Benjamin Franklin on Reading, Attention, and the Human Mind

When, by some indulgence of Providence, I found myself once more walking the streets of America, I was astonished to discover that nearly the whole written knowledge of mankind had been placed within reach of almost every citizen.

I thought at first that a great work had been accomplished. In my day, knowledge was limited by distance, expense, and scarcity. When my friends and I established the Library Company of Philadelphia, we pooled our money so that one man's small purse might gain access to many men's minds. A useful volume was read, reread, discussed, and tested against experience. We did not possess many books, but the books we did possess, in some measure, possessed us.

Today, a young tradesman may carry in his pocket more books than the richest scholar of Europe could once have assembled in a lifetime. No printer who ever strained at a hand press could behold such abundance without admiration.

And yet I soon perceived a paradox. You have reinvented access to knowledge, but you have not reinvented the human mind. It still requires silence, attention, reflection, and time if knowledge is to become understanding. The tragedy may be that, having placed nearly all the wisdom of mankind within reach of every citizen, you have made knowledge abundant while allowing the sustained attention required to understand it to become increasingly inadequate to the task.

We suffered from a famine of information. You live amid a deluge. A man may consume words from morning until night without remaining with any of them long enough to be instructed. The deepest danger is not that you know too little, but that you encounter so much and absorb so little. A mind may become crowded without becoming enlarged. It may possess information without wisdom, opinions without understanding, and convictions never tested by serious encounter with another mind.

Publication has undergone a similar revolution. In my time the gates were often too narrow, and worthy voices went unheard. Your Internet has thrown open a different gate: nearly everyone may now place an opinion before the public. That is a triumph. But wisdom and nonsense, scholarship and invention, reason and rage now arrive upon the same glowing pane, each demanding the same attention. The old gatekeepers sometimes excluded merit. The new gates admit nearly everything—and in the abundance, merit itself may be buried.

The serious writer therefore enters a marketplace that rewards the immediate, the enraging, and the absolute. Good writing is tempted to imitate flawed writing merely to be noticed. And the reader, moving constantly from message to image, headline to outrage, argument to amusement, may retain the ability to read words while gradually losing the ability to follow thought.

This is why serious reading matters. A book asks us to enter another mind and remain there. History confronts us with people who did not share our assumptions. Biography reveals character across years rather than moments. Philosophy requires us to follow an argument beyond the sentence we prefer. The novel permits us to inhabit lives we have never lived.  Most importantly, serious reading exposes us to the possibility that we may be wrong.

Your technology increasingly offer each citizen the opinions he already favors and the arguments most likely to secure his continued attention. The conclusion comes first; information is then summoned to defend it. We cease reading to discover and begin reading to confirm.

Attention, I have come to believe, is not merely an intellectual discipline. It is a form of respect.  To read well is therefore to practice a small act of humility. For a time, another mind is permitted to speak before ours answers. We follow its argument and resist asking only whether it confirms what we already believe. Sometimes we emerge unchanged. Sometimes we discover that we were mistaken. But in either case, we have practiced one of the habits upon which civilized life depends: granting another mind our serious attention.

For a republic, the loss of that habit is no private misfortune. Self-government depends upon citizens capable of listening to people they do not immediately understand and remaining with difficult questions long enough to discover that truth may be more complicated than their faction has led them to believe.

A citizen unable to remain with a difficult page may eventually find it difficult to remain with a difficult question. You may therefore produce the curious spectacle of a nation in which everyone is informed, everyone is speaking, everyone is certain—while fewer people listen, and fewer still truly learn.

You have placed the library of the world in every hand. That is a magnificent achievement.  But a free republic requires more than information. It requires citizens capable of turning information into understanding, understanding into judgment, and judgment into wisdom.

You have built the greatest library mankind has ever known. The question is whether, amid all this abundance, you are losing the kind mind capable of entering it.

B. FRANKLIN