A Response to Vitalik: Why Read Books?

Books possess secrets. They're not merely transmitters of data.

Dec 23, 2022

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I’ve given a bit of grief in the past to legacy magazine writers who fail to keep up with modern technology. Now I want to give some grief to technologists who fail to adequately assess the importance of the greatest technology man ever invented: books.

A few weeks ago Vitalik Buterin, the inventor and steward of the Ethereum ecosystem, posed the following question:

vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin

Question for people who argue that reading long-form books is virtuous or even necessary: Are podcasts an acceptable substitute? If not, why not, and what even is the difference between a podcast and an audiobook? (I frequently listen to both)

The post disturbed me. Although it was framed neutrally, it was easy to read into the tweet skepticism that there was anything inherently important about books as opposed to other media. A similar sentiment had been expressed by Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced former CEO of FTX and Alameda Research.

But what disturbed me more was that though I do believe books are superior media, I didn’t see anyone formulate what I considered to be a satisfactory answer as to why.

Given that I run a business centered around the reviewing of books, it seemed to me that I better be able to articulate an answer—or else find a different line of work.

So here’s my attempt.

To begin, I’m going to have to pick up a technical term from one of the best books I’ve ever read. That book is The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a monument to scholarship that weaves together neuroscience and literary criticism, by the late Dr. Julian Jaynes.

Jaynes argues that once upon a time, before the ancient event known as the Bronze Age Collapse, humanity as a whole was effectively schizophrenic.

That is, our behavior was determined wholly by what seemed to us to be “voices in our head.” This function of the human brain can be labeled bicamerality. (Apologies to any Jaynes specialist here—I’m eliding some stuff.)

This function of bicamerality still exists today, but it is much diminished. It can be accessed by various rituals (speaking in tongues), by poetry, by hypnosis, and, involuntarily, it is accessed ceaselessly in the form of actual clinical schizophrenia.

(We can shelve for now the question of whether the voices one hears in states of bicamerality are in any sense objectively “real” or whether they can be explained as an epiphenomenon of the brain. For this argument we must simply accept Jaynes’s argument that the phenomenon of hearing such voices existed at large scale in the past and continues to exist in the modern era under the circumstances of hypnosis, poetic trance, glossolalia, and schizophrenia.)

But why would we want this capacity? It’s hard to give a reason that can be understood according to our modern utilitarian mindset. In this respect it’s impossible not to draw a through-line threading SBF’s disdain for books and his “effective altruist” philosophy.

A few weeks ago at a bar I was having a discussion with a very nice, intelligent guy who described himself as sympathetic to effective altruism. I mentioned that the philosophy had never attracted me and he asked me to explain why. I told him that I didn’t believe that data throws much light on deep ethical questions . “For instance,” I asked, “does the data tell us that we ought to eliminate suffering?”

“But of course.”

“And what if that leads us to a world where, in order to minimize suffering, we all become non-sentient vegetables, as in The Matrix—or perhaps simply minimally volitional human slugs strapped to our VR headsets?”

That was not something he’d considered.

Now I’m not saying I have the answer to my own question about suffering. But if you’re going to be an Effective Altruist, you better have a damned good answer! Otherwise you run the risk of being *less* altruistic the more effective you are. If there’s no firm moral footing to your altruism, then there’s no use being effective about it.

If your moral endeavors consisted solely of an attempt to use available data to eliminate suffering, then the human capacity for bicamerality is probably not something you would want to preserve—it’s probably not even something that you would notice.

But let’s assume just for argument that there’s more to life than simply eliminating human suffering. Suddenly it might seem that all kinds of human capacities might be worth preserving, even if they don’t appear, on the face of it, “good” for humanity. If we remain humble and admit our lack of knowledge about the purpose of life, then all sorts of strange vistas open up.

Why is bicamerality, specifically, worth preserving? To answer, we’ll have to talk about a religiosity in a very broad sense. I don’t mean religiosity in the sense of adherence to any creed. I mean it in terms of a deep sense of contiguousness with all existing matter, and the attendant nearly indescribable sense of wellbeing that follows from that.

Although it might sound rather grand, such consciousness (sometimes called cosmic consciousness) is not particularly rare. William James collected example upon example of such consciousness among everyday people in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Even stranger, the psychologist Abraham Maslow found that all mentally healthy people regularly experience some variety of “cosmic consciousness”—Maslow called them “Peak Experiences”—and, not only that, having “Peak Experiences” was the best possible predictor for whether or not a person was in generally good mental health.

This should surprise us. We’d expect mental health to be something that improves linearly—you have more of it the more you have basic good things: a roof over your head, a good job, a family, etc. But actually what matters most is whether you have experiences that transcend all the everyday elements of a supposedly “good life.”

