Reading should not be, must not be, ought not be an act of consumption. Something where we engage, use a product thereby incorporate it into ourselves. You cannot consume a good text, a fine piece of writing. The best way of thinking about it to me is that it’s an act of encounter. It’s coming face to face with something, metaphorically speaking, that is not us but which we have to attend to. What are the enemies of attention/ attentiveness? Haste, superficiality, characterisation and mischaracterisation, dismissal, disdain for objects/ people. Attentiveness, that moment where we linger instead of dismissing it. We hover over the send button before sending the tweet. That act of hesitation and lingering with something is an important action within our moral development. Today the common view held is reducing text to mere information. The belief that a text is something then that you can scan, skim or zig zag your way through without comprehending it. We are on the brink of a new age of illiteracy or moral illiteracy. The inability or incapacity to attend to texts that otherwise demand our attention. These might be well written opinion pieces, novels, monographs or quarterly essays. Moral illiteracy is the inability to attend to a text that doesn’t simply open itself up at a first glance. In our reading habits we have become superficial. We consume gargantuan amounts of information every day, yet we are almost entirely illiterate in the way we are prepared to wrestle with difficult complex information. In our writing habits we are becoming conformists rather than nuanced. We are becoming indelicate and ungentle rather than persuasive and seductive. You put these together and you are eroding one of the fundamental faculties of the moral life. Which is to mean what we say, stand by what we say and for what we say to be left answerable to other people and for us to engage with the self-presentation of other people as something that needs to be tarried with, lived with, engaged with rather than simply dismissed or otherwise consumed.