Congratulations on being attacked – you have arrived. Very nice piece btw.

Once upon a time, there was a physical ‘market place’ of ideas. Town and village notice boards, meetings in the town and village halls and… actual marketplaces, selling… food, goods and services. There was also gossip in the street and over the garden fence. And a ‘framework of morality’ to attempt to hang it all together – dare I say church and school and community. And, of course, there are always those with power and vested interest (even in the local fruit and veg show and, well, try standing at the school gates!), and sometimes that power and vested interest was misused. However, as long as people could physically come together to share experience, thoughts and ideas, however seemingly banal, there was hope and at least some sort of meaningful life, as maybe lockdown taught us. And yes, the printing press enabled those thoughts and ideas to be more widely spread and able to be thought about (although the witch hunts seemed to be a knock on effect initially). But beware… the problem with this model of existence is that your family, neighbours, friends, community are all watching (no wonder there were witch hunts!). And feeding back to you. And metaphorically stroking and patting, but also warning if we wander onto dangerous ground. And that is powerful stuff. Learnt over hundreds of thousands years. Just like Grimms fairy tales or any other myth or religion to make sense of the world and our place in it. It takes a ‘village’ to bring up a child. And then that child becomes the ‘village’, taking on their responsibilities in turn. But, all I need to do is skim, scroll, tap, click and hey guys look at me! Shall I press send? Indeed another stunning and brilliant essay by Mary Harrington. There is a slow food movement. How about a campaign for a ‘slow news based on actual certifiable facts’ movement. Where participants are actually accountable to the people they have to physically co-exist with. But surely that is old hat because we intellectuals are all internationalist and globalists now. My truth… unless of course you’ve spent the day slogging away doing the hard lifting to then come home to feed and care for the family. Exhausting that. And someone has to do the hard lifting for any society to run successfully.

It is very nice to see ideas that were curated people such as Curtis Yarvin and other neo-reactionaries are now becoming more mainstream within conservative dialogue. Conservatives, if they wish to conserve anything, must abandon their old obsession with “liberalism” and wake up to the current reality instead of preaching about 1980s small-government nonsense.

Thanks again for such an interesting piece and I don’t doubt the trouble. But I’m not completely convinced by the deep literacy thesis.
Reading almost certainly changes people’s consciousness, yes. The sharp increase in literacy amongst ancient Hebrews in the 6th century BC exilic period, as the Bible began to be written down, correlates with the emergence of monotheism: an oral culture is a distributed culture, whereas a literate culture requires the individual to find the meaning of words within themselves, hence fostering a gathered, unified sense of reality – including monotheism. But not democracy. At least, not back then.
Conversely, if the origins of democracy are to be found in ancient Athens, I don’t think literacy had much to do with it – though there was a growing sense of individual consciousness. Witness the shift in sculptures in the 5th century BC from generic kouroi and kores to figures with individual beauty and inner poise. Ancient, partial democracy was a compromise between this new consciousness of individuality and older traditions of collective rootedness to gods and land. But I don’t think reading had much to do with it.
Conversely again, there are the moral panics that surround deep literacy in the modern period. When people started reading novels, for example, there were worries about idleness and indolence. All that sitting around reading.
So I actually wonder whether the marketplace of ideas is the problem, when marketplace means free trading for its own sake, rather than as a means of arriving at goods – in the deep sense of what’s good for life.
When even civilisation is depicted as just one possibly interesting manifestation of ideas after another, as the recent BBC Civilisations remake portrayed it, contact is lost with a transcendent centre and sense of the good, which might triangulate myriad experiments and quests, and hold them in dialogue together.
Maybe the rise in authoritarianism is a misplaced yearning for such holding.

Thank you for this – well put.
Incidentally, the systems where the decisions are made well upstream of the voters are well known to us who were adult before 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down: It is “Democratic Centralism”, where the Party decides what and who is voted on, thus assuring the ideologically correct outcome.
Also, I would argue with your contention that we live in an era of unique superabundance of information. In absolute terms, no doubt, but in relative terms, the advent of the movable-type printing press brought a storm of handbills, some of them informative, but many scurrilous and peddling the wildest conspiracy theories. The authoritarian answer was the registration of printing presses and censorship, the democratic response was the responsibility of publishers for their product.
While I share your concerns, I am more optimistic – while in the formerly free West those who risked their lives to defend freedom have mostly died, in Eastern and Southern Europe we still have a constituency for whom authoritarianism was a reality much more recently, and seared in the memory of our generation. Our Eastern European friends have their own historical hang-ups and democratic growing-up to do, but they have seen the tangible and psychological differences freedom makes, and will – hopefully – come to our rescue, however fitful and idiosyncratic that process may be.

