The Erosion of Deep Literacy
深度扫盲的侵蚀
Thoughtful Americans are realizing that the pervasive IT-revolution devices upon which we are increasingly dependent are affecting our society and culture in significant but as yet uncertain ways. We are noticing more in part because, as Maryanne Wolf has pointed out, this technology is changing what, how, and why we read, and in turn what, how, and why we write and even think. Harold Innis noted in 1948, as television was on the cusp of revolutionizing American life, that "sudden extensions of communication are reflected in cultural disturbances," and it's clear we are stumbling through another such episode. Such disturbances today are manifold, and, as before, their most critical aspects may reside in alterations to both the scope and nature of literacy. As with any tangle between technology and culture, empirical evidence is elusive, but two things, at least, are clear.
有思想的美国人正在意识到，我们日益依赖的无处不在的信息技术革命设备正在以重要但尚不确定的方式影响着我们的社会和文化。正如玛丽安-沃尔夫（Maryanne Wolf）所指出的，我们之所以注意到更多的问题，部分原因在于这项技术正在改变我们阅读的内容、方式和原因，进而改变我们写作甚至思考的内容、方式和原因。哈罗德-英尼斯（Harold Innis）在1948年指出，当时电视正处于彻底改变美国生活的风口浪尖，"传播的突然扩展反映在文化的动荡上，"很显然，我们正在经历另一个这样的阶段。今天，这种动荡是多方面的，与以往一样，其最关键的方面可能在于识字范围和性质的改变。正如技术与文化之间的任何纠葛一样，经验证据难以捉摸，但至少有两点是明确的。
For one, the new digital technology is democratizing written language and variously expanding the range of people who use and learn from it. It may also be diffusing culture; music and film of all kinds are cheaply and easily available to almost everyone. In some respects, new digital technologies are decreasing social isolation, even if in other respects they may be increasing it. Taken together, these technologies may also be creating novel neural pathways, especially in developing young brains, that promise greater if different kinds of cognitive capacities, albeit capacities we cannot predict or even imagine with confidence.
首先，新的数字技术正在使书面语言民主化，并以各种方式扩大了使用和学习书面语言的人群范围。数字技术还可以传播文化；几乎每个人都可以廉价、方便地获得各种音乐和电影。在某些方面，新的数字技术正在减少社会隔离，即使在其他方面，它们可能会增加社会隔离。总之，这些技术还可能创造出新的神经通路，尤其是在发育中的青少年大脑中，这些通路有望提高不同类型的认知能力，尽管这些能力我们无法预测，甚至无法有把握地想象。
But it is also clear that something else has been lost. Nicholas Carr's 2010 book, The Shallows, begins with the author's irritation at his own truncated attention span for reading. Something neurophysiological is happening to us, he argued, and we don't know what it is. That must be the case, because if there is any law of neurophysiology, it is that the brain wires itself continuously in accordance with its every experience. A decade later, Carr's discomfort is shared by growing legions of frustrated, formerly serious readers.
但同样明显的是，我们还失去了其他一些东西。尼古拉斯-卡尔（Nicholas Carr）在2010年出版的《浅滩》（The Shallows）一书中，一开头作者就对自己的阅读注意力涣散感到恼火。他认为，我们的神经生理正在发生变化，而我们却不知道是什么原因。事实肯定如此，因为如果说神经生理学有什么规律的话，那就是大脑会根据自己的每一次经历不断地自我调整。十年后，越来越多曾经严肃认真的读者也对卡尔的观点感到不满。
In her 2018 book, Reader, Come Home, Wolf uses cognitive neuroscience and developmental psycholinguistics to study the reading brain and literacy development, and in doing so, helps identify what is being lost. According to Wolf, we are losing what she calls "deep literacy" or "deep reading." This does not include decoding written symbols, writing one's name, or making lists. Deep literacy is what happens when a reader engages with an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author's direction and meaning, and engages what one already knows in a dialectical process with the text. The result, with any luck, is a fusion of writer and reader, with the potential to bear original insight.
在2018年出版的《读者，回家吧》一书中，沃尔夫运用认知神经科学和发展心理语言学来研究阅读大脑和读写能力的发展，并在此过程中帮助确定了正在失去的东西。沃尔夫认为，我们正在失去她所说的 "深度识字 "或 "深度阅读"。这并不包括解码文字符号、写自己的名字或列清单。深层读写能力是指读者在阅读一篇较长的文章时，能够预测作者的写作方向和意义，并将自己已经掌握的知识与文章进行辩证地结合。如果幸运的话，其结果是作者与读者的融合，并有可能产生独到的见解。
Deep literacy has wondrous effects, nurturing our capacity for abstract thought, enabling us to pose and answer difficult questions, empowering our creativity and imagination, and refining our capacity for empathy. It is also generative of successive new insight, as the brain's circuitry for reading recursively builds itself forward. It is and does all these things in part because it touches off a "revolution in the brain," meaning that it has distinctive and describable neurophysiological consequences. Understanding deep literacy as a revolution in the brain has potential payoffs for understanding aspects of history and contemporary politics alike.
深度阅读具有奇妙的效果，它能培养我们的抽象思维能力，使我们能够提出并回答棘手的问题，增强我们的创造力和想象力，提高我们的移情能力。它还能不断产生新的洞察力，因为大脑的阅读回路会递归地向前发展。深层阅读之所以能够做到这些，部分原因在于它引发了一场 "大脑革命"，也就是说，它具有独特的、可描述的神经生理学后果。将深度识字理解为大脑中的一场革命，对于理解历史和当代政治的方方面面都有潜在的益处。
Deep reading has in large part informed our development as humans, in ways both physiological and cultural. And it is what ultimately allowed Americans to become "We the People," capable of self-government. If we are losing the capacity for deep reading, we must also be prepared to lose other, perhaps even more precious parts of what deep reading has helped to build.
深层阅读在很大程度上促进了我们人类的发展，无论是在生理方面还是在文化方面。也正是深层阅读最终让美国人成为能够自治的 "我们人民"。如果我们正在失去深层阅读的能力，我们也必须准备好失去深层阅读帮助我们建立的其他部分，也许是更珍贵的部分。
BRAIN REVOLUTION 大脑革命
Scientists continue to debate the question of addiction to technology and its effects on memory and social isolation, a question transformed anew in the dozen years since the June 2007 introduction of the iPhone. But beyond the addiction debate, few cognitive scientists doubt that so-called multitasking is merely the ability to get many things done quickly and poorly. And no one doubts that heavy screen use has destroyed attention spans.
自 2007 年 6 月 iPhone 问世以来的十几年间，科学家们一直在争论技术成瘾及其对记忆力和社会隔离的影响。但是，除了关于技术成瘾的争论之外，几乎没有认知科学家怀疑所谓的多任务处理不过是一种快速而拙劣地完成许多事情的能力。没有人怀疑大量使用屏幕会破坏注意力。
But more than attention spans are at stake. Beyond self-inflicted attention deficits, people who cannot deep read — or who do not use and hence lose the deep-reading skills they learned — typically suffer from an attenuated capability to comprehend and use abstract reasoning. In other words, if you can't, or don't, slow down sufficiently to focus quality attention — what Wolf calls "cognitive patience" — on a complex problem, you cannot effectively think about it.
但是，这不仅仅是注意力的问题。除了自我造成的注意力缺陷之外，无法进行深度阅读的人，或者没有使用并因此丧失了他们所学到的深度阅读技能的人，通常会受到理解和使用抽象推理能力减弱的影响。换句话说，如果你不能或不愿意放慢速度，将高质量的注意力--也就是沃尔夫所说的 "认知耐心"--集中在一个复杂的问题上，你就无法有效地思考这个问题。
We know that prolonged and repetitive exposure to digital devices changes the way we think and behave in part because it changes us physically. The brain adapts to its environment. The devices clearly can be addictive; indeed, they are designed to be addictive. Technology companies know that swiping "trains" the brain in certain ways; designers know what produces quick bursts of dopamine and oxytocin. They also know that two-dimensional representations on a screen do not match the sensory richness of direct, unmediated experiences, and they know the implications — which is why many cyber-technologists strictly ration their use among their own children. As neurologist Richard Cytowic put it, "Digital devices discretely hijack our attention. To the extent that you cannot perceive the world around you in its fullness, to the same extent you will fall back into mindless, repetitive, self-reinforcing behavior, unable to escape."
