Losing The Art of Reading...And Its Consequences

    It was just after 5:00 a.m., and I was wide awake because the previous evening I had made a run to something called OWOWCOW which makes a gazillion flavors of the greatest homemade ice cream…ever!  So instead of quietly getting out of bed, at 5:00 a.m., and doing something even mildly constructive, I grabbed my phone, responded to a few messages, then opened YouTube—and scrolled through it for the next hour. The slop had hypnotized me! Finally, after watching a video of the REAL story of Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles, I snapped out of it.

    What was I doing?! I could have been attempting to sleep, or gone to the gym early; my laptop, awaiting more ground-breaking prose was nearby (see what I did there?). Worse yet, the novel I was reading was right next to me…I mean, RIGHT NEXT TO ME! At any moment, I could have put down my phone, picked up the book, gone downstairs and engaged with material far more fulfilling than videos of the meaning of a one-hit wonder from a lifetime ago. Instead, I scrolled. Ugh…

    We’ve all put down a book in favor of losing ourselves in a phone or iPad…or worse. It's like surreptitiously gorging on leftover Halloween candy. There are fleeting moments of enjoyment, and then you feel slightly sick in mind and body. Also, you feel dumber. Welcome to life in a Post-Literate Age, kids!

    That said, have you noticed this term gaining traction, the “Post-Literate Age?” It broadly refers to the decline of the written word and the return, in some senses, to an oral culture in which knowledge was shared through speech. These days, you probably hear more people recommending podcasts than recommending books. The most popular political pundits aren’t writers or even TV stars—they host video podcasts and live-streaming shows on Twitch. Today’s Thomas Paine isn’t a writer; he’s an influencer. I can’t believe I just typed that. 

    Long before Facebook or Instagram, Marshall McLuhan—a sort of media philosopher who famously appears in the movie Annie Hall—pioneered the post-literate idea in the early ’60s. Neil Postman, a McLuhan disciple, pushed it further in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he wrote. “They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.” Forty years later, this observation is startlingly accurate.

    Postman’s most prescient argument, however, is the way in which we will become post-literate. He compares George Orwell’s vision of the future in his classic novel 1984 to Aldous Huxley’s in Brave New World. Orwell feared books would be banned, according to Postman. Huxley worried that banning books would be unnecessary—because no one would want to read them anyway. “As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions,’” Postman wrote. Today, we have distraction machines in our pocket or on our bedside table, ever at the ready.

    Here’s the strange thing, however: Literacy rates are the highest in the history of the world. Still, the world that Huxley imagined, and Postman prophesied, is upon us. That’s because people consume Facebook updates, Instagram captions, and X posts throughout the day. Rarely do they pick up a book. A recent Atlantic story, citing the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, said that just 48% of Americans had read a single book in 2022…I mean, just ONE book! Really?! That is a 6% decline from a decade earlier. According to a study released last August, over the past two decades the number of Americans who read for pleasure daily has fallen from 28% to 16%. The slide among young people is even more pronounced. Ugh…

    Turns out, reading a book is a lost art—and the demise of book reading might have dire consequences. “Perhaps this plague of illiteracy has played a role in the disappearance of truth and, with it, liberal democracy,” George Packer wrote in The Atlantic last fall.

    By that account, I suppose I shouldn’t feel too bad about my sugar-induced awakening the other morning. The least insidious manifestation of a post-literate age is wasting time scrolling through Instagram or Facebook; the worst is that the most powerful country in the world being led by a cadre of egomaniacal, anti-democratic morons.

    If there’s any good news, it’s that certain media figures and publications are, finally, noticing. It has come up in conversation with various comedians—ironic, I suppose, since they mostly work in a spoken-word medium—including Marc Maron, Bowen Yang, and Hasan Minhaj. Packer’s been writing about it for The Atlantic; business journalist Joe Weisenthal, cohost of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, has been talking about this idea for years.

    In his newsletter, Culture Capital, Times of London columnist James Marriott wrote a manifesto last year about the dawn of the post-literate society and the end of civilization. “If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history,” he said, “the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.”

    Several recent stories and books have approached post-literacy by exploring Western culture’s intensifying stupidity and lack of creativity. Esquire’s Dave Holmes wrote a piece this year on the rise of Big Stupid in America. A cover story in New York magazine explored our nation’s profound stupidity, and W. David Marx’s new book, Blank Space, argues that the 21st century has lacked fresh ideas. Last month, indie periodical The Baffler dedicated an entire issue to the subject of the post-literate age. (You can find The Baffler at your local Barnes & Noble or buy a print copy online.)

    “It’d be naive to pretend that reading a novel or translating a poem can be a form of resistance,” Nicolás Medina Mora writes in The Baffler. “But who knows? Perhaps reinventing the old literary forms could help us reverse the current moment’s drive to stupidity.”

    Look, I have a couple of podcasts that I listen to regularly. Hell, I even keep threatening people that I’m going to start a podcast! I certainly do not advocate ditching podcasts, ignoring the videos on your phone, or deleting all your social media apps. But the decline in literacy, and its many symptoms, should worry all of us. “As you have probably noticed,” James Marriott wrote in his 2024 essay, “the world of the screen is going to be a much choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.” Such a world surely encourages the rise of authoritarianism and an illiberal society.

    But the most compelling argument about the decline of reading isn’t its connection to the downfall of democracy or the dumbing down of American life. It’s that we are all wrong about why people should read. “Telling someone to love literature because reading is good for society is like telling someone to believe in God because religion is good for society,” Adam Kirsch wrote for The Atlantic last week. “It’s a utilitarian argument for what should be a personal passion.”

    And it’s not just a passion, he continued. Books should evoke the same feeling as having a cheeky drink or a drunken cigarette. “It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice,” Kirsch argued. “This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.”

    As a high school student in the late ’70s, I checked out Jonathan Livingston Seagull from the public library up the street from where we lived. I had already been a voracious reader thanks to my family, but I had not taken a serious dive into novels...good or bad. The librarian offered me this warning: “Be careful with this book—there's hidden religion in it.” She was right about the religion, and looking back it was not a particularly good novel. But it gave me an early lesson in metaphor and irony. Books can be informative and entertaining; like cigarettes and alcohol, they can also be dangerous and bad for your health. However, the good and great novels can help us how to think clearly...and for ourselves. 

    So what happens when we stop reading books? Well, the first thing I will have to deal with is people who actually believe that not reading is the height of intelligence. But more importantly: Democracy falters, classical liberalism retreats, stupidity abounds, and—perhaps equally as bad—we become less … cool! That’s right, kids…reading is cool!

    So, to Sancho and the rest of my devoted readers, I’d like to formally apologize right now, for any future crankiness. The post-literate age is really gonna suck.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com