The end of Literate Society

This is an excerpt from Cultural Capital, a Substack written by James Marriott, a columnist for the The Times of London.. We recommend that you read the entire piece there.

      It was one of the most important revolutions in modern history—and yet no blood was spilled, no bombs were thrown and no monarch was beheaded. Perhaps no great social transformation has ever been carried out so quietly. This one took place in armchairs, in libraries, in coffee houses and in clubs.

      What happened was this: in the middle of the 18th century huge numbers of ordinary people began to read.

      For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the 1700s, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere.

      This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution.” It was an unprecedented democratization of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.

      It was an age of monumental works of thought and knowledge: the Encyclopédie, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Radical new ideas about God, about history, about society, about politics and even the whole purpose and meaning of life flooded through Europe.

      Print changed how people thought. The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. It is no accident that the growth of print culture in the 18th century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism and the rapid development of science. The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

      Now, we are living through the counter-revolution. More than 300 years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic 20th-century critics of the screen age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

      In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by 40 percent in the last 20 years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.” Most remarkably, in late 2024 the OECD published a report which found that literacy levels were “declining or stagnating” in most developed countries.

      What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history.

      Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait.

      The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

      If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.

      The transmission of knowledge—the most ancient function of the university — is breaking down in front of our eyes. Writers like Shakespeare, Milton and Jane Austen whose works have been handed on for centuries can no longer reach the next generation of readers. They are losing the ability to understand them.

      The tradition of learning is like a precious golden thread of knowledge running through human history linking reader to reader through time. It last snapped during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as the barbarian tides beat against the frontier, cities shrank and libraries burned or decayed.

      That golden thread is breaking for the second time. The collapse of reading is driving declines in various measures of cognitive ability. Reading is associated with a number of cognitive benefits including improved memory and attention span, better analytical thinking, improved verbal fluency, and lower rates of cognitive decline in later life.

      After the introduction of smartphones in the mid-2010s, global PISA scores—the most famous international measure of student ability—began to decline. Most intriguing—and alarming—is the case of IQ, which rose consistently throughout the 20th century but which now seems to have begun to fall.

      The result is not only the loss of information and intelligence, but a tragic impoverishing of the human experience.

      For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence. The classics have been preserved over the centuries because they contain, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, “the best that has been thought and said.”

      The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading nonfiction, we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.

      Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations. [The] draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing.

      If our world feels unstable at the moment—like the ground is shifting beneath us—it is because those underpinnings are falling to pieces underneath our feet.

      As books die, we seem to be returning to “oral” habits of thought. Our discourse is collapsing into panic, hatred and tribal warfare. Anti-scientific thought thrives at the highest level of the American government. Promoters of irrationality and conspiracy theories find vast and credulous audiences online.

      Reading enriches creative work by giving men and women of genius access to the vast and priceless trove of knowledge preserved in books—“the best that has been thought and said.” The discipline of reading equips them with the analytical tools to interrogate, refine and revolutionize that tradition.

      The stagnant culture of the screen age … is characterized by simplicity, repetitiveness and shallowness. Its symptoms are observable all around us.

      Pop songs in every genre are becoming shorter, simpler and more repetitive and films are being reduced to endlessly-repeated franchise formulas. Studies suggest that the number of “disruptive” and “transformative” inventions is declining. More money is spent on scientific research than ever in history but the rate of progress “is barely keeping pace with the past”.

      Doubtless many factors are at work, but this is also precisely what you would expect of a generation who spent their childhoods glued to screens rather than reading or thinking.

      If the literate world was characterized by complexity and innovation, the post-literate world is characterized by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation. Our culture is being transformed into a smartphone wasteland. Most of all, this increasingly trivial and mindless culture is a calamity for our politics.

      The rapid expansion of literacy helped to destroy the orderly, hierarchical and profoundly socially unequal world. The reading revolution was a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancien regime. Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe.

      The system worked in an age before mass literacy. But as knowledge spread through society and the analytic, critical modes of thinking fostered by print took hold, the whole mental and cultural atmosphere which sustained the old order was burned away. People began to know too much. And to think too much. The feudal order seems to be fundamentally incompatible with literacy.

      Print cannot abolish the innate human tendencies towards partisanship and violence (witness the aftermath of the French revolution). Print is certainly not immune to fake news and conspiracy theories (witness the lead-up to the French revolution). But you do not have to believe print is a perfect and incorruptible system of communication to accept it is also almost certainly a necessary pre-condition of democracy.

      Politics in the age of short-form video favors heightened emotion, ignorance and unevidenced assertions. Such circumstances are highly propitious for charismatic charlatans. Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the post-literate world. TikTok usage correlates with increased vote share for populist parties and the far right.

      Why does TikTok benefit populists disproportionately? Because, almost by definition, populism thrives on emotions, not thoughts; on feelings not sentences. Populists specialize in providing that rush of certainty you get when you know you’re right. They don’t want you to think. Thinking is where certainty goes to die.

      The rational, dispassionate print-based liberal democratic order may not survive this revolution.

      The big tech companies like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact in order to survive they must promote stupidity. The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat. Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones.

      Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print, many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants, moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking. The world after print increasingly resembles the world before print.

      As power, wealth and knowledge concentrate at the top of society, an angry, divided and uninformed public lacks a way to understand or analyze or criticize or change what is going on. Instead, more and more people are impressed by the kinds of highly emotional, charismatic and mystical appeals that were the foundation of power in the age before widespread literacy.

      As tech companies wipe out literacy and middle-class jobs, we may find ourselves in a second feudal age. Or it may be that we are entering a political era beyond our imagining.

      Whatever happens, we are already seeing the world we once knew melt away. Nothing will ever be the same again.