我们知道，长期、重复地接触数字设备会改变我们的思维和行为方式，部分原因是它改变了我们的身体。大脑会适应环境。这些设备显然会让人上瘾；事实上，它们的设计就是为了让人上瘾。科技公司知道，刷卡能以某种方式 "训练 "大脑；设计师们知道，刷卡能快速产生多巴胺和催产素。他们还知道，屏幕上的二维表象无法与直接、无中介体验的丰富感官相提并论，他们也知道其中的含义--这就是为什么许多网络技术专家严格限制自己的孩子使用它们。正如神经学家理查德-赛托维克（Richard Cytowic）所说："数字设备会分散我们的注意力。如果你不能完整地感知周围的世界，那么你也会陷入无意识、重复性、自我强化的行为中，无法自拔"。
Thanks to roughly 200,000 years of evolution, the human brain is an extremely efficient change detector. Any sudden and atypical image, smell, or sound could signal a threat or an opportunity, so the brain had always to be on alert, even during sleep. (Some refer to this evolutionary development as the brain's "novelty bias.") And we are still on alert; our brains are not anatomically much different from what they were in Neolithic times, even if some of the circuitry is different.
经过大约 20 万年的进化，人类大脑已成为一个极其高效的变化探测器。任何突如其来的非典型图像、气味或声音都可能预示着威胁或机遇，因此大脑必须时刻保持警惕，即使在睡眠中也是如此（有人将这种进化发展称为大脑的 "新奇偏差"）。(有人把这种进化发展称为大脑的 "新奇偏差"。）我们现在仍然处于警戒状态；我们的大脑在解剖学上与新石器时代并无太大区别，即使某些电路有所不同。
Maintaining constant vigilance consumes much of the brain's power supplies, and switching attention, in particular, eats up lots of calories. Even a century ago, life was far less frenetic than it is today; more items vie for our attention in a given hour than our ancestors had to handle in a day or even a week. As Cytowic puts it,
时刻保持警惕会消耗大脑的大量电能，尤其是转换注意力会消耗大量热量。即使是在一个世纪以前，生活也远没有今天这么狂热；一个小时内需要我们关注的事情比我们的祖先一天甚至一周内需要处理的事情还要多。正如 Cytowic 所说：
We ask our stone-age brains to sort, categorize, parse, and prioritize torrential data streams it never evolved to juggle, while in the background we have to stay ever vigilant to change in every sensory channel....Screens of all sorts serve up rapidly changing images, jump cuts between scenes, erratic motion, and non-linear narratives that spill out in fragments....Is it any wonder people today complain of mental fatigue? Fatigue makes it even harder to sort the trivial from the salient and navigate the glut of decisions modern life throws at us.
我们要求石器时代的大脑对其从未进化过的汹涌数据流进行排序、归类、解析和优先排序，而在后台，我们必须时刻警惕各种感官渠道的变化....，各种屏幕上的图像瞬息万变，场景之间的跳切、不规则的运动和非线性叙事在碎片化....，难怪今天的人们会抱怨精神疲劳？疲劳使我们更加难以区分琐碎和突出的事物，也更难以驾驭现代生活向我们抛出的大量决定。
The knock-on issue thus becomes clear: It is hard to sustain the attention necessary for deep reading when we are distracted and exhausted from being both sped up and overloaded — what tech writer Linda Stone aptly calls "continuous partial attention." And many, particularly those who have never inculcated the discipline that comes with a serious education, have become, as Senator Ben Sasse puts it, "addicted to distraction." The neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains it more specifically: "Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation" (emphasis added).
因此，连带的问题变得很明显：当我们分心、疲惫不堪时，就很难维持深度阅读所需的注意力，因为我们既被加速，又被超载--科技作家琳达-斯通恰如其分地称之为 "持续的部分注意力"。许多人，尤其是那些从未接受过严肃教育的人，已经变得像参议员本-萨斯（Ben Sasse）所说的那样，"对分心上瘾"。神经科学家丹尼尔-莱维汀对此有更具体的解释："多任务处理创造了一个多巴胺成瘾的反馈回路，有效地奖励了失去注意力和不断寻找外部刺激的大脑"（着重部分由作者标明）。
A sadder and more troubling knock-on effect also reveals itself: If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists. Fully immerse yourself in digital "life," and timelines will flatten into unconnected dots, rendering a person present-oriented and unable to either remember or plan well. That permanently "zoned out" person will become easy prey for the next demagogue with an attractive promise and a mesmerizing spectacle.
一个更可悲、更令人担忧的连锁反应也显现出来：如果不进行深度阅读，就无法培养思考、想象和创造的能力；因此，你可能意识不到比电子游戏更令人满意的东西存在。完全沉浸在数字 "生活 "中，时间线就会扁平化，变成一个个没有联系的点，使一个人以现在为导向，既不能很好地记忆，也不能很好地计划。这种长期 "失神 "的人很容易成为下一个蛊惑人心的煽动者的猎物，他们的承诺很诱人，场面也很壮观。
Mediated electronic interactions also create forms of what could be called acquired social autism. Any experienced high-school guidance counselor can attest that most of their students do not have the social skills necessary to, for example, speak to college-admissions personnel one on one. There is also growing empirical evidence of social-media fatigue. Our gadgets create exhaustion, isolation, loneliness, and depression, which track with the rise of suicide rates in younger age cohorts. In a few extreme cases, when isolation sharply diminishes the influence of peer standards of acceptable conduct, it can lead to violent anti-social behavior.
通过媒介进行的电子互动也会造成所谓的后天社交自闭症。任何有经验的高中辅导员都可以证明，他们的大多数学生都不具备必要的社交技能，例如，与大学招生人员一对一交谈。关于社交媒体疲劳的实证证据也越来越多。我们的小工具造成了疲惫、孤立、孤独和抑郁，这与年轻群体自杀率的上升是一致的。在少数极端情况下，当孤立感大大削弱了同龄人可接受行为标准的影响力时，就会导致暴力的反社会行为。
In science fiction, the typical worry is that machines will become human-like; the more pressing problem now is that, through the thinning out of our interactions, humans are becoming machine-like. That raises the possibility that the more time we spend with machines and the more dependent on them we become, the dumber we tend to get since machines cannot determine their own purposes — at least until the lines cross between ever smarter AI-infused machines and ever less cognitively adept humans. More troubling are the moral issues that could potentially arise: mainly ceding to machines programmed by others the right to make moral choices that ought to be ours.
在科幻小说中，人们通常担心机器会变得像人类一样；而现在更紧迫的问题是，由于我们之间的互动越来越少，人类正在变得像机器一样。这就产生了一种可能性，即我们与机器相处的时间越长，对机器的依赖程度越高，我们就会变得越笨，因为机器无法决定自己的目的--至少在越来越聪明的人工智能机器和认知能力越来越差的人类之间出现界限之前是这样。更令人担忧的是可能出现的道德问题：主要是将本应由我们做出道德选择的权利让给由他人编程的机器。
HABITS OF MIND 思维习惯
The human brain is genetically hardwired with the ability to understand and articulate oral language, but no gene exists for reading and writing. Literacy is a cultural achievement long in the making, though, on an evolutionary timeline, it is a fairly recent innovation. It is a development that, by changing the very structure of human brain circuitry, "transformed the nature of human thought," as Wolf writes. What Carr detected, even before iPhone market saturation, is that the plasticity of the human brain extends well beyond childhood: We are or become, cognitively speaking, what we do with language.
