best when we build upon relationships,” wrote David Sax, the author of The Revenge of the Analogue: Real Things and Why They Matter.

So I feel at least partially vindicated by preferring verbal conversations over digital messaging, and printed books over e-books. Indeed analogue is more expensive than its digital equivalent, but consider the richness of experience that comes with it. In my experience, printed books tend to engage all of our senses from holding the book, enjoying and appreciating the illustrated cover designs and their related significance to the subject matter and to the print format and style. I have bought and sold books. I have loaned and borrowed books to and from friends. Books on my shelves have triggered numerous interesting conversations. And poetry books, in particular, are known to have started philosophical discourse and, at times, cultivated romances. There is a world of rich human experiences associated with printed matter that e-books and technology cannot offer.

As was reported, e-book sales are declining, but alas, reading in general is declining as well. According to The Washington Post, Americans have hit a three-year low in the amount of literature that they read (I can only surmise the same is true almost everywhere). How sad. Reading literature from around the world has made me realise how incomplete my grasp is over humanity’s vast and immense store of cultural diversity, human emotions, human ingenuity, inventiveness, and the perpetual desire to discover and comprehend the unfathomable vastness of nature and the universe in which we exist.

We need to be reading more, not less. Reading helps us in the awareness of the elements of personal integrity, the importance of justice in a society, the need for tolerance and respect, the cultivation of self-dignity, personal honesty and adherence to societal and global norms for moral-ethical development. Reading invokes our inner spiritual awakening to resort to kindness and forgiveness towards others, and a fastidious need for self-reflection and understanding others. Reading teaches us the meanings of the contemporary doctrine of democracy and public leadership, the public consciousness and social awareness of the notion that the entire democratic enterprise is meant to be in the realm of compassion and caring for people — remove these elements and a democracy is a body without a soul — a manifestation, meaningless, and an idea dead before its birth.

Hence, I read books, knowing that my illiteracy is almost insurmountable — an impediment of my own invention — my own lack of insubstantiality shared with many others in my own society as well as the world over. Sad, isn’t it?

Published in The Express Tribune, December 10^th, 2017.

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