In the English language there are many expressions and words that indicate our high valuation of the individual. Any dictionary will give you several pages of words that have ‘self’ as a component. Philosophically, self is synonymous with the ego, but encompasses one’s nature, one’s uniqueness, in short, one’s individuality, which has come to be positively valued in Western culture. In fact, the idea of self and being has become interwoven in Western culture. What accounts for the relatively high valuation placed on the self in the West as compared, a lesser valuation of the same in other, more collectivistic, cultures?

Literacy has been a key instrument in the formation of a strong sense of selfhood. This is not to say the West has been more literate than other parts of the world, but to claim that in the West literacy has functioned differently as a result of at least nine hundred years of internalization of information. In addition, this is to claim that in Europe and America, literacy became a common mode of knowing where most of humankind continues to rely on oral communication. As we shall see, when literacy is combined with greater access to information, this has produced personalized modes of knowing, thinking, and acting.

Personal intellectual life can only develop within a liberal policy towards the dissemination of information, and this has not happened on any large scale in most world cultures. In fact, even today governments are busy screwing down the hatches to ideas outside them in order to keep a more or less controlled status quo going. So, it is safe to say that everyone has a private self, but not every culture values the development of personal opinions, ideas, and thoughts as these give the person a heightened sense of uniqueness that is at odds with prevailing collectivistic ways of life.
Since the European Renaissance, liberation of intellectual life has won over authoritarian control, with the exception of occasional periods of backsliding into authoritarianism and mass conformity. What accounts for the difference between the West and the rest when it comes to the cultivation of the self? We can always go back to the ancient Greeks, but keeping with our theme of reading and the development of a sense of individuality, one of the more recent highlights of this relationship came with the Confessions by Augustine (354–430 C.E.).

Augustine’s writings are unique for their times because they focus on the ‘I’ of first-person narration. They are introspective and self-critical, written in the hope of discovering ‘truth’ within, rather than following the conventional ‘truths’ gleaned from authorities. Augustine believed that truth comes from God but can be discovered within the person during moments of ‘illumination’. He encouraged self-exploration within a framework of bettering the Christian. But Augustine also advocated silent reading at a time when monks would recite aloud to themselves or to each other, sharing whatever they learned from scripture. It is the importance of silent reading we need to consider.

By shifting to the inner voice through silent recitation, individuals entered a wholly different experience, a different mode of cognition. This, of course, would be true mostly of the intellectual elite, those who were taught to read and to write. It largely excluded the masses until more recent times. But, back in the eleventh century, silent reading allowed the person to mull over and to relate what he read to what he already knew. The person no longer depended on orthodox interpretations of texts; he was freed of his mental chains to develop new ideas, even from the texts that the intelligentsia was expected to know. As Alberto Manguel notes: ‘the text became the reader’s own possession, the reader’s intimate knowledge’ (1996, p.51). Silent reading is believed to have allowed the person to develop a distinct sense of a private self.

This intellectual shift had social consequences. From predominantly oral to increasingly literate culture, in Europe the transformation was from the world of social relationships, centered on oral interaction, to the realms of the self – to private self-reflection, speculation, and philosophy. This epistemological shift is believed especially to have had dramatic and cumulative consequences for the nature of ‘scientific’ communication and cognition. For instance, printed texts permitted analysis ‘for deeper levels of meaning’ (exegesis). Dictionaries standardized the denotation of words, permitting greater objectivity and accuracy. Literacy also brought with it ‘abstract categorization … logical reasoning … [and] articulated self-analysis …’ (Ong, 2000, p.55). It gave rise to a sense of personal ‘ownership of words,’ as opposed to collective possession, and it encouraged thinking that was more ‘religiously neutral’ (p.132). To a great extent, the ability to read and write brought a sense of having a unique mental life to the person. This set the stage for numerous cultural changes in Europe.

With the spread of literacy, European societies developed subgroups or religious sects that had their own interpretations of the textual knowledge that was once restricted to the few. Consequently, society became more atomized as individuals associated with like-minded people who shared ideologies. This process of social diversification continued until it received a boost from the German monk, Martin Luther.