从基因上讲，人类大脑具有理解和表达口头语言的能力，但并不存在阅读和书写的基因。识字是一项酝酿已久的文化成就，尽管从进化的时间轴来看，它是一项相当新的创新。正如沃尔夫所写，通过改变人类大脑回路的结构，识字 "改变了人类思维的本质"。甚至在 iPhone 市场饱和之前，卡尔就已经发现，人类大脑的可塑性远远超出了童年时期：从认知角度讲，我们是语言的使用者，或者说我们成为了语言的使用者。
There is no question that adult reading habits have changed over the past few decades. The skimming and speed-reading in Z or F patterns that is characteristic of surfing the internet — the new norm for many — does not help enable critical content, if there is any, to sink into working memory. As reading method goes, it is the anti-deep; one barely gets wet at all. Twitter, in particular, epitomizes the transition from using written language as a means to think to using language as a platform for micro-designer spectacle — in some respects a throwback to oral culture, and certainly a far more cognitively superficial activity, as L. M. Sacasas recently argued in the New Atlantis. Skimming on the net also has a shadow effect: When one picks up a book for an afternoon or evening, the same pattern throws itself onto the printed page. That is what Carr noticed but did not perhaps understand.
毫无疑问，过去几十年来，成年人的阅读习惯发生了变化。以 "Z "或 "F "模式进行的略读和速读是上网冲浪的特点，也是许多人的新习惯，但这无助于将关键内容（如果有的话）纳入工作记忆。就阅读方法而言，这是一种 "反深度 "的阅读方法，人们几乎根本无法深入其中。正如 L. M. 萨卡萨斯最近在《新亚特兰蒂斯》（New Atlantis）一书中所论述的那样，从使用书面语言作为思考的手段，到使用语言作为微观设计师奇观的平台，推特尤其是这一转变的缩影。网络上的浮光掠影也会产生阴影效应：当人们在下午或晚上拿起一本书时，同样的模式就会出现在印刷页面上。卡尔注意到了这一点，但也许并不理解。
Henry Kissinger noted one consequence of this development in the context of strategy:
亨利-基辛格（Henry Kissinger）从战略角度指出了这一发展的一个后果：
Reading books requires you to form concepts, to train your mind to relationships....A book is a large intellectual construction; you can't hold it all in mind easily or at once. You have to struggle mentally to internalize it. Now there is no need to internalize because each fact can instantly be called up again on the computer. There is no context, no motive. Information is not knowledge. People are not readers but researchers, they float on the surface....This new thinking erases context. It disaggregates everything. All this makes strategic thinking about world order nearly impossible to achieve.
读书需要你形成概念，训练你的思维关系....，一本书是一个庞大的知识构架，你不可能轻易或一下子把它全部记在脑子里。你必须费尽脑力才能将其内化。现在不需要内化了，因为每个事实都可以在电脑上立即再次调用。没有背景，没有动机。信息不是知识。人们不是读者，而是研究者，他们浮在表面....，这种新思维抹去了背景。它分解了一切。所有这一切使得关于世界秩序的战略思考几乎不可能实现。
Neil Postman put it succinctly, if more broadly, in 1985: Only in the printed word can complicated truths be rationally conveyed.
尼尔-波兹曼（Neil Postman）在 1985 年简明扼要地指出了这一点：只有在印刷文字中，复杂的真理才能得到合理的传达。
But Kissinger is getting at something else here: namely, the sources of original thought. The deep-reading brain excels at making connections among analogical, inferential, and empathetic modes of reasoning, and knows how to associate them all with accumulated background knowledge. That constellation of sources and connections is what enables not just strategic thinking, but original thinking more broadly. So could it be that the failures of the American political class to fashion useful solutions to public- and foreign-policy challenges turn not just on polarization and hyper-partisanship, but also on the strong possibility that many of these non-deep readers are no longer able to think below the surface tension of a tweet?
不过，基辛格在这里说的是另一件事：即原创性思维的来源。深度阅读的大脑擅长在类比、推理和移情推理模式之间建立联系，并知道如何将它们与积累的背景知识联系起来。这种来源和联系的组合不仅能促成战略思维，还能促成更广泛的原创思维。因此，美国政治阶层无法为公共政策和外交政策的挑战制定出有用的解决方案，这不仅是两极分化和过度党派化的结果，也很有可能是因为这些非深度读者中的许多人不再能够在推文的表面张力之下进行思考。
Absence of thought as a mode of cognition likewise stifles imagination and feeds cultural insularity. Along with the technology-enabled prevalence of mediated interactions as opposed to face-to-face ones, insularity in turn conduces to the narrow "tribal" emotions of identity politics. The "echo chamber" effect, characteristic of mediated electronic interactions, tends to truncate a person's ambit of empathy, as Senator Sasse has stressed, and not just as regards politics. It could be, in other words, that we skim now with respect to our emotions as well as our thinking — how else is it possible to degrade the beauty and difficulty of friendship into "friending" someone instantaneously on Facebook? Deep reading, contrarily, deepens and widens our theory of mind in both its rational and affective aspects. Fiction reading, in particular, enables us to simulate the consciousness of another person.
作为一种认知模式，思想的缺失同样会扼杀想象力，助长文化的封闭性。与面对面的互动相比，通过技术手段进行的互动更为普遍，这种封闭性反过来又助长了身份政治中狭隘的 "部落 "情感。正如参议员萨斯所强调的那样，中介式电子互动所特有的 "回音室 "效应往往会截断一个人的共鸣范围，而这不仅仅是在政治方面。换句话说，我们现在可能在情感和思考方面都是浮光掠影--否则怎么可能把友谊的美好和困难降格为在脸书上即时 "加为好友 "呢？相反，深层阅读则从理性和情感两个方面深化和拓宽了我们的思维理论。尤其是小说阅读，能让我们模拟他人的意识。
Indeed, our developing the ability to deep read is part of what made us human. Pre-literate cultures can be rich and imaginative without written language, but unless people capable of mobilizing their imaginations to spin wondrous stories and discover empirical truths about the world can get them written down, there is a limit to how long the power of those stories and insights can endure. The writing processes we use to objectify knowledge gained — processes that make intersubjective sharing stable and longstanding over generations — have become integral to who we are.
事实上，我们发展深层阅读的能力是我们成为人类的原因之一。没有书面语言，识字前的文化也可以是丰富而富有想象力的，但除非人们能够调动想象力，编织奇妙的故事，发现关于世界的经验真理，并将其记录下来，否则这些故事和见解的力量能够持续多久是有限的。我们用来将获得的知识客观化的书写过程--这些过程使主体间的分享稳定而长久，世代相传--已成为我们不可或缺的一部分。
Literacy as a cultural achievement changed society because it enabled humans to learn from predecessors long-since deceased and to teach those who come long after, thus creating skeins of intergenerational conversation that no other animal can match. In other words, literacy enabled the sum of education and schools, libraries and archives, research and coordinated human work to generate a reality far more massive and seemingly objective than what Kenneth Burke once called our bio-sensory bit of reality, "the paper-thin line of our own particular lives." The rewards of deep reading are cumulative over time, therefore, not only in the individual, but also in society. Deep literacy marks the birth of useful abstractions bearing profound implications for moral reasoning. As Hermann Hesse pointed out, "[w]ithout words, without writing, and without books there would be no history," and so "there could be no concept of humanity."