In its place we find a growing tendency for political change to be driven by campaigning bodies that aim not to win by debating, but to do so by setting the parameters within which democratic political debate is able to take place. Whether it’s creating guidelines, writing school curricula, influencing legislation or shaping international standards or treaties, such activity takes place, by definition, prior to democratic deliberation.

The control of language to influence debate – Blair (the other Blair – Orwell) called it New Speak in 1984.
Making some words verboten, making some words we are familiar with mean something different (what is a woman?)… it’s all an attempt to shape the way we think by manipulating the language.
Surprising how much of 1984 has come true without us noticing or worse without us caring.

The thesis that long form reading enabled the rise of democracy and modern government feels flimsy at best. Europe tore itself apart some 100 years ago that long predated modern media strategies. It is true that the radio, mass print, and rising literacy enabled nefarious (and evil) forms of persuasion and propaganda but these forms were also defeated. Social media as we know it is 20 or so years old but the seeds of our discontent have germinated for decades.

I saw no mention as to why the youth feel discontent with the world order. For the most part, youth in the west are rioting. They have seen material declines in their hopes for the future. We need to ask ourselves why we do not see such rioting in the east and the answer feels obvious. Speak to any Indian, Chinese, or southeast Asian citizen and most have experienced a 20x-40x increase in GDP per capita since 1980. In the west, just a handful of nations have replicated such astonishing growth, which are Poland and Chile. As a youthful member of the west, I have seen a horrific gutting of future prospects with stark rises in housing, healthcare, and education costs. This is not caused by social media.

Finally, some anecdotes. Chile rejected its populist constitution and sent it back to the drawing board. It was the longest constitution ever written, which flies in the face of Mary’s thesis that long form writing is dead. In the US, abortion was returned to the states. Though I deeply disagreed with the decision and believe I have been vindicated in my conviction that Republican politicians merely used abortion to raise votes, there is an argument to be made that this was a democratic exercise.

I think this article made a few good points but blaming social media for the destruction of democracy is a bridge too far. There are far more compelling arguments that can simplistically be boiled down to, “Can I live a good life with reasonably hard work?” For many youngsters, that contract was broken by their elders in the west.

This is the best summary of our current situation that I have seen. Everything that Mary writes here resonates with my own (68-year) experience, which includes 26 years as a professor at an undergraduate liberal-arts college.
The decline of long-form reading is a significant contributor to the gradual decline of critical thinking skills. At the same time, there have been so many other cultural changes (and more changes continuing), many of which interconnect and feed back to accelerate the overall social upheaval.

Somewhat defeatist. No? The author is right that the Covid ‘pandemic’ showcased for us the future (longing for and faith in a Caesar ‘who’ would deliver us from evil). That it was a generational response (even post-Pandemic), I cannot agree. Instead what happened mirrored the Dark Ages when the lamp of learning was kept alight by the few labouring in monasteries giving birth ultimately to the Renaissance for which we are or should be grateful; except this time round it has been the few courageous academics, scientists, doctors (including Malone, whom UnHerd labelled ‘controversial’) who despite being ‘not noticed’ curtesy ‘the algorithm’ successfully challenged Caesar. This fact signals for me there are deeper non-material emergent processes reliant on each of us evoking by summoning those selfsame practices the author believes have passed their sell-by date: deep reading, sustained engagement, abstract thinking, deliberation and an inner life. In short, not capitulation to Caesar.

A very good article. The problem is that as every year goes by the long form gets longer and the distractions get greater. Each generation is born with a blank sheet and to make intelligent decisions they need to learn an ever more complex context. It takes time and effort and they face a bewildering array of information sources.
The same happens in administration, political leaders do not have the time (or for some the inclination) to understand all the implications of a policy and its implementation. The civil service has expanded to accommodate this, it requires trust and co-operation between administrators and politicians to balance power with knowledge. It will require a remarkable leader to accomplish it and govern intelligently.
Finally individuals have an increasing sense of entitlement, including the right to have a say irrespective of the effort they put into thinking things through.

