People in a post-literate society can still read; it’s just that most of them will choose to watch short-form videos instead. (Skibidi Toilet / Alexey Gerasimov)
I have spent most of my adult life in elite universities; first as a student, then doing teaching and research. It now feels inevitable that I would live this way, but it wasn’t always so. I grew up lower middle class in Northwest England, my dad a teacher in a local high school, my mum a secretary for a company that sold screws. Despite us not being Catholic, I went to the local Catholic comprehensive, where I specialised in getting myself kicked out of RE lessons for challenging claims made by the teachers. (I mean, come on, it really isn’t the case that condoms don’t work because the Aids virus is “too small”.)
Aged 15, my hobbies consisted of listening to punk rock, falling off skateboards, and smoking pot with my friends. If you’d asked my teachers to pick the child most likely to get degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, and then spend a lifetime in education, I would have been quite far down the list. But in the year of my GCSEs, I had a revelation. If I wanted to get out of Southport (and I very much did) I might have to reconsider my plans. Maybe I should stop being the class clown, and actually do some work; see what happened if I tried, rather than coasted? Turns out, I wasn’t just good at schoolwork, I enjoyed it. (OK not you, maths). By the time my A levels rolled around, I never looked back.
Except this story isn’t quite right. It makes me the main character in a way I don’t deserve. The truth is, I could never have made that step if I hadn’t come from a family filled with books. Pretty much every room in my parents’ house has books in it, thousands of them in total. Both my parents read to me from a young age, my French mother gritting her teeth and slogging through all the Chronicles of Narnia, and much else besides. I lived around the corner from the library. I had friends who read, too.
So as much as I messed around in high school, I had a solid foundation in reading. In the end, I didn’t need a fancy private education or personal tutors to luck my way into Oxford and then a career in academia. I made it without those. But I would never have made it without books.
All of which makes James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages a distressing read. Although he grew up in Tyneside rather than Merseyside, like me Marriott is lower middle class, from a bookish family, and reading eventually propelled him to a position traditionally held by the children of elites. He’s a little younger than I am (I can remember the world without the internet; he can’t). But if he’s right, we are the last of a dying breed.
To some extent, The New Dark Ages is a beefed-up version of Marriott’s Substack post that went viral last year — and has prompted many similar articles since. The evidence is in: reading is collapsing. Though this started with the rise of TV, it exploded exponentially with the smartphone (the real villain in this historical story). And the consequences are likely to be dramatic. Before reading the book, you might think that it’s hysterical for an author to claim that the rise of screens at the expense of print heralds the end of Western democracy. By the end, while you may not agree with him, you will not be calling him hysterical.
Let’s avoid one misunderstanding right away. Marriott is not claiming that in future people will be illiterate. They will still need to be able to read words to function in technologically advanced societies (text messages; emails; blindly obeying ChatGPT, etc). But what appears to be in mass decline is the reading of complex, long-form prose. This is particularly obvious when it comes to reading books, where the statistics are stark. In America, reading for pleasure has declined by 40% in the past 20 years. In the UK, The National Literacy Trust reports that the number of children saying they read for pleasure is the lowest on record. But it is also a story about the loss of widespread reading in the form of daily newspapers. As well as the disappearance of local journalism, national publications have seen circulation drop from the millions to the low hundreds of thousands. The very fact that you are reading this means that you are now firmly in a minority of the population.
What has increasingly replaced both books and newspapers is screens — and specifically the screens we carry around in our pockets, upon which we watch short-form videos. This is the dawn of the post-literate society. People can read; it’s just that most of them choose not to.
OK, so what’s the problem? Let’s start with the fact that it is only through the written word that human beings can engage in long, complex, critically verifiable chains of thought. An oral culture can bequeath a story, but it cannot become The Odyssey until somebody writes it down. Even more dramatically, imagine someone trying to dictate from memory (let alone listen to, understand, and analyse) something like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
More than that, however, reading literally rewires our brains. Marriott marshals the relevant neuroscientists, and they are clear: the kind of complex cognition that our civilisation depends upon is possible only for humans who can read. Humans who can read more complex things are (on average) able to have more complex thoughts. Those who struggle to read complex things struggle to have complex thoughts.
This is why smartphones are nothing short of a civilisation-threatening disaster. What a smartphone removes is the need for reading anything complex, let alone long-form. Indeed, they are designed to do the opposite. Thousands of very smart engineers devote their entire careers to diverting as much of your attention as possible to short form videos, the scrolliest of scrollbait. When watching short videos delivering the dopamine hits to which we are now addicted, our brains are rewiring. This time, to make us stupider.