识字作为一种文化成就改变了社会，因为它使人类能够向早已逝去的前人学习，并教导后来者，从而创造出其他动物无法比拟的代际对话。换句话说，扫盲使教育和学校、图书馆和档案馆、研究和协调的人类工作的总和能够产生一个比肯尼斯-伯克曾经所说的我们的生物感官的现实，"我们自己的特定生活的薄纸线 "更庞大、似乎更客观的现实。因此，深度阅读的回报是长期累积的，不仅对个人如此，对社会也是如此。深度阅读标志着有用的抽象概念的诞生，对道德推理有着深远的影响。正如赫尔曼-黑塞（Hermann Hesse）所指出的，"没有语言，没有文字，没有书籍，就没有历史"，因此 "也就没有人类的概念"。
Those reading this essay developed these habits of mind as children who learned to read and now continue to do so as adults. In an odd way, that's the problem: We almost never reflect on how unusual, and in many ways unnatural, deep reading actually is. Consider that the only time any of us can be alone with ideas brought by others is in reading. It is, as Marcel Proust put it in On Reading, "that fertile miracle of communication that takes place in the middle of solitude." Otherwise, we are each necessarily engaged in dialogue with one or more other in-the-flesh people: In other words, we experience the community as context, simultaneously with the ideas. Deep reading alone creates the possibility of a private internal dialogue with an author not physically present.
阅读这篇文章的人在孩提时代就养成了这些阅读习惯，现在长大成人后依然如此。从一个奇怪的角度来看，这就是问题所在：我们几乎从未反思过深度阅读实际上是多么不寻常，在很多方面是多么不自然。想想看，我们中的任何一个人只有在阅读时才能与他人带来的思想独处。正如马塞尔-普鲁斯特（Marcel Proust）在《论阅读》（On Reading）一书中所说的，这是 "在孤独中发生的交流奇迹"。否则，我们每个人都必然要与一个或多个其他有血有肉的人进行对话：换句话说，我们在体验思想的同时，也体验着作为语境的群体。深层阅读本身就创造了与不在场的作者进行私人内部对话的可能性。
More important, when we are immersed in deep reading, we bracket our sensory surroundings and social context to become engrossed in worlds that exist only in our heads. The power of this out-of-body capacity is quite remarkable. Wolf cites research showing that when a fictional character with whom the reader has developed an affinity is running in the text, the deep reader's motoric regions activate as if he were actually running instead of sitting in a chair reading. So we can be in our heads nowhere real, but being there imaginatively creates real effects nonetheless. This tells us, among other things, that the kind of intimate, silent dialogue that occurs only during deep reading requires a considerable capacity for abstract thought just for it to occur at all. In deep reading, we separate the message of the text from the author; we decontextualize it, in other words, and therefore necessarily abstract it.
更重要的是，当我们沉浸在深度阅读中时，我们会屏蔽周围的感官环境和社会背景，沉醉于只存在于我们头脑中的世界。这种出神入化的能力相当惊人。沃尔夫引用的研究表明，当读者对文中的虚构人物产生亲切感时，深层阅读者的运动区域会被激活，就好像他真的在奔跑，而不是坐在椅子上阅读。因此，我们可以在脑海中无处真实存在，但想象中的存在还是会产生真实的效果。这告诉我们，只有在深层阅读中才会出现的那种亲密的、无声的对话，需要相当的抽象思维能力才能实现。在深层阅读中，我们将文本的信息与作者分离开来；换句话说，我们将文本去语境化，因此必然将其抽象化。
For those who make a habit of deep reading, cognitive capacities for such abstract thinking expand to fill our appetites, or what we may call our pressing artificial needs. And those needs can become pressing because the material world, while expansive and rich, has limits that the world of the abstract and the imaginative very likely does not. So once into that world, the appetite to explore more of what we, with helpful authorial others, conspire to invent can become irresistible, at least this side of the dinner bell.
对于那些养成深度阅读习惯的人来说，这种抽象思维的认知能力会不断扩大，以满足我们的胃口，或者我们可以称之为迫切的人为需求。这些需求之所以会变得迫切，是因为物质世界虽然广阔而丰富，但也有其局限性，而抽象和想象的世界很可能没有这种局限性。因此，一旦进入了那个世界，探索更多我们和其他作者合谋发明的东西的欲望就会变得不可抗拒，至少在晚餐铃响的这一边是如此。
In order for deep reading to exist there also must be deep writing. The author also must abstract the message being crafted because, usually, no specific reader can be readily anticipated or held in mind. Classes or kinds of people can be identified as a writer's target audience, but that is different and that too requires a kind of decontextualized abstract thought. Thus, we have a writer privately squeezing into an artificial, decontextualized "space" in order to convey something, fictive or not, to unknown readers in unknown but theoretically very distant times who are similarly situated, so to speak, in an artificial, decontextualized space. If this is not in some non-trivial sense an unnatural act for human beings to engage in, then what is?
要进行深度阅读，还必须有深度写作。作者还必须对所要传达的信息进行抽象，因为通常情况下，没有特定的读者是可以轻易预见或牢记的。可以将某类或某类人确定为作家的目标读者，但那是不同的，也需要一种去语境化的抽象思维。因此，我们看到的是一位作家私下挤进一个人为的、去语境化的 "空间"，以便向未知时代但理论上非常遥远的未知读者传达某种虚构或非虚构的东西，而这些读者可以说同样处于一个人为的、去语境化的空间。如果这在某种意义上不是人类所从事的非自然行为，那又是什么呢？
And yet we typically overlook how significant this act is for us as individuals and to us collectively as a society. We only feel uncomfortable when we sense, as did Carr, our earned capacities somehow slipping away — or when we worry that cognitively sped-up and multitasking young brains may not acquire sufficient capacities for critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy, and hence will become easy prey for charlatans and demagogues.
然而，我们通常忽略了这一行为对我们个人和社会集体的重要意义。只有当我们像卡尔一样感觉到我们的能力在不知不觉地流失时，或者当我们担心认知速度加快、任务繁多的年轻大脑可能无法获得足够的批判性思维、个人反思、想象力和移情能力，从而容易成为骗子和蛊惑人心者的猎物时，我们才会感到不安。
MODERN MAN 现代人
Deep literacy has often been overlooked as a factor in history because historians are so deeply enmeshed in a world of deep reading that they, like the proverbial fish in water, take its existence for granted. A poignant example is that of Karl Jaspers, famous for his theory of the Axial Age. Jaspers observed that several civilizational zones with little to no contact between them nevertheless developed several philosophical themes seemingly in common at around the same period, between the eighth and third centuries B.C. Why this was so constituted a mystery for Jaspers and the many interpreters his 1949 study attracted. It seems not to have occurred to them that the advent of literacy for a critical mass of people during the period in question might account for the commonalities Jaspers observed.
深层素养作为历史学的一个因素常常被忽视，因为历史学家们深深地沉浸在深层阅读的世界中，就像谚语中的水中之鱼，认为深层阅读的存在是理所当然的。卡尔-雅斯贝尔斯（Karl Jaspers）就是一个鲜明的例子，他以轴心时代理论而闻名于世。雅斯贝尔斯观察到，在公元前八世纪到公元前三世纪之间的同一时期，几个文明区之间几乎没有任何联系，但却发展出了几个看似相同的哲学主题。为什么会这样，这对雅斯贝尔斯和他在 1949 年的研究吸引来的众多解释者来说是一个谜。他们似乎没有想到，在这一时期，识字人数达到了一个临界点，这可能就是雅斯贝尔斯所观察到的共同点的原因。
What Jaspers saw was less the similar content of the formulations of different ancient cultures and more the similarity of the level of abstraction at which those formulations took shape by dint of the cultures having recently become literate. In other words, phenomena that many saw as causes of the Axial Age were actually consequences of something else that went unremarked: the spread of deep literacy in a still-small but critical share of the population.