Some people seem to have peak experiences very easily. For others it’s more difficult. But in any case these experiences are less like everyday life, and more like schizophrenia. They are, I believe, instance of bicamerality. It may be that this bicameral function is not easily accessible by every human—just as not every human is tall and athletic enough to play in the NBA or has enough lobe power plus discipline to become a chess grandmaster. It may be that certain people have higher levels of bicamerality and certain people have none at all.

If that’s true, then it’s hard to bear down too hard on someone asking “what is the point of books?” It may be that the person is unable to access the phenomenon that would immediately answer the question. Similarly, someone with zero or near-zero autism-adjacency could very easily ask the question “What’s the point of chess?” But a highly autism-adjacent chess player would never ask that would question; the question is precluded by the very phenomenon of playing chess at a high level.

Now we can now finally ask the question—what about books, or “long-form books,” as Vitalik puts it, makes them such catnip for those ranking higher on the bicamerality scale?

To quote from a really old book:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Every culture, not just Christianity, gives an account of the magical power of language. The poet Robert Graves argues persuasively that poetry itself is a vestige of the rites of a pre-Abrahamic religion that has since been forgotten. At the very least it is generally acknowledged that the different meters (iamb, trochee, etc.) evolved from ritual dances. (Gravers maintains that the iamb comes from a ritual that mimicked the hobbling mating dance of partridges.) And we know from the sacred texts of all cultures that certain words were considered magically powerful (such as YHWH in the Torah); and even today advertisers and other master persuaders compile lists of power words that are proven to be more effective than comparable synonyms.

But this is all anecdotal. Do words actually possess some power beyond their ability to transmit data? Could there be something inhering within the sound of words?

Any poet will answer this question with a resounding yes. Certain principles of the manipulation of sound are known to all real poets. One such principle is the variation of vowel sounds within a line. Take for instance the first line of Thomas Gray’s famous “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day. Every stressed vowel sound is different. The only repeated vowel sounds are the schwa (represented by /ə/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet) of the two thes and of.

This is beginning to sound as though I’m merely praising the musicality of language that can be found in books; but I’m trying to get at something much deeper than that. To begin our descent into the depths, we can ask ourselves: Why is musicality itself good? To say that a poem is good because it’s musical is like saying a painting is good because it’s cinematic. We’re just dancing around what we’re trying to say by pointing to another genre of art that gives us the same sensation.

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What is the sensation we’re looking for? To answer that question we’ll turn to the great English poet A. E. Housman. “Experience has taught me,” Housman said in the lecture “The Name and Nature of Poetry,” “when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.”

Robert Graves agreed: "A. E. Housman's test of a true poem was simple and practical; does it make the hairs at one's chin bristle if one repeats it silently while shaving."

As did that most poetic of novelists, Vladimir Nabokov (although he paid particular attention to another part of the body than the chin: “Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.”

And for a gloss on Housman’s statement, here is the great Italian delectator of literature Roberto Calasso: “He who recalls a line of verse while shaving experiences that shiver, that romaharṣa, or ‘horripilation,’ that befalls Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gītā when overwhelmed by the epiphany of Kṛṣṇa.”

What, in the common parlance, are these guys on about?

I’m neither a physiologist nor a metaphysician, so I won’t get too technical. But one thing that’s worth noting is that the raising of hairs on one’s body occurs in other situations as well. For instance, when lightning is about to strike. This phenomenon, known variously as goosebumps, pilorection, or horripilation, triggers nerves sending electrical signals to our muscles in order to make them contract and to make our hairs stand up. According to a study in Nature, such states can contribute to wound repair.

Could it be that there’s some hidden power to words that has been more or less occluded over history? And might there be a connection between sound and some kind of generative power? The idea sounds pretty out there. But on the other hand we use gadgets that convert sound to electricity all the time: They’re called microphones.

If there’s even a smidge of truth to all this, books would be the best place to look for such production of sound. For one thing, many books are old; thus they would be closer to whatever the lost source of this power might be. And of course books are the media which humans have used for all history to record their words as carefully as possible. And it takes great care to produce truly resonant patterns of words.

I’m not arguing that books have, explicitly, been the vehicles for sound-based electrical power. What I’m arguing is that this ability of man to create power using sound has always been inherent, and has always been both one of the motivating factors for and the products of ritual, poetry, and imaginative prose.

Literature has always implied something more than the mere transmission of data. It’s just that we’ve either lost the ability to identify it precisely and to discuss it scientifically. One reason for that may be that we simply evolved away from this capacity for literature. In other words, our overall bicamerality had decreased. After all, we know that once upon a time poets used to spontaneously compose epics after going into bicameral trances. Try doing that today! (To understand the exact connections between electricity, poetry, and bicamerality, you’ll have to read Jaynes’s book. See especially page 365.)

Whether this trend can be reversed is beyond my ken. All I can do now is leave you with a poem from the aforementioned A. E. Housman. To my mind this is as good a test as any of latent bicamerality. See if you feel the slightest shiver upon reading the final stanza. If you do, books may be for you.