Doomscrolling ourselves to death

A new book argues that literacy itself is in decline, and that the reasons go back further than smartphones. The article describing it opens with a look at what young boys now watch on YouTube.

The Book at the Center of It

The book is called The New Dark Ages, written by Times writer James Marriott and published this week. Marriott first laid out his concerns in a much read online post last year, arguing that fewer people read books than before. The article’s writer, a friend of Marriott’s, calls the book entertaining, full of fact, and often amusing, making its case in roughly 50,000 words.

A Childhood Built on Books

Marriott describes growing up in a family where literature took the place of religion. He writes:

“Literature was our religion: the way we explained and interpreted our lives.”

He recalls being matched against novels by Thomas Hardy or poems by Philip Larkin for nearly every event in life, from a loss in the family to a minor argument at school. Shakespeare held a singular place in the family’s regard, treated, in Marriott’s words, as close to divine. The family marked the day of Shakespeare’s birth every year with a treat made at home, and traveled to Stratford-upon-Avon on what Marriott calls “solemn pilgrimages.” He was once given a Shakespeare-themed stuffed bear wearing a Hamlet quote on its front.

Early Warnings From Universities

Marriott says he first heard about declining literacy from friends working at universities. He writes that he “came close to” studying for a PhD on scenery in poetry written after the war, a plan he later dropped. Reports from friends were soon followed by numbers showing declines in reading comprehension among students, along with an even greater drop in reading for pleasure among both children and adults.

Blaming the Phones — and Then Not

The obvious suspect, Marriott notes, was smartphones. But his looking into the matter pointed him toward an older cause: television. He credits Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death for warning of this decades in advance.

Marriott writes that Postman believed TV’s bent toward the trivial and toward charm in its personalities was wearing away the reasoned public discussion that a free society depends on. Some critics dismissed Postman as a Luddite. Marriott’s judgment is plain:

“The passing of time has revealed that he was a prophet.”

Tracing Literacy Back Centuries

The book also follows literacy’s long history, starting with its fall at the end of antiquity and its gradual return beginning in the 12th century, first in the cities of northern Italy. The invention of printing sped things along, sometimes faster than buyers could keep pace with. Marriott names two Roman publishers who printed 20,000 books in a fit of confidence, then wrote to Pope Sixtus IV, at the end of the 15th century, for help because they could not sell a single one.

Protestantism pushed literacy further by placing weight on direct reading of the Bible. Marriott notes that in Sweden, the Lutheran Church went so far as to bar marriage to those who could not read. The Enlightenment followed, and Marriott treats it as a high point, crediting it with a wider reach of feeling for others across lines of class, sex and race.

Reading as a Window Into Other Lives

Marriott points to particular books as proof. Wealthy men reading Pamela, he writes, spent hours inside the inner thoughts of a servant, someone many of them would otherwise have passed by without a second glance. Marriott writes of the readers of Olaudah Equiano’s memoir The Interesting Narrative, who came to understand, through Equiano’s own account, what it meant to be taken from one’s home by slave traders, placed on a slave ship, and sold like a piece of goods.

Marriott argues that those who once feared reading would destroy the social order had a point.

• Literacy fell after antiquity and rebuilt itself gradually from the 12th century
• Printing moved faster than buyers, leaving stock that found no buyer
• Protestantism tied reading directly to religious practice
• The Enlightenment carried feeling for others further through literature
• Television, not only smartphones, gets blamed for today’s decline

The writer opens the piece with YouTube as an example of the problem it describes now, setting Marriott’s early years, full of Shakespeare, against a platform built on videos like people bathing in Diet Coke and Mentos, or fixing a microwave to their head with cement. Next to that, the writer says, the dull television of the 1990s looks as rich in story as Dostoevsky.

Source: edwest.co.uk

books · culture · literacy · reading decline · television