Re: my recent essay on the dangers intrinsic to any attempt to create a monoculture, I think of this passage from Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle describing what happens to an apparatchik named (ironically enough) Innokenty Volodin after he has begun to break with his formation and training by reading forbidden books:

It turned out that you have to know how to read. It is not just a matter of letting your eyes run down the pages. Since Innokenty, from youth on, had been shielded from erroneous or outcast books, and had read only the clearly established classics [of the Marxist-Leninist canon], he had grown used to believing every word he read, giving himself up completely to the author’s will. Now, reading writers whose opinions contradicted one another, he was unable for a while to rebel, but could only submit to one author, then to another, then to a third.

Monocultures effectively forbid reading, in any meaningful sense of the word. Consider the “sensitivity readers” that publishers now employ to make sure that books don’t offend a favored group: one could debate whether such practices do more good than harm — I can certainly imagine the value of having someone help me avoid giving unnecessary and unwanted offense — but the one thing sensitivity readers aren’t doing is reading. They should be called “sensitivity analysts” or “offense detectors.” Genuine reading requires a degree of negative capability — a virtue that any monoculture (rightly, given its interests) designates a vice.