雅斯贝尔斯所看到的，与其说是不同古代文化的表述内容相似，不如说是这些表述的抽象程度相似，而这些抽象程度是由于这些文化最近才开始识字而形成的。换句话说，许多人认为是轴心时代原因的现象，实际上是另一种未被注意到的现象的后果：深层识字能力在仍然很小但很重要的一部分人口中的传播。
Understanding deep literacy can also take us from Jaspers's Axial Age to the modern age. The rise of individual agency — one of the hallmarks of modernity — depends on the development of a refined sense of interiority in a person: that sense of the inner conscious being that defines one's individual, essential self. In short, very likely, the advent of deep literacy, by enabling a new sense of interiority, is the proximate source of modernity via the rise of individual agency that it allowed.
对深层素养的理解也可以把我们从雅斯贝尔斯的轴心时代带入现代。个人能动性的崛起--现代性的标志之一--取决于一个人内在性意识的发展：这种内在意识定义了个人的本质自我。简而言之，很有可能的是，深度识字的出现，通过促成一种新的内在性意识，是现代性的近似源泉，因为它允许个人能动性的崛起。
Unless provoked to think about it, we usually assume that this sense of interiority has been an invariant aspect of being human. But that is not obvious. The growth of our inner voice to articulate maturity probably depends on our developing language capacities, from that of the child before he develops a theory of mind to that of the adult capable of seeing the self as an object — capable in other words of asking the first question of philosophy: Who, or what, am I? After all, what need has anyone for a particularly articulate inner voice if that voice never has anyone else to "talk" with, which is an activity done silently only in reading? Thus, our adult sense of interiority seems closely linked, perhaps inextricably so, to our gaining literacy competence.
除非引起我们的思考，否则我们通常会认为这种内在感是人类不变的一面。但这并不明显。我们内心声音的成长到清晰的成熟，可能取决于我们语言能力的发展，从儿童发展出思维理论之前的语言能力，到成人能够将自我视为对象的语言能力--换句话说，能够提出哲学的第一个问题："我是谁？我是谁？毕竟，如果内心的声音从来没有人可以与之 "交谈"，而 "交谈 "是一种只有在阅读中才会默默进行的活动，那么人们还需要什么特别善于表达的内心声音呢？因此，我们成人的内在感似乎与我们的识字能力密切相关，也许是密不可分的。
The mature "narrator" likely arises from the aforementioned complementary pairing of unnatural acts, as the necessarily dialectic reading/writing process that defines deep literacy continues over time. The mature narrator in our heads is thus a cognitive artifact of culture, of the revolution in the brain, not of neurobiology alone. As Walter Ong put it, "[o]ral communication unites people in groups" whereas writing and reading "throw the psyche back on itself" and thus cultivate individuality.
成熟的 "叙述者 "很可能产生于上述非自然行为的互补配对，因为定义深度读写能力的必然辩证的阅读/写作过程会随着时间的推移而继续。因此，我们头脑中的成熟叙述者是文化的认知产物，是大脑革命的产物，而不仅仅是神经生物学的产物。正如沃尔特-翁（Walter Ong）所说，"一般交流将人们团结在群体中"，而写作和阅读则 "将心理抛回自身"，从而培养了个性。
So the silent narrator in the minds of non-readers must be, at least in some ways, a narrator different from our own — and societies made up of the latter must, at least in some ways, differ from societies made up of the former. The slow movement from oral/communal to written/private uses of narration has indeed ultimately been epochal. It is hard to disagree with Ong's conclusion that, "without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials."
因此，非读者心目中的无声叙述者，至少在某些方面，一定是不同于我们自己的叙述者--而由后者构成的社会，至少在某些方面，一定不同于由前者构成的社会。从口头/集体叙述到书面/私人叙述的缓慢发展，最终确实具有划时代的意义。很难不同意 Ong 的结论："没有文字，人类意识就无法发挥其更大的潜能"。
In this light, consider a typical child in a society with widespread deep literacy and the development of the relationship of narratives to thinking in his mind. The process starts when books are read to a child before he can decode them, creating a link between the written word composed of morphemes, the phonemes the words make when the morphemes are sounded out, and the symbolic meaning carried by them. (As far as we know, this link can be created only by shared attention between at least two human beings; it cannot be fashioned between a child and a television set, an e-reader, or any other machine. That is one main reason why the best predictor of eventual reading proficiency is how many hours adults spend reading to young children.)
有鉴于此，请看一个典型的儿童，在一个深度识字广泛普及的社会中，在他的头脑中发展叙述与思维的关系。这一过程开始于在儿童能够解码之前给他阅读书籍，在由词素组成的书面文字、词素发音时的音素以及词素所承载的象征意义之间建立联系。(据我们所知，这种联系只能通过至少两个人的共同关注来建立，而不能在孩子和电视机、电子阅读器或任何其他机器之间建立。这也是为什么预测最终阅读能力的最佳指标是成人为幼儿阅读的时间）。
Then a child learns to decode writing and pronounce it, but usually only aloud. As decoding matures into true reading, a child will still usually not be able to read silently; there is often an intermediate stage on the way to deep literacy when a child is whispering or moving his lips while reading. (Some adults who have yet to achieve full deep literacy do this, too, as can sometimes be observed on buses, trains, park benches, and so on.) Only later can the more mature child advance into truly silent reading, and gain the ability to meet an author halfway in the complex dynamics of deep literacy common to adults. Only then does the child's narrator develop into a mature form.
然后，孩子开始学习解码和发音，但通常只能大声朗读。当解码成熟为真正的阅读时，孩子通常仍无法进行默读；在通往深度识字的道路上，通常会有一个中间阶段，即孩子在阅读时会小声说话或移动嘴唇。(一些尚未达到完全深度识字的成年人也会这样做，有时在公共汽车、火车、公园长椅等地方就能看到这种情况）。只有到了后来，更成熟的孩子才能进入真正的无声阅读，并获得与作者在成人常见的深度识字的复杂动态中相遇的能力。只有到那时，儿童的叙述者才能发展成成熟的形式。
This development is true on the historical scale as well. Ponder the language of prayer and ritual over the millennia. Ancient prayer was and most ritual prayer is still communal, so liturgy is meant to be spoken aloud, chanted, or sung. But even individual prayer, whether it takes place in a group setting or alone, is not usually supposed to be completely silent even today; lips need to move. This tradition, at one point itself a novelty as illustrated by the exchange between Hannah and Eli at Shiloh in I Samuel, is a remnant of an earlier time when truly silent prayer, and silent reading, was all but unknown — a time when nearly all writing that went beyond mere lists was integrally related to and arose from within religion.
这种发展在历史上也是如此。请思考几千年来祈祷和仪式的语言。古代的祈祷是集体性的，大多数仪式祈祷仍然是集体性的，因此礼仪是要大声说出来、吟诵或歌唱的。但即使是个人祈祷，无论是集体祈祷还是单独祈祷，通常也不应该完全保持沉默，即使在今天也是如此；嘴唇需要活动。正如《撒母耳记上》中哈拿和以利在示罗的交流所表明的那样，这一传统本身曾一度是一种新奇的事物，它是早期真正的默祷和默读几乎无人知晓的时代的残余--在那个时代，几乎所有超越单纯列表的文字都与宗教有着内在的联系，并产生于宗教之中。
The rise of Protestantism has everything to do with Martin Luther's key insight that the essence of a person is the soul within. Hence his view that the priestly rituals of the Church were in vain because they could not penetrate into the interiority of the soul — could not directly engage the inner person, could not converse with the narrator. In his view, the ritual was functionally mute and thus useless. But (probably) unbeknownst to Luther, his own deep literacy likely formed the portal of his sense of interiority, and therefore presaged his theological discovery. Protestantism's focus on scripture in the new theological dispensation was not coincidental, to put it mildly.