The great reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546 C.E.) was an Augustinian monk in the Roman Catholic Church. Like Augustine before him, he was stricken with a sense of doubt and inadequacy in his relationship to God. In this, Luther was influenced by the humanists and ‘free-thinkers’ of his times, men who questioned received ideas with a rational perspective. Their avid search for meaning was part of what became known as the Renaissance in Europe, a great time for the emergence of the individual, buried under years of mysticism and closed-mindedness. Literacy was essential to the ‘rebirth’ of mankind.

In Luther’s theology, matters of belief became an individual problem (Erikson, 1993, p.191). He stressed that it was not the ‘good deeds’ and payoffs to the Church that would get the believer into heaven, but a deeply-felt sincerity and spiritual authenticity that could only come through awareness of one’s ‘self’ (p.219). With its emphasis on introspection, Protestantism marks a turning point in Western man’s intellectual maturation from dependency on authority to greater self-confidence, especially in matters of ideology. Self-knowledge, spiritual self-improvement, rational education, and a degree of self-restraint and hard work were now indicators of salvation (p.217). This mentality, fuelled by increasing levels of literacy, represented a major step towards the modern age.

Luther’s Protestant teachings spread rapidly throughout Northern Europe once Gutenberg’s printing press was able to disseminate the reformer’s ideas at greater speed than ever before. Disenchanted Christians were ready for reform and they took up the new teachings with a vengeance. Once Luther had translated the Bible into the language of the people (vernacular German), everyone could read the sacred Word for himself and people no longer needed the clergy to mediate between themselves and the sacred Word. People could read the text for themselves. Greater personal independence and greater self-confidence contributed to a sense of personal autonomy and responsibility. Of course, these were a nexus of factors, all mutually reinforcing each other. They are believed to have been instrumental in establishing not only individualism but its descendent, the modern capitalist world (Erikson, 1993, p.231).
During and after the Renaissance rational communication promoted linear thinking, even as we find in the essay form, the journal article, the scientific paper and report. Such communication is stripped of the extraneousness of oral speech, to concentrate attention on the essential theme or message. Whether this format of communication is capable of real ‘objectivity’ or not is debatable. However, literacy gave words greater accuracy even as they provided deeper layers of meaning (recorded in dictionaries) for universal access.

But literacy found its most fertile soil in early America where popular education stressed the need for the ability to read and the application of rational thought in human affairs. The first settlers from Europe, the Puritans, emphasized reading and writing as means of self-improvement just as Augustine and Luther had believed them to be. By keeping spiritual diaries or autobiographies, the Puritans practiced personal self-examination. They favored the ‘plain style’ of writing, devoid of the rhetorical tricks and colorful language of oral communication because they believed people could be led astray by ‘satanic’ verbal deception (Ruland & Bradbury, p.11). Literacy in the New World thus was instrumental in the formation of an ideology centered on the self. This continues today despite ever-increasing pressures for mass-conformism.

There are, of course, many more factors that led to the development of Western individualism. Some of these have yet to be discovered. However, it is safe to say that in the Western experience silent reading, increasing levels of literacy, greater personal autonomy, and the values of hard work and progress have been instrumental in producing the modern world, for better or for worse.

Bibliography

Ezrahi, Yaron (1996) ‘Modes of reasoning and the politics of authority in the modern state.’ In David R Olson, Nancy Torrance (Eds.) Modes of Thought. Explorations in Culture and Cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press
Erikson, Erik H (1958/1993) Young Man Luther. A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company
Fernandez-Amesto, Felipe (1997) Truth. A History and Guide for the Perplexed. London: Bantam
Manguel, Alberto (1996) A History of Reading. New York, NY: Viking Press
Ong, W J (2000) Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge
Ruland, Richard and Malcolm Bradbury (1991) From Puritanism to Postmodernism. A History of American Literature. New York: Penguin Books
Triandis, Harry C (1995) Individualism and Collectivism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press

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