Directed Porosity

In yesterday’s The Atlantic, Joshua Bennett, a literature professor at MIT, wrote that he’s building a Great Books program there.¹ In an age when machines can summarise books in seconds, Bennett thinks students should wrestle with difficult texts together. They need a canon, not just a reading list. Why? Bennett quotes his great-grandmother: reading, she told his mother, can never be stolen. »It is yours the way little else in this life is yours.« Singer-songwriter Tom Waits said almost the same thing about love: »All that you’ve loved is all you own«.² Both are solving the same puzzle: what do you call an ownership that can’t be taken away, and how does something so private become something a society holds in common?

»A kind of directed porosity, steering where millions of already-open, already-permeable minds get perturbed, without ever reaching inside a single one of them«

The Stoic philosophers had a name for the first half: ta eph’ hēmin, the things within our power. Biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela arrived at something related when they tried to define what makes a living system alive at all.³ A cell, an organism, a mind stays itself by staying closed: nothing outside can reach in and install a new structure directly. But it isn’t sealed. It’s »structurally coupled« to everything around it: the world can perturb it – nudge it toward one next state rather than another, without ever specifying what that state will be. A poem doesn’t put a thought in you. If it’s any good, it perturbs you, and what you do with that perturbation is built from whatever you already were. Reading stays a private act even when something real crosses the boundary between you and the world.

Critic George Steiner described that crossing in four stages: trust that a text means something, extract its meaning (a small violence, since something is taken from the original), incorporate it into your own »house of thought«, and finally restitute it: give something back. Understanding is never entirely innocent.⁴ But Steiner describes two entities already in a room together. He doesn’t explain what brought them there in the first place. Of everything that might have caught your attention, why this particular book? And how does it come to be shared by millions of otherwise sealed-off minds who probably won’t ever meet?

That’s the canon’s job, and the answer to the second half of our question. Not trusting the text or incorporating it to our thinking – those stay exactly as private as ever – but raising the odds that enough people will get in contact with the same handful of targets: a kind of directed porosity, steering where millions of already-open, already-permeable minds get perturbed, without ever reaching inside a single one of them.

That’s not just a figure of speech: there’s mathematics to support it. Percolation theory describes how, below a critical fraction of open pores, water remains trapped in isolated pockets. Cross that threshold, and a continuous path suddenly emerges through the material.⁵ Culture percolates in much the same way. Readers remain separate, each enclosed in a private world, until enough of them encounter the same text. Then something that nobody designed snaps into being: a connected network of minds, spanning distances that none of its individual members could cross alone.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins gave the unsteered version of directed porosity a name: the meme, an idea that spreads from mind to mind the way a gene spreads from body to body, selected for nothing but its capacity for replication.⁶ A meme needs no canon, no sense of what’s worth keeping – only the dumb luck of fitting the holes it finds. It’s catchy rather than cherished, and sometimes that’s enough to cross boundaries a canon spends centuries trying to cross on purpose.

Which brings us back to Bennett’s reading list, and the strange business of deciding what a society should read together. A canon selects, from everything that might perturb us, a few things that millions of people will encounter independently. Over time, that selection shapes the landscape of possible thought: what a society can recognise, argue about, remember. When enough people are perturbed by the same things, their private worlds begin to resonate. A society emerges from connections nobody can see, let alone control.

Bennett’s great-grandmother was right. What you read can never be stolen. But that doesn’t mean it was entirely your choice. We can’t choose what happens inside another mind. We can choose what millions of minds are exposed to. And that, over time, is how a culture perturbs itself into existence.

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