新教的兴起与马丁-路德的重要见解不无关系，他认为人的本质是内在的灵魂。因此，他认为教会的祭司仪式是徒劳的，因为它们无法深入灵魂的内部--无法直接与内在的人接触，无法与叙述者对话。在他看来，仪式在功能上是哑巴，因此毫无用处。但（可能）路德并不知道，他自身深厚的文化素养很可能构成了他内在性意识的入口，并因此预示了他的神学发现。可以说，新教在新的神学分配中对经文的关注并非偶然。
The rise of deep literacy in enough people in early modernity — mightily aided, of course, by Gutenberg's invention of movable type — was a precondition of Protestantism's firm establishment and rapid growth, and its establishment was in turn a major accelerator of deep literacy in the societies in which it became the principal faith community, in large part because Protestants ordained compulsory schooling for all children. The Reformation found a very powerful engine in the establishment of these schools: Wherever Protestant beliefs spread, state-mandated education soon followed, each reinforcing the other.
在现代早期，足够多的人识字--当然，古腾堡发明的活字印刷术功不可没--是新教牢固确立并迅速发展的先决条件，而新教的确立又反过来极大地促进了以其为主要信仰团体的社会中的识字率的提高，这在很大程度上是因为新教徒规定所有儿童都必须接受义务教育。这些学校的建立为宗教改革提供了强大的动力：无论新教信仰传播到哪里，国家强制教育很快就会跟进，两者相辅相成。
This rendered the Reformation a twin theological-political movement, based on the idea of "conscience" as the fulcrum. Conscience was central to arriving at theological truth through reading Scripture, and theological truth led to a social consensus on the importance of conscience in the political arena as well. The simple understanding here was that the capacity for moral reasoning is essential for an individual to come to religious truth, and moral reasoning collected into a social ethos is the only foundation for a morally just political order — the individual and socio-political facets of conscience reinforcing each other in a virtuous cycle.
这使得宗教改革成为一场以 "良知 "为支点的神学与政治双重运动。良知是通过阅读经文得出神学真理的核心，而神学真理也促使社会就良知在政治领域的重要性达成共识。这里的简单理解是，道德推理能力是个人获得宗教真理的必要条件，而道德推理汇集成的社会风气则是道德公正的政治秩序的唯一基础--良知的个人层面和社会政治层面在良性循环中相互促进。
The eventual consequences of this development, for the West and in due course for the world, have been huge. The Protestant way of thinking about the relationship between the individual and society is quintessentially modern because it starts with individual, not corporate, agency. As far as political thought goes, this is the origin of our "We the People": God's will is implemented upward through popular sovereignty, not downward from the divine right of kings. This is where the moral basis for modern liberal democracy comes from, and without the spread of deep literacy, it likely doesn't come at all. It is simply not possible to build a bourgeois economy and society without enough people who are literate and numerate to operate them.
这一发展最终给西方乃至世界带来了巨大的影响。新教关于个人与社会关系的思考方式是典型的现代思考方式，因为它的出发点是个人而非企业。就政治思想而言，这是我们 "我们人民 "的起源：上帝的意志是通过人民主权向上实现的，而不是通过君权神授向下实现的。这就是现代自由民主的道德基础，而如果没有深厚的文化素养的传播，很可能根本就没有这种基础。如果没有足够的识字和识数的人来操作资产阶级的经济和社会，就根本不可能建立起资产阶级的经济和社会。
LITERACY AND POPULISM 扫盲与民粹主义
The capacity for abstract reasoning, too, is integral to liberal-democratic politics: The concepts of representation; the virtues of doubt, dissent, and humility; and the concept of a depersonalized constitutional order are all very abstract ideas. Is it possible that an emotionally more volatile post-deep-literate society may at a certain tipping point regress to accommodate, and even to prefer, less-refined and -earned forms of governance?
抽象推理能力也是自由民主政治不可或缺的一部分：代表权的概念，怀疑、异议和谦逊的美德，以及非人格化宪法秩序的概念，都是非常抽象的概念。是否有可能在某个临界点上，一个情感上更加动荡的后深度文盲社会会倒退到适应、甚至偏爱不那么精致和得来不易的治理形式？
We know what such a regression would basically look like: a less abstract, re-personalized form of social and political authority concentrated in a "great" authoritarian leader. On the left, that looks at the extreme like a brave new world order that enforces diversity and radical, undifferentiated egalitarianism from above by dint of brainwashing and coercion. On the right it looks like an extreme form of conservative nationalism, the nation defined as white Americans and tolerated non-whites, in which the state provides social and economic security to the Volksgemeinschaft while strictly policing both its literal and figurative borders. In any event, neither dispensation can stand too much liberalism, and possibly not much more democracy either.
我们知道这种倒退基本上会是什么样子：一种不那么抽象、重新人格化的社会和政治权威形式，集中在一个 "伟大的 "独裁领袖身上。在左派看来，这在极端情况下就像一个勇敢的新世界秩序，通过洗脑和强制手段从上而下地推行多样性和激进的、无差别的平等主义。在右翼看来，它是一种极端形式的保守民族主义，国家被定义为美国白人和可容忍的非白人，国家在为人民提供社会和经济安全的同时，严格管理其文字和形象上的边界。无论如何，这两种派别都无法忍受太多的自由主义，可能也无法忍受更多的民主。
We know that a significant decline in a society's deep literacy can matter because it has happened before. Thanks in part to the revolutionary impact of the codex, male literacy rates in the Roman Republic and then Empire were probably in the 30% to 40% range, at least in urban areas. We even have records of slaves knowing how to read and write. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476, literacy rates quickly dropped below 5%, and did not regain their previous levels until the 16th century at the earliest. Until they did, the advent of liberalism as we understand the term could not happen.
我们知道，一个社会的深层识字率大幅下降可能很重要，因为它曾经发生过。部分由于法典的革命性影响，罗马共和国和帝国时期的男性识字率大概在 30% 到 40% 之间，至少在城市地区是这样。我们甚至有奴隶识字的记录。西罗马帝国于 476 年灭亡后，识字率迅速降至 5%以下，最早要到 16 世纪才恢复到以前的水平。在恢复之前，我们所理解的自由主义不可能出现。
One could argue that American history is replete with majorities of non-deep-literate people in virtually every decade since 1776, and democracy endured and populist surges were rare. And surely, whatever the recent decline in deep literacy, more Americans are deep-literate today than in 1919 or 1819. But this overlooks the fact that, at its 1776 birth, independent America probably constituted the most mass-literate society in world history, notwithstanding the number of slaves and indentured servants. Such a high rate of literacy was the consequence of the highly scripturalist nature of Protestantism and the deeply religious character of most colonial-era American settlements.
我们可以说，自1776年以来，美国历史上几乎每十年都有多数人不识字，民主得以延续，民粹主义汹涌而至的情况十分罕见。而且可以肯定的是，无论近来深度识字率如何下降，与1919年或1819年相比，今天有深度识字的美国人更多。但这忽略了一个事实，即独立的美国在1776年诞生时，可能是世界历史上识字率最高的社会，尽管奴隶和契约仆人的数量不少。如此高的识字率是新教高度圣经化的结果，也是大多数殖民时代的美国定居点宗教色彩浓厚的结果。
Furthermore, populist surges were not rare; they merely expressed themselves most often in religious culture as Great Awakenings rather than directly in politics — but the bleed-over from the former to the latter was hardly trivial. Besides, throughout most of American history, politics has been an elite affair despite its ever-growing egalitarian pretensions. That was true before the Jacksonian era, but it was basically true long thereafter, as well. Most people showed a natural deference to educated folk, and the further back one goes, the higher the percentage of educated men (it was mostly men) who went to divinity school. Protestant scripturalists showed particular reverence for well-educated clergy, especially in "high church" circles.
