Quote and Comment, Wolf

The quality of our reading stands as an index to the quality of our thought.  

– Maryanne Wolf

When I was a child there was a song we sang in Sunday school. You may remember it. 

Oh, be careful, little eyes, what you see,/Oh, be careful, little eyes, what you see./For the Father up above is looking down in love,/Oh, be careful, little eyes, what you see.

There were several more verses similarly admonishing the ears, tongue, hands, and feet. As it turns out, we were being given very, very good advise—both for our spiritual formation and for living in the world that was yet to come. There would be much for us to lay our eyes upon. More than we could imagine.

Now, decades and decades later, we’ve arrived. And the case appears to be uncomfortably straightforward.

Some Facts: Less than half of us are reading books, while all of us are reading online content. The dialogue in our public space (and in many of our private ones) has degraded to the point of being not simply unproductive but destructive.

A Potenital Conclusion: This latter source of reading—no need to comment on its quality—has become our index, and dialogue is the evidence of thought. Do you wish to impact the quality of your thought? Choose carefully what you read. And maybe, if enough of us decide to impact our own score on Wolf’s Index, we’ll begin to impact our culture.