James Marriott’s essay on the “dawn of the post-literate society” supports what to me has been evident for over a decade: in the wake of the smartphone, book readership has diminished and so has the cognitive discipline of the human species. Marriott aptly begins his essay with the rise of the book in the eighteenth century. This period, known as the Enlightenment, is a high point in the history of literature. It includes the great satirical novels Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Candide and Moll Flanders. It includes the great essayists Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, Edward Gibbon, Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, who wrote, “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” It was the era in which a rising middle class aspired to become learned and read whatever they could get their hands on, and all forms of literature—plays, poetry, novels, pamphlets, newspapers, twopenny sheets—enjoyed a booming readership.
When literature flourishes, civilization in all its forms advances. The eighteenth century is credited with an influx of new ideas and ways of thinking that circulated through the body politic and changed how nations govern. The ideas of Hume, Kant, Descartes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Berkeley, Burke, Smith and Paine concerning individual liberties, the powers of church and state, natural rights and religious tolerance gave rise to the economic and political institutions that prevail today. The eighteenth century saw the American colonies assert their independence and unite into a federal republic under a document founded on the principles articulated in books.
In the eighteenth century, literature was a liberating force, the spirit of which could not be more at odds with the insidious stupidification we see today. Fast-forward three hundred years to the era of the smartphone and the book industry and print readership are in free-fall. People have ceded their agency to a despot who is purging the nation of his political opponents and consolidating unprecedented power in the executive branch. They have willingly elected an authoritarian despot who has weaponized the judicial and congressional branches of government to enrich himself and punish his straw-man enemies.
But Trump is not the only symptom of the mental decline afflicting our country. Overall, we see a loss of sustained focus, logical reasoning and recall; a supplanting of momentous ideas with trivial amusements; stagnation and retrogression in the arts, music and literature; and widespread ignorance of the founding principles and spirit of our republic. We see future generations being raised on short-form videos, social media posts, computer games and porn. But what is most disheartening is that people have opted for it. They have willingly forsaken direction, purpose, meaning and agency for a future devoid of hope.
Marriott’s essay comes on a wave of grim diagnoses and grimmer prognoses regarding the state of literacy worldwide. A slew of articles have addressed illiteracy among men, on whom it’s common to blame our cultural decline. There’s Peter Biles on the crisis of the male protagonist; Joseph Bernstein on the disappearance of the novel-reading man; and Jeremy Gordon on the reason men should read fiction. David Brooks attributes the decline of the great novel to ideological conformity on the political left, which has typically produced the literary mavericks who author great novels. Other conservatives like Alex Perez blame a publishing industry that has become a feminine hegemon.
Most of these commentators focus the supply side of the problem—authors, editors and publishers—without giving due attention to the demand side, readership. In any market there is a feedback loop between supply and demand. In publishing, the demographics of the demand side (predominantly women) has informed the supply side, that is, authors, agents, editors and publishers (predominantly women). But this isn’t odd, when you consider that a similar pattern has played out in the video game industry, which is currently the hegemon of men.
The decline of book readership we see today is too pervasive to be explained by the sex or political persuasion of authors, agents and publishers. The spread of mass illiteracy in the last decade is a function of civilization as a whole and it affects every demographic. Substack is replete with essays on a phenomenon called “the new Dark Age.” Most of these essays point the finger at big tech as the perpetrator of the darkness into which our civilization has drifted, and their indictment is not unjustified. The digital economy has strategically and deliberately hijacked the human brain for profit and routed the book market.
I do not know what it will take for people of all ages and sexes to put down their smartphones and start reading books again. Readers of print media may continue to diminish, as successive generations read exclusively on screens. As in past industrial revolutions, a countervailing movement may arise which, analogous to the Luddites, smashes smartphones, ignores AI and refuses to spend a quarter of a lifetime gazing into the blue light. (A recent study reports that young people are projected to spend an average of twenty-five years of their lives on a smartphone.) There may come a period of social unrest and political upheaval that results in regulations on digital media consumption. But that seems unlikely, given that smartphones are convenient, necessary, pacifying and a matter of personal choice.
The more powerless and marginalized people become, the more reluctant they will be to participate in cultural and political institutions. The less control over their lives they will exert and the more apathetic about the state of civilization they will become. Seduced by digital media that have ushered in the age of tech barbarism, people have conceded their power to choose. While the suppression of literacy is common in authoritarian regimes—literacy enables people to think critically and resist tyranny—in this one, literacy has been willingly forsaken. People have stopped reading books as a matter of choice, because they can no longer concentrate.
Despite my grim outlook on the future of reading, I’m positive that books will never disappear. They are too old and robust a form of communication, too important a record of human experience and too integral to our predominantly old universe to simply go away. I believe that books will always be around for anyone who might tire of the inane digital slop. I only question whether anyone will want to pick up a book and have the discipline to finish it. As Ray Bradbury said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”