此外，民粹主义的兴起并不罕见；它们只是在宗教文化中最常见地表现为大觉醒，而不是直接表现在政治上--但从前者到后者的渗透并非微不足道。此外，在美国历史的大部分时间里，政治一直是精英的事情，尽管其平等主义的幌子不断膨胀。杰克逊时代之前是如此，但之后很长一段时间也基本如此。大多数人对受过教育的人表现出一种天然的敬畏，而且越往后，受过教育的男人（主要是男人）上神学院的比例就越高。新教经院派特别崇敬受过良好教育的神职人员，尤其是在 "高级教会 "圈子里。
Literacy rates in 19th-century America, notably female literacy rates, register a near continuous rise, and the correlation with democratic participation is arguably positive. All three major American antebellum social movements arose from this development: abolition, temperance, and female suffrage. But rising literacy rates did not bring unvarnished blessings because too much democracy driven by scantily educated people rarely does: It constitutes a distributed mob, potential or extant, more or less of the kind the ancient Greeks warned against. For example, higher rates of literacy and democratic participation in the 1850s correlate with the brittle, abstract forms of para-theological, Second Great Awakening reasoning that infested political discourse and helped bring about the Civil War.
19 世纪美国的识字率，尤其是女性识字率几乎持续上升，与民主参与的关系可以说是积极的。美国前贝鲁姆时期的三大社会运动都源于这一发展：废奴运动、节制运动和女性选举权运动。但是，识字率的提高并没有带来纯粹的祝福，因为受教育程度不高的人所推动的民主很少有这样的效果：它构成了一种潜在的或现存的分布式暴民，或多或少是古希腊人所警告的那种暴民。例如，19 世纪 50 年代较高的识字率和民主参与率与脆弱、抽象的准神学形式、第二次大觉醒推理相关联，这些推理充斥着政治话语，并促成了南北战争。
A kind of sine wave seems to run through American history, with each step-change upward in literacy associated with a Great Awakening, and each one rotating around an emotionally evocative and encompassing central idea. There was George Whitefield's Awakening of the 1740s, with its core idea of God, part rediscovered and part redefined from the days of the Puritan pioneers. Then came the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s through the 1840s — the camp-meeting Awakening associated with Charles Grandison Finney, Methodist circuit riders, and the rise of the Baptists. The core idea was the nation, under the aegis of the further-redefined, far-more-democratic Protestant God. Then came the Third Great Awakening, which spanned the 1880s through 1910s: the Awakening of the Chautauqua movement, William Jennings Bryan's Populists, and the Social Gospel. The core idea was the Whig understanding of progress as annealed in the spreading Industrial Revolution.
美国历史上似乎有一种正弦波，识字率的每一步提高都与 "大觉醒 "有关，而每一次 "大觉醒 "都围绕着一个令人回味无穷、包罗万象的核心理念。乔治-怀特菲尔德（George Whitefield）在 17 世纪 40 年代发起的 "觉醒 "运动，其核心思想是 "上帝"，这是在清教徒先驱时代的基础上重新发现和定义的。随后是 19 世纪 20 年代到 40 年代的第二次大觉醒--与查尔斯-格兰迪森-芬尼（Charles Grandison Finney）、卫理公会巡回骑手以及浸礼会的兴起有关的营会觉醒。其核心理念是在新教上帝的支持下建立国家。随后是第三次大觉醒，时间跨度为 19 世纪 80 年代到 19 世纪 10 年代：乔托夸运动的觉醒、威廉-詹宁斯-布莱恩的民粹主义者以及社会福音。其核心思想是辉格党人对进步的理解，这种理解在不断蔓延的工业革命中得到了印证。
Now, arguably, we behold a fourth Great Awakening, which began in the late 1950s — just as the television entered every home and commenced the draining of Americans' capacity for deep reading — and continues today. Its core idea is radical (and sometimes global) egalitarianism. It is roiling American politics with what we conventionally call the culture wars, but it obviously also affects a host of policy zones, including immigration and education.
可以说，现在我们看到的是第四次大觉醒，它始于 20 世纪 50 年代末--就在电视进入千家万户并开始消耗美国人的深度阅读能力之时--一直持续到今天。其核心思想是激进的（有时是全球性的）平等主义。它正以我们通常所说的文化战争搅动着美国政治，但它显然也影响着移民和教育等一系列政策领域。
Each successive Awakening wave has moved further from viewing church clerical leadership as its explicit font of authority. Each has been more democratizing in various ways and less deferential to established hierarchy. Each has increasingly infiltrated and reified political discourse to one degree or another — the moral fervor of the Second Great Awakening that helped produce the Civil War was preceded by the moral fervor of the First Great Awakening that arguably led to an earlier civil war, which Americans call the Revolutionary War. And now, unsurprisingly given the history, we live amid a (mostly) cold civil war.
每一次觉醒浪潮都不再将教会神职人员的领导视为其明确的权威来源。每一次觉醒都在不同程度上更加民主化，而不再遵从既定的等级制度。每一次觉醒都在不同程度上越来越多地渗透并重新整合政治话语--第二次大觉醒的道德狂热促成了南北战争，而在此之前，第一次大觉醒的道德狂热可以说导致了更早的内战，美国人称之为革命战争。而现在，鉴于这段历史，我们生活在一场（主要是）冷战的内战之中，这并不奇怪。
Put in the idiom of literacy, it could be that, all else being equal, literate people are less deferential to authority, and that would make some contemporary Americans inclined to demand freedom from the state and others to demand equality enforced by the state. This sounds self-contradictory because it is. Maximum freedom, or liberty, and maximum equality are in tension. Thanks to "the natural aristocracy of talent and virtue," as Jefferson put it to Adams, unconstrained freedom will produce economic, social, and usually political inequality. Attempts to enforce equality will put a crimp on freedom. In a sense, the populist, Awakened energies in American politics today are twinned, with populist demands for equality of outcomes, not just opportunity, coming from the left, and populist demands for freedom coming from the right. The challenge is to figure out ways to reconcile these two fundamental demands. But we will have a difficult time doing that if the process is driven more by emotion than by thought — especially at a time when deep reading, and all that flows from it, has gone out of fashion.
用识字这个成语来说，可能就是在其他条件相同的情况下，识字的人不那么服从权威，这就会使一些当代美国人倾向于要求国家给予自由，而另一些人则要求国家强制平等。这听起来自相矛盾，因为事实的确如此。最大限度的自由与最大限度的平等是相互矛盾的。正如杰斐逊对亚当斯所说的那样，由于 "天赋和美德的天然贵族"，不受约束的自由会产生经济、社会，通常还有政治上的不平等。实行平等的企图会压制自由。从某种意义上说，当今美国政治中的民粹主义和觉醒能量是孪生的，民粹主义要求结果平等，而不仅仅是机会平等，这种要求来自左翼，而民粹主义要求自由则来自右翼。我们面临的挑战是如何调和这两种基本诉求。但是，如果这个过程更多地受到情感而非思想的驱使，我们将很难做到这一点--尤其是在深度阅读以及由此产生的一切已经过时的时候。
CONCRETE THINKING 具体思维
As it is, we now have greater levels of at least superficial participation in political discourse, if not in politics itself, thanks in part to social-media technologies. Vast numbers of people contribute scantily supported opinions about things they don't really understand, validating the old saw that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
事实上，我们现在对政治话语的参与程度即使不是政治本身，至少也是肤浅的，这在一定程度上要归功于社交媒体技术。大量的人对他们并不真正了解的事物发表了肤浅的意见，验证了 "一点点知识可能是一件危险的事情 "这一古老的观点。
A greater percentage of Americans may be deep literate in 2019 than in 1819 or 1919, but probably not than in 1949, before television, the internet, and the iPhone. We have reached a stage at which many professors dare not assign entire books or large parts of moderately challenging ones to undergraduates because they know they won't read them. And while more Americans are graduating from four-year colleges than ever before, the educational standards of many of those institutions, and the distribution of study away from the humanities and social sciences, suggest that a concomitant rise in deep literacy has gone unrealized as the degree factories churn.
