Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

by Maryanne Wolf

As Nadine Strossen25 writes persuasively in her new book, Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, a democracy succeeds only when the rights, thoughts, and aspirations of all its citizens are respected and given voice and its citizens believe that this is true, regardless of their viewpoint. The great, insufficiently discussed danger to a democracy stems not from the expression of different views but from the failure to ensure that all citizens are educated to use their full intellectual powers in forming those views. The vacuum that occurs26 when this is not realized leads ineluctably to a vulnerability to demagoguery, where falsely raised hopes and falsely raised fears trump reason and the capacity for reflective thinking recedes, along with its influence on rational, empathic decision making.