Literacy for peace

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.

Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

Among the many reasons Steven Pinker gives in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature for the gradual decline of human violence over the centuries (see "The decline of violence," Nov. 13), one of the most important may be the spread of literacy. As more people learned to read and the printing of books and other materials increased, rates of violence gradually declined.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Why might that be so? Pinker answers that question in the lines above: Reading almost anything gives us another person's point of view. There's an American proverb that goes something like, "Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins." Reading puts us in those moccasins. Even if we still disagree with what writers are saying, we can at least see they have reasons for their viewpoints. Rational argument becomes a better response than fists or bullets.

Of course, books can sometimes lead to violence. Abraham Lincoln was not entirely joking when he said of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, that she was the "little woman who wrote the book that started the great war." Yet consider the impact books like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird have had on race relations in the United States. Such books put white readers in the "moccasins" of black Americans. Other books help readers understand the points of view of American Indians, Asians, Moslems, Mormons, atheists, evangelical Christians, Republicans, Democrats or anyone else one might feel a compulsion to take up arms against.

Movies, television and now the Internet have broadened what Pinker calls the "technology for perspective-taking." Almost every day, through one means or another, most of us are exposed to how other people live, how they think, how they feel and what they believe. Sometimes this may make us angry, but rarely does it make us violent.