与1819年或1919年相比，2019年可能有更大比例的美国人具备深层次的读写能力，但与电视、互联网和iPhone出现之前的1949年相比，可能就不是这样了。我们已经到了这样一个阶段，许多教授不敢给本科生布置整本书或难度适中的大部头，因为他们知道他们不会读。虽然从四年制大学毕业的美国人比以往任何时候都要多，但其中许多院校的教育标准，以及偏离人文和社会科学的学科分布，都表明随着学位工厂的运转，深层次素养的提高并未实现。
The decline of deep literacy, combined with the relative rise in status of the superficially educated, may well be the main food stock for the illiberal nationalist forms of the contemporary populist bacillus not just in America, but in much of the world at large. If so, it endows Ortega y Gasset's 1930 radio-era observations in The Revolt of the Masses with new import. The common, not particularly well-educated person, Ortega y Gasset argued, has ideas in his head but did not produce those ideas:
深层识字率的下降，再加上受教育程度相对较低的人地位的提高，很可能是当代民粹主义杆菌中的非自由民族主义形式的主要食物储备，不仅在美国如此，在世界许多地方也是如此。如果是这样的话，奥尔特加-加塞特 1930 年在《大众的反叛》一书中提出的广播时代的观点就有了新的意义。奥尔特加-亚-加塞特认为，普通人受教育程度不高，他们脑子里有想法，但没有产生这些想法：
He wishes to have opinions, but is unwilling to accept the conditions and presuppositions that underlie all opinion....To have an idea means believing one is in possession of the reasons for having it, and consequently means believing that there is such a thing as reason, a world of intelligible truths. To have ideas, to form opinions, is identical with appealing to such an authority...and therefore believing that the highest form of inter-communion is the dialogue in which the reasons for our ideas are discussed. But the mass-man would feel himself lost if he accepted discussion, and instinctively repudiates the obligation of accepting that supreme authority lying outside himself.
他希望有自己的观点，但不愿意接受作为所有观点基础的条件和前提.... "有观点 "意味着 "相信自己有观点的理由"，因此也就意味着 "相信有理性这种东西，相信有一个可理解的真理世界"。有思想，形成观点，就等于诉诸这样一种权威......因此，相信最高形式的相互交流就是讨论我们思想的理由的对话。但是，如果大众接受讨论，他就会感到迷失方向，并本能地拒绝接受自己之外的最高权威的义务。
And this, he continued, gave rise to both the right-wing and left-wing extremists of his day: "The Fascist and Syndicalist species...characterized by...a type of man who did not care to give reasons or even to be right, but who was simply resolved to impose his opinions. That was the novelty: the right not to be right, not to be reasonable: ‘the reason of unreason.'"
他接着说，这就产生了当时的右翼和左翼极端分子："法西斯主义和工会主义......的特点是......有一种人不屑于说明理由，甚至不屑于说自己是对的，而只是决心把自己的观点强加于人。这就是新奇之处：不正确的权利，不讲道理的权利：'不合理的理由'"。
The very notion of a right not to be reasonable is predicated on a discourse, if one can even call it that, of untethered emotion that rules out that mode of activity that enables reasoning: deep literacy, and what follows from it. Indeed, amid all the recent confusion about what populism actually is, the deep-literacy prism in the light of history can help achieve some definitional precision: Populism of the illiberal nationalist kind is what happens in a mass-electoral democracy when a decisive percentage of mobilized voters drops below a deep-literacy standard.
不讲理的权利 "这一概念本身就是建立在 "不受约束的情感 "这一话语基础之上（如果可以这样称呼的话），而这一话语排除了能够进行推理的活动模式：深层素养，以及由此产生的东西。事实上，在近来关于民粹主义究竟是什么的种种困惑中，从历史的角度来看深层素养棱镜有助于实现某种定义的精确性：非自由民族主义的民粹主义是指在大规模选举的民主制度中，当动员起来的选民中有决定性的比例低于深层素养标准时所发生的事情。
Perhaps any literacy overshadows deep literacy in democratic political life. Adults who haven't read a book since high school tend to become mobilized to vote for reasons that differ from those of more literate voters. This is not a new observation; political scientist Philip Converse wrote of this phenomenon in 1964, a time when social science was just beginning to penetrate the mythology of a "pure" American democracy:
在民主政治生活中，也许任何识字率都会掩盖深层识字率。高中毕业后就没读过书的成年人往往会被动员起来投票，其原因与识字较多的选民不同。这并不是一个新的观察结果；政治学家菲利普-康沃斯（Philip Converse）在1964年就写过这种现象，当时社会科学刚刚开始渗透 "纯粹的 "美国民主神话：
[M]oving from top to bottom of this information dimension, the character of the objects that are central in a belief system undergoes systematic change. These objects shift from the remote, generic, and abstract to the increasingly simple, concrete, or "close to home." Where potential political objects are concerned, this progression tends to be from abstract, "ideological" principles to the more obviously recognizable social groupings or charismatic leaders and finally to such objects of immediate experience as a family, job, and immediate associates. Most of these changes have been hinted at in one form or another in a variety of sources. For example, "limited horizons," "foreshortened time perspectives," and "concrete thinking" have been singled out as notable characteristics of the ideational world of the poorly educated.
[从信息维度的顶端到底端，信仰体系中的核心对象的特征发生了系统性的变化。这些对象从遥远的、一般的和抽象的转向越来越简单的、具体的或 "近在咫尺 "的。就潜在的政治对象而言，这种变化往往是从抽象的、"意识形态 "的原则到比较明显的社会团体或有魅力的领袖，最后到家庭、工作和直接伙伴等直接经验的对象。这些变化大多已在各种资料中以这样或那样的形式有所暗示。例如，"有限的视野"、"缩短的时间视角 "和 "具体的思维 "被认为是受教育程度低的人的思想世界的显著特征。
Could it be that the masses, referred to by Hamilton as a "dreadful monster," are composed in the main of "concrete thinkers," who think concretely because they lack a facility for, or a habit of, deep reading? After all, deep readers at least may know what they don't know, and hence are better able to deploy shields of skepticism against all forms of advertising, including the political kind that enchants populist mobs into being. Those who lack a reading habit may be locked in perpetual intellectual adolescence, but they can still gather in the street, shout, and even shoot. The 16th-century English bishop John Bridges wrote that a fool and his money are soon parted. He might have said the same about a non-reader and his political agency.
难道被汉密尔顿称为 "可怕怪物 "的大众主要是由 "具体的思想家 "组成的，他们之所以具体地思考，是因为他们缺乏深入阅读的能力或习惯吗？毕竟，深度阅读者至少可能知道自己不知道什么，因此能够更好地用怀疑主义的盾牌抵御各种形式的广告，包括让民粹主义暴民着迷的政治广告。缺乏阅读习惯的人可能永远处于知识的青春期，但他们仍然可以聚集在街头，大声喧哗，甚至开枪射击。16 世纪英国主教约翰-布里奇斯曾写道：傻瓜和他的钱很快就会分开。他对不读书的人和他的政治机构可能也是这么说的。
The phenomenon of deep literacy can be a powerful explanatory factor for a range of theoretical and practical questions. No single factor explains anything entirely when it comes to the spiraling universe of social and political life, and it would be a stretch to claim that any of the above arguments amounts to a proof. But to omit deep literacy from the range of considered variables seems unwise. We should continue to generate new and more interesting questions to pose about deep literacy, and the meaning of its possible erosion, or transformation by novel means, in our own country and beyond.
深层素养现象可以成为一系列理论和实践问题的有力解释因素。当涉及到社会和政治生活的螺旋式上升时，没有任何一个因素可以完全解释任何事情。但是，将深层素养排除在考虑的变量范围之外似乎是不明智的。我们应该继续就深层素养提出新的、更有趣的问题，以及在我们的国家和其他国家，深层素养可能受到的侵蚀或通过新的手段发生的转变的意义。