In his new book, The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society, James Marriott declares that the decline in reading is "the most important cultural shift of our time." The book, published by The Bodley Head at £12.99, argues that the age of print is giving way to the age of the screen, ushering in what Marriott calls a "post-literate society."
Marriott, a columnist whose recent Times article attracted more than a million reads, grounds his argument in the "reading revolution" of the 18th century. He notes that newspapers then turned reading and writing, previously the preserve of a tiny social elite, into a realm that included everybody. By the end of the 19th century, almost every adult in Britain and North America could read.
The Reading Revolution and Its Reversal
Marriott argues that print culture in the 18th century kept pace with a growing hostility to religious superstition and the development of science. It helped usher in the industrial revolution, the idea of human rights, the rise of capitalism, and the advent of democracy. However, he says, "there is evidence that this remarkable story may be coming to an end."
That evidence includes the precipitous decline of the newspaper industry, with 320 papers closed in Britain between 2009 and 2019, and the ubiquity of AI as the lazy student's approach to essay writing. Marriott's university-teacher informants lament that key texts like George Eliot's Middlemarch and James Joyce's Ulysses, once the backbone of the English curriculum, are now off the menu—not because students don't want to read them, but because they can't handle those books' intellectual demands.
The Hollowing-Out of Society
Marriott, a passionate bookworm, peppers his narrative with affectionate dips into his bookish home and provincial background in Newcastle upon Tyne. He writes with transparent honesty and anger: "I want to persuade you that literacy matters profoundly to our civilisation. I believe much of the disorder and unreason of the 21st century is a direct consequence of the fading of the written word and the colonisation of our culture by addictive screens. As reading declines, the result, evident all around us, is the hollowing-out of our society."
While the middle chapters of the book are numbingly repetitious, Marriott's attack on "addictive screens" is spot-on: "Watching a video is a relatively passive experience, but reading is a kind of thinking." He points to anatomical differences found between the two modes of acquiring information. American researchers have shown that when reading on a screen, the eye moves through a passage of writing in a zigzag style, as readers rapidly "word spot" through a text to grasp the context and dart to the conclusion. Thumbing through fragments on a social media feed, says Marriott, "we pay less attention, we understand less, and we think less critically about what we read."
Disenlightenment and the Search for Hope
Marriott also cites symptoms of what he calls the new Disenlightenment among left-wing progressives. One example comes from a university in New Zealand, where Maori folklore ("ways of knowing") is now accorded equal status with "Western science." That policy, says Marriott, is a product of emotion, not rational thought.
The book's pleasures include biographical detours to celebrate great writers and readers of the past—Montaigne, Rousseau, Doctor Johnson—and a long list of recommended reading, including Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness.
However, the weakest chapter is where Marriott rummages through contemporary writings looking for hope. He avers, "The sheer meaninglessness of screen culture is a paradoxical reason to be optimistic." The reviewer remains unconvinced, concluding, "Oh really? If only."
