Long read: The dawn of the post-literate society

Over the past few months, we featured a couple of pieces on the decline of reading as a habit and its implications based on data from new research. Here’s a more detailed take on the implications for a post literate society – on intelligence, creativity or even democracy.

The author begins with this remarkable quote from Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985): “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.”

He then talks about the reading revolution, sometime post the 1700s as the most important revolutions in modern history: “…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. People alive at the time understood that something momentous was going on. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor.

…It was an unprecedented democratization of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.

… People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured off the presses.”

…the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.”

He then cites the studies which show the dramatic decline in reading habits across the world and the role of smartphones in it before turning on to the implications from this tragedy. First, human cognitive decline: “After the introduction of smartphones in the mid-2010s, global PISA scores — the most famous international measure of student ability — began to decline….students increasingly tell surveys that they struggle to think, learn and concentrate. You will notice the tell-tale mid-2010s inflection point..…[the] decline in measures of reasoning and problem-solving is not confined to teenagers. Adults show a similar pattern, with declines visible across all age groups”

The piece emphasises why: “…This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.

As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacy, certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points.”

It shows up in the deteriorating quality of public discourse as well: “As books die, we seem to be returning to these “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 such as Candace Owens and Russell Brand find vast and credulous audiences online.

Laid out on the page their arguments would seem absurd. On the screen, they are persuasive to many people.

The rise of these emotional and irrational styles of thinking poses a profound challenge to our culture and politics.

We may be about to find out that it is not possible to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society.”

It is showing up in quality of creative output as well: “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 of researchers who spent their childhoods glued to screens rather than reading or thinking.

Even books themselves are becoming less complex.”

Finally, and most importantly he dwells on why democracy could be at risk, given that it was this very reading revolution that democratised knowledge and ended up pulling us out of feudalism:

“The reading revolution was a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancient regime — the old autocratic system of government with almighty kings at the top, lords and clergy underneath and peasants squirming at the very bottom.

Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments.

…The feudal order seems to be fundamentally incompatible with literacy. The historian Orlando Figes has noted that the English, French and Russian revolutions all occurred in societies in which literacy was approaching fifty per cent.

… An effective democracy pre-supposes a reasonably informed and somewhat critical citizenry capable of understanding and debating the issues of the day in detail and at length.

Democracy draws immeasurable strength from print — the old dying world of books, newspapers and magazines — with its tendency to foster deep knowledge, logical argument, critical thought, objectivity and dispassionate engagement.”

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