I’ve been trying out substack. It’s higher quality than the other media sites. I came across this one on how civilization might end, because we stopped reading.
https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1
It has the history of literacy, which I thought I knew, but it focuses on the 19th century, when we went from a books being published to tens of thousands. That correlates with us pushing out oligarchies and religion. But it’s not just reading itself.
He looks at something like Kant, who didn’t just open a page and start writing in the same way Joe Rogan turns on a microphone and starts talking. Kant put down some concepts, thought about them, rearranged them, expressed them in a way that got other people thinking. He compares this today’s most commonly used forms of writing, short form, meaningless videos, memes. They attract eyeballs but they make you stupid.
The graphs are depressing at times; shorter sentences in books, the relationship between far-right voting and TikTok, the drop in reading for pleasure.
He says, “Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.” The crawl out of the dark ages depended on receiving the thinking of previous generations, it was our “cognitive liberation”. And now, he says, “We may be about to find out that it is not possible to run the most advanced civilization in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society.”
He cites pop culture. My generation has a song that mentions “Dylan Thomas” followed by the line “whoever he was”. Monty Python’s Flying Circus was no doubt seen as anti-intellectual, but they had a sketch on summarizing Proust. I don’t see much of that anymore.
I haven’t read the link yet, but he says we figured out over the last couple centuries that we should fund science, but now we getting less progress out of that investment. Once, the elite and powerful who maintained the world as their playground and people as their toys feared books and readers. They may not say it out loud now, and maybe they don’t realize it, but they are building a world that doesn’t read.
“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.” Will we drop to that percentage again and fall back? I think of the popularity of Anne Frank’s diary and wonder if someone hiding in an apartment in Chicago today has the same thoughts, but can’t put them on paper, or if they did, who would read it?