I am a manual worker, full of despair at the society we have allowed to take root in our great country.
I come here mainly to find out what Mary is thinking and this essay is important. we all know that UK society is in decline, but few of us realise that much of the damage is done by the lack of interest in reading, especially amongst the inhabitants of my social sphere.
Now it’s all about quick one liners and sound bites people lack the power of concentration or the ability to reason. We are becoming a nation of stupid entitled yobs.
I gave up on democracy years ago we never actually had it, it was simply a device to keep useless jobsworth politicians in position to better themselves. Now we can see, as the veil is being pulled back, the true nature of current Western society. Mary is a lone voice who understands what is happening to society and her words are like a glass of fine Malt whisky, bringing cheer and a sense that renewal is indeed possible.

While I hesitate to recommend Marshall McLuhan because (a) it sounds pretentious and (b) for a communications guru he was remarkably bad at communicating, his central argument about the way in which literacy reshaped society, and in which declining literacy will therefore necessarily change its shape again, is highly relevant here. His famous aphorism “the medium is the message,” meaning that how we take information in dramatically affects what information we absorb and how, is horribly pertinent to social media.
P.S. Given the emphasis the author rightly places on “deep reading” I suppose it’s OK to suggest slogging through McLuhan’s problematic prose in quest of his important insights.

Oh Mary, will you marry me? I’ll treat you well if only you continue to write these insightful, incisive and thoughtful articles.

“…the time to have done anything about it was around 30 years ago, when the first commercial ISPs launched.”
I agree with most of what you say. But you hit the nail with the sentence above. Always the same story … people keeps inventing things -i.e the internet, mRAN technology-, without measuring the consequences of those unregulated fabulous inventions to humanity and the fabric of society in the long term.
Then the Big Fish comes along use it and abuse it to make billions without due accountability. For a while we believe we are all beneficiaries of the invention. Until one day we wake up to the reality of its devastating effects … always too late! Big Fish has taken all it could swallow and doesn’t care about the chaos left behind.
Perhaps we are all too lazy to question and demand accountability. Perhaps we are too naïve and gullible and deserve what we get … the result of being too shortsighted.
 

Another insightful piece from Ms Harrington. I note with interest this particular statement: “I predict the following: post-democracy will retain democracy-like rituals, but actual politics will happen well upstream of voting. And where such regimes exercise power directly, this will be couched in impersonal procedure that impedes direct accountability even as it enables more frankly authoritarian policies“. Surely this is how both Russia and the EU operate now and have done so for some time?

“Well, it turns out that this makes “the marketplace of ideas” much more volatile, infectious, and politicised, and accordingly less willing to notice politically inconvenient facts. That is, less a vector for collective truth-seeking than an accelerant for conspiracy fantasy, purity spirals and unhinged meme wars. And this is chipping away at faith in the capacity of debate to make anything better”.

Argument by use of fallacies

Maybe this is the limit of both reason and feelings that we have access to. We can only ever swing from one idea to the other with slight permutations of culture and contemporary values. It’s not much, but then again maybe that’s all we are. And if you’re lucky you might live right on the cusp of change. Which means it’s no one’s fault, but just reaction.

“Long-form reading builds up an interlinked base of knowledge, held in long-term memory, that you can use to think with. “
In an argument about education I was told – by teachers – that rote learning was bad – it was about good memory – point being that knowledge is specifically the retention / remembering of information, otherwise you don’t have knowledge, and therefore no foundation to think with.
We weren’t the last generation (early 40’s) to recall a time before internet, we were the last generation who were taught this way to retain information, whether we knew it or not at the time.

To those here like me who agree with Mary: What is to be done? If our fellow citizens are rendering themselves no longer capable of self government, how are we to respond? How is the heritage of Weestern Civilization to be maintained through what will only be described as a new dark age? Relocate to a different country? Retreat to a hermitage? How to educate your children for what’s coming?

I’m serious about this question. Ideas?