What about podcasts? There is some evidence that the precipitous decline in the sales of non-fiction books is partially due to the fact that we’re listening to more podcasts — at least some of which are highly intelligent. The problem is that doing so returns us to something like an oral culture; the inadequacies of oral culture are most apparent when you transcribe the kinds of things that people say on podcasts. Marriott quotes a quack “historian” getting airtime on the Tucker Carlson Network (number of listeners per episode: 56.8 million), discussing Winston Churchill:
“He wanted redemption. He wanted to go out there and prove that he’s the warlord, that they can go out there and fight this big war. Probably. I think part of it… I read about Churchill and he strikes me as a psychopath, but he’s also a sort of… I mean, he was a drunk. He was very childish in strange ways. People would talk about how as an adult, as prime minister, they’d find him in his room and he’s playing with action figures like war toys and army men and stuff, would get mad when people would interrupt him when he was doing this. This is a strange fellow.”
Aside from this all being factually false, the most striking thing when it’s written down is how obviously unpersuasive it is. If you write like that, it’s clear to everybody that you’re an idiot to be ignored. But because our ears work differently from our eyes, we find oral testimony persuasive even when it is filled with glaring errors, inconsistencies, and even a basic lack of coherence. The collapse of reading correlates with the rise of conspiracy theories, flat-earthers, false beliefs about vaccines, and all the rest of the internet-enabled bullshit. What they both have in common is 2007: the launch of the iPhone.
All of this would be bad enough — but it gets considerably worse when you factor in the political implications. (Which prominent politician does the above transcript remind you of?) As Marriott is keen to emphasise, mass literacy is a recent phenomenon, and by no means the historical norm. It only really got going in Western countries around the 18th century, and he persuasively makes the case that it is no accident that democracy arose in the 19th. It first required a print culture where everybody read a lot — and what they read was more cognitively demanding than what is more readily on offer today. We have reliable records of working-class children choosing to read Dickens, Defoe and Shakespeare in the Forties: in other words before television became ubiquitous.
Marriott is of course aware that many interconnected issues are buffering Western democracies: inequality, economic stagnation, rising immigration as a flashpoint for democratic discontent. But what makes the book persuasive is that he puts forward a plausible underlying explanation of what has driven, or at least exacerbated, so many of the problems we now face: “the literate foundations on which liberal democracy rests are crumbling beneath our feet”. The fact that he must make this case in a book is a vicious, if fitting, irony.
Throughout human history, whenever underlying technologies have changed, the politics have changed. Reading is a case in point. The invention of the Gutenberg press eventually made Western democracy possible through the rise of literate populations. Along the way, it also helped undermine absolute monarchies, as well as unleashing the European wars of religion, resulting in millions of deaths. History is rarely a simple story of upward progress. Marriott ends with some valiant attempts to be optimistic about the future. You can tell his heart isn’t really in it; the man understands his own evidence. (One suspects the publishers told him that he had to end on an upbeat note, because publishers have this bizarre belief that only positivity shifts units.) I came away not optimistic, but convinced that we are now hurtling firmly downwards.
I recently spent a Saturday afternoon compiling reports on the students who seem to have submitted pure AI copy-and-paste for their resits. The resits they are taking because I already caught them doing this in April. And herein lies the problem of academia. I’m doing this because I’m mad and actually think that education and scholarship matter. The incentives strongly suggest to me that I should just pretend I haven’t noticed, and enjoy my Saturday. (The students are also under perverse incentives; if you don’t cheat but the others do, aren’t you just the mug?) Most academics are not as mad as me, at least in this specific regard, and they respond to incentives rationally. But until we find a way to sort this out, university degrees really are going to be pretty much worthless.
If you stand at the back of a lecture hall these days, you see a sea of screens, students flicking through their dopamine suppliers. At the front, some relic from a previous generation drones on. A couple of times a week, the relic is me. Still, it’s not all bad news. After years commanding us that we had to allow students to use their laptops in class (disability accommodation, apparently), King’s College London has finally given my department permission to ban them at teacher discretion. It’s too little, too late — but I suppose it’s something.
The world Marriott and I were born into is already dead. A new one has taken its place. Insofar as I have a role left in it, it will be as a sort of citizen-gamekeeper for those peculiar creatures strange enough to still want to read books in a world where the dopamine hits of TikTok and the shortcuts of AI compete for every second of waking attention.
The university as safari park. It sounds almost cute — until I remember that nobody feeds the animals for free.