Supposed menaces multiply rapidly as technologies — smartphones, artificial intelligence — mutate. But the most menacing development involves no exotic technology, so it is disregarded.
But not by James Marriott. This British thinker warns us: An artifact that enabled modernity — skepticism, rationality, science, democracy — is now of rapidly dwindling importance. This artifact, which onlookers said “addicted” its early adopters, was: the book.
So, read one. This one: Marriott’s slender “The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society.”
In the 18th century, suddenly many people began to read widely, especially books. Although it was not until late in the next century that adult literacy became nearly universal in North Atlantic nations, in the previous century, reading spread far beyond the minuscule sliver of society that could read, or afford, books.
Print culture involved what Marriott calls “the imaginative and participatory quality of reading.” This “astonishingly recent phenomenon,” he says, fostered the rising prestige of reason, and the retreat of superstition.
Engaging with the printed word in book form, Marriott writes, “changed how people thought.” Long-form prose strengthened the mental muscles necessary for prolonged concentration on arguments and complexities: Readers, Marriott says, began to question received ideas: “Where does power come from? How should we classify whales? How do we know the Bible is true?”
Today, numerous literature professors report that they formerly expected students to read a novel a week, but no longer assign such masterpieces as George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” or James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Students are not just unwilling, they are unable to comprehend sophisticated, nuanced narratives. As deep reading becomes, Marriott says, a “rare, even esoteric accomplishment,” our culture becomes unmoored “from its foundations in the written word.”
Marriott thinks the “digital bombardment” from smartphones is “the major culprit” in producing “a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal and autocratic.” He might, however, be insufficiently pessimistic.
Yes, “the moronic inferno of social media” partly explains the “fading of the written word.” But perhaps a large and growing majority is pathetically nostalgic for what was, until recently, normal: the mental lassitude of pre-literate people who flinch from the imaginative and creative act of immersive reading. Such reading is demanding. It is a kind of work. It is, however exhilarating because it is not passive. It is the opposite of what screens offer their enervated, glassy-eyed grazers.
The invention of writing emancipated humanity from enslavement to memory. Societies without vibrant writing cultures are timid, hidebound, uncurious. “When we write our ideas down we externalise part of our minds,” Marriott says. Written, ideas can be “analysed, challenged and improved.”
Print culture, a still brief and perhaps ending chapter in the human story, democratized information, which hitherto had been controlled by the powerful. Imagine how augmented their power will be when they do not need to bother rationing information to an uninterested, nonreading public.
“It is difficult,” Marriott writes, “to appreciate how central reading was once to almost every aspect of life.” When the novelist Victor Hugo died in 1885, 2 million Parisians filled the streets. When the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel “Pamela” married, Marriott says, church bells rang across England.
But Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), who flourished when reading did, nevertheless said, “People in general do not willingly read if they can have anything else to amuse them.” Today, Marriott says, amusement “has been blitzed by the food-blender forces of the algorithm to its most easily digestible form.” To gauge the leakage of complexity and nuance from our culture, compare the lyrics of Cole Porter with those of Justin Bieber. Or note, as the Economist has, that sentences in popular books have become shorter by almost a third since the 1930s.
Marriott recalls that in the 1950s, Lionel Trilling’s collection of literary essays, “The Liberal Imagination,” sold more than 100,000 in hardback. Best-selling novels in the 1960s included Saul Bellow’s “Herzog” and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard.”
“On the page,” Marriott says, “invective quickly becomes tedious.” On screens, “intransigence and madness” proliferate. We are attempting “to run a democracy without a grown-up conversation.” We are learning this: Reason, tolerance and progress are contingent, not inherent, facets of humanity’s story.
Is it possible, Marriott wonders, “to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society”? He notes that, in proposing a grotesquely gargantuan Arc de Trump, “the first post-literate president reached instinctively for a visual style that defined autocratic politics before the age of mass literacy.”
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