Gods and Monsters

The King and the Swarm preview, week 5

Over the coming weeks, as I bring book-writing to its close, I’ll be previewing my forthcoming book The King and the Swarm here, in chapter-by-chapter summary form.

Then, a couple of times a month, I’ll hold a subscriber-only AMA salon, to discuss the previews or any other themes you want to bring. The next AMA salon will take place on Thursday 13 August at 19.00 BST (14:00 EST, 11:00 PST) in the subscriber chat for this newsletter. (I’ll try and keep the thread questions from proliferating this time.)

So far I’ve made my case that the Singularity already happened, not once but three times. We looked at the deep differences between oral and literate cultures: the way learning to read rewrites our brains, and how this changed human societies at scale. We’ve explored the European manuscript culture that developed the wake of literacy: one deeply bound up with Christian faith, where books were hand-written and scarce, and where literacy meant not just reading, but also the cultivation of memory and reading aloud. Then we looked at the revolutionary effects of improving the scale and fixity of book production with print, even though people didn’t start out using it for anything very revolutionary (that came later).

This chapter summary looks at those revolutionary effects of print from the perspective of religious faith. Here the impact of print was paradoxical: it both intensified religious feeling, and also, eventually, gave rise to the “secularism” we now think of as distinctively modern.