As modern society treads through the fast-paced, persistent waves of automation and quantification, the Romantic in me, while intrigued and more often than not amazed by what the latest algorithms can achieve, wishes for a breather. A collective pause. And the exploration of a question (or three): what are these AI systems ultimately for? Are they truly creating a world that we wish to live in? Finally, is the direction we are headed in helpful for posterity?

At this point, I came across Carl Hendrick’s Substack post: The Humility of the Page: The Lost Ethics of Deep Reading. I hadn’t thought of reading as an ethical practice per se before, and his juxtaposition of deep reading and algorithmic optimization prompted me to revisit my own relationship with written texts.

Hendrick explains how reading is indeed an ethical practice–and a deliberate one at that:

It is the discipline of giving sustained, generous attention to the interior life of another. To read carefully is to say: your words matter; your complexity matters; your thought, even if difficult or dissonant, matters. It is to suspend our impulse to reply, to judge, to scroll away. And in that suspension, something else arises: empathy, reflection, even transformation.

He notes that as a result of immersing himself in such an exercise:

The boundaries of [his] moral imagination were being stretched, gently but insistently, by voices far wiser and more complex than [his] own and [he] became a better person for it.

Several years ago, one of my college professors had described philosophy as “a continuous conversation.” And that’s what reading essay collections from Western and Eastern antiquity into the 1900s definitely felt like! There was a certain magic to poring over the meditations of influential thinkers, meticulously tracing their reasoning through the many pages, and attempting to grasp the wisdom that they sought to impart. I wasn’t just in the seminar room reading a printed PDF document; I was making a determined foray, albeit amateur, into their minds. New spaces for conversation emerged for my classmates and myself as their voices – certainly “far wiser and more complex” – reached across space and time.

My high school music teacher, if I remember correctly, said something similar as well–particularly about the sheet music clustered on the stands in front of us. It was up to us, the readers of inscriptions passed down through generations, to carry forth and hopefully learn from the voices, emotions, and ideas communicated on paper by those who came before. There are simply no words adequate enough to express the swelling of energy our ensemble felt as we brought to life Dvořák’s New World Symphony and transported ourselves to the 1800s for all of 45 minutes. (If you haven’t listened to the fourth movement, please do.) During those 45 minutes, we became a part of something greater as we coexisted with the music. There was no sense of urgency nor need to be more efficient or productive. Just being present and finding joy in connection was enough.

To read deeply is to insist that some things, wisdom, empathy, the expansion of human understanding, cannot be optimised, only experienced.

Based on my own experiences (the ones mentioned above being but two examples), I agree. Reading with intention invites us to engage with “slowness [a]nd sustained attention”, which stem from simply being–breathing and taking in what’s right in front of us. These in turn prime us to connect across cultures and eras. A critical exercise in ethics, especially during a time when the “move fast and break things” ethos seems more prevalent than ever.

With both the past and the future in mind, I sincerely hope that over the next few years, we are able to take a step back and, in the process, examine ways in which we can reconcile the new advances that AI applications offer with opportunities for stillness that allow us to be in touch with our and others’ inner selves.