Reading habits for the new literary ‘dark ages’

The 18th-century writer and polymath Samuel Johnson was seldom seen without a book. People say he read in bed and while walking. He even read at dinner, the pages folded over his lap like a “dog who holds a bone in his paws in reserve while he eats something else,” as his biographer, James Boswell, put it.

The fact that today, Johnson is perhaps best known as the face of an internet meme — which, ironically, shows him looking at a text in annoyed befuddlement — tells us pretty much everything we need to know about how reading habits have changed since. As The Times columnist James Marriott suggests in the subtitle of his latest book, The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, what was once part of most people’s daily routines is slowly becoming a lost art, supplanted first by the audiovisual allure of television and now short-form content on social media.

Marriott is far from the first to write about this topic. As he notes in his introductory chapter, essays bemoaning the decline of reading skills and literary culture are so numerous they might as well be considered a literary genre in their own right. Unlike many of these other writers, however, Marriott does not consider post-literacy as a contemporary phenomenon, but as the latest phase in a process that goes back centuries.

Sitting down with Big Think over Zoom, Marriott discusses what TikTok has in common with King Louis XIV’s court paintings, why Triumph of the Will (1935) managed to find a larger, more enduring audience than Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925), and why reading may become an activity akin to going to the gym or taking fiber supplements.

Reading revolution

During the Industrial Revolution, when reading started becoming commonplace across society, some people described the trend in terms not unlike how we describe the rise of smartphones and social media now. Strange though it may sound to us, they saw reading as an “epidemic,” an “addiction,” or an “evil force” that, if left unchecked, would tear down the fabric of society.

Looking back, such language calls to mind other baseless moral panics, such as those centered on the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons and violent video games in the 1980s and ‘90s, respectively. The only difference, Marriott says, is that in the case of the “reading revolution,” there was legitimate cause for concern.

“If you were a conservative moralist thundering from your pulpit,” he tells Big Think, “your panic was completely justified because literacy was helping to destroy the hierarchical, autocratic society you cherished.”

Reading has played a key role in many transformative historical developments, from the Reformation and the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution itself. The flourishing of reason and scientific thinking, the abolition of slavery and emancipation of women, and the shift from monarchical to more democratic forms of government all occurred against a backdrop of rising literacy rates and increasingly sophisticated reading habits — which brings us to Marriott’s book.

Although there is some disagreement over how drastic the decline in reading has been, the fact remains that people no longer read as much or as well as they once did. Gone are the days when George Orwell reported that U.K. children were “readily picking up works by Dickens, Defoe, and Shakespeare,” as Marriott writes, or when the New York Times Best Seller list consisted largely of literary novels and esteemed authors like Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, and Truman Capote were the lead guests on major late-night talk shows.

What, then, lies ahead?

A step toward post-literacy

The first, and most obvious, potential danger in the post-literate world is losing the skills and experiences that historically only reading has provided. So much ink has been spilled on the negative impact of screens in our lives that we don’t always bother to ask what makes reading better, if anything.

Citing various studies on how reading stimulates the brain, Marriott concludes that it benefits us precisely because it challenges us. Anyone can watch YouTube or scroll TikTok with their brains turned off — some even seek out these platforms for that reason — but you can’t passively read a book in the background. It requires active thinking. People who read have also been found to think “more analytically” than people who don’t — a valuable skill at a time when misinformation may be becoming more difficult to identify.

This brings us to the second danger of the post-literate age: the power of the screen. Marriott argues that while reading and writing lend themselves to contemplation and introspection, visual media — including film, TV, and now social media — deal with appearances, spectacle, and conflict. If one has had an overall liberalizing effect on society, giving people the cognitive tools and information they need to question the world around them, the other has arguably done the opposite and helped those in power manipulate and exploit the general public.

Soon, we might see a movement to stay cognitively fit, because you can no longer expect to be challenged or stimulated automatically just by living your life.

To illustrate this difference, Marriott points to the propaganda of Hitler’s Germany. “Mein Kampf is widely agreed by everyone who’s ever read it, including high-ranking Nazis, to be a terrible, tedious, unreadable book,” he says. “Meanwhile, Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary of the Nuremberg rallies, Triumph of the Will, is still regarded as a masterpiece of cinema. It continues to be taught and watched to this day.”

To some extent, this is because Riefenstahl was a better filmmaker than Hitler was a writer. But it also speaks to the differences between visual and written media. As Marriott says, the passive viewer can fall for “bad ideas” that wouldn’t easily sway a critical reader.

One recurring theme of The New Dark Ages is that our “post-literature future [is going to resemble] the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal, and autocratic.” Already, Donald Trump’s AI-generated videos and Vladimir Putin’s shirtless photoshoots are serving a purpose similar to the larger-than-life portraits of pre-revolutionary European royalty. As then, Marriott says, contemporary society’s language of power has returned to being predominantly visual: “expressed not through arguments and thoughts, but images.” As reading subsides, Marriott expects the things it gave us — reason, science, human rights — to subside, leaving ignorance, superstition, and tyranny in their place.

The future of reading

Sweeping though his central thesis may be, Marriott does add a couple of necessary caveats. Though he argues reading is important for building and maintaining a functioning democracy, he does not believe it is political penicillin; if it were, Weimar Germany — one of the most literate and literary places in the history of the world, he notes — would not have given way to Hitler. And while he compares and contrasts writing with visual media, he does not necessarily see the two as diametrically opposed or mutually exclusive. Certain films and TV shows can be as dense and deep as a great book, while literature has its equivalent of slop. And the internet and social media, for all the trouble, can contribute to collective learning, too.

As for when, if, and how reading will ever make a comeback, The New Dark Ages suggests that shoring up the supply side won’t be enough: A cultural shift must reignite demand. Rising literacy rates in Europe around the time of the Reformation have often been linked to the invention of the printing press in 1440. However, equal emphasis should be placed on Protestant theology, which positioned individual reading and textual analysis of the Bible as the fastest and surest way to God.

Marriott suspects that growing awareness of the post-literate age will give rise to a reading culture not unlike the one that exists around modern fitness trends.

“There’s an analogy with the rise of junk food in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” he tells Big Think. “It makes people fatter and less healthy. But it also marks a point where a lot of people started exercising: running marathons, weightlifting, going to the gym.” In a world where certain technology risks deteriorating our cognitive skills and wearing down our mental health, reading could transform into something we actively seek out not just because it’s fun, but because it’s good for us.

“If you want to be healthy and fit,” Marriott concludes, “that’s no longer something you’ll be able to do by default,” as people did before the time of supermarkets and sedentary lifestyles. “Instead, you have to make a conscious decision to work towards that. Soon, we might see a movement to stay cognitively fit, because you can no longer expect to be challenged or stimulated automatically just by living your life.”

This article is featured on Big Think.