Mark Vernon on the implications of a society where reading – whether for study or pleasure – has disappeared 

A new moral panic is haunting the land: the rise of a post-literate society. The fear is that a world without reading is being forged by the prevalence of flighty, flashing screens and addictive social media.

Move over political fragmentation and psychological disorders. This crisis is indicated by a decline in the numbers of people who read for pleasure, or for study, or who want to take English as a degree: the collapse of the paragraph, the chapter, the book.

Infinite scrolls are blamed for freshers now needing courses on reading. The rewired brain has grown incapable of the cognitive skills that long-form arguments require. Democracy, too, is at stake as reason is replaced by reactivity; law by digital anarchy.

And, no doubt, there is much in this spike of concern. Catherine, Princess of Wales, recently called it an “epidemic of disconnection”.

Modern-day Romantics are on the case – currently led by the sharp-minded Times columnist, James Marriott. A devotee of the dumb-phone and lover of books (his Substack is called “Cultural Capital”), he has collated the evidence, deepened the case, and unexpectedly become an activist.

But there is a deep irony in the fact that post-literacy is preoccupying believers in the power of literature, feeling and aesthetics. For at least some of these enlightened folk are implicated in what, I reckon, lies behind the literary decline: a crisis in the significance of words themselves.

What? Am I saying that champions of poetry, students of etymology, and devotees of the novel are to blame for post-literacy? In a way, yes, because what they have missed is a subtler, longer-term waning of trust in words fostered by the modern worldview and postmodern ways of learning.

William Blake was also on the case, 200 years ago. He lived in a boom time for books, with his craft as an engraver promising him a good living because plates and images were much in demand. “There are now I believe as many Booksellers as there are Butchers & as many Printshops as of any other trade,” he observed of Georgian London. And yet, he also spotted that the birth of the novel and market in tomes coincided with a significant theological shift.

Words on the printed page were no longer experienced as myriad reflections of the divine Word, an echo of the language of angels. The philosopher, John Locke, had persuaded many that words are primarily signs for ideas in lonely speakers’ minds, language merely a convention for communication. Voices ring out across the void that isolates each of us.

A reductive trajectory was set. It was only a question of time until normal people would read without question intellectuals like Yuval Noah Harari. “[T]he truly unique feature of our language is … the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all,” the bestselling author writes in Sapiens. Language matters as a useful technology. Never mind that fiction and myth become synonyms for yarns, concoctions, lies.

I’ve been lucky enough to meet James Marriott. I reckon he is a good soul, which is why he’s worried. Only, I wonder if he believes in souls because he, too, writes from the emptied modern worldview, regularly airing what he calls his “nihilistic prejudices”. “The universe is a cold, barren place,” he recently averred bravely. “We are all just biological machines made of chemicals and electric signals. Any attempt to pretend otherwise seems suspiciously like wishful thinking to me.”

Well, that nothing-buttery must include words, language, literature. They become sounds on the chilly wind, fantasies birthed from brains in skulls.

The worldview renders the study of languages and literature little more than a noble folly or transient consolation. The difference between a shelf of books and an infinite scroll is merely one of sophistication, not kind. All verbiage is a distraction from the darkness – for all that some distractions are better than others, enabling the learned to engage in that more advanced delusion called human rationality or social reasoning.

Blake summarised the emptying out: “No Faith is in all the Earth: the Book of God is trodden under Foot.” In other words, when the cosmos is treated as a machine, not only the Bible but all books risk being regarded as machine code. Conversely, Blake argued that writing calls to the soul only when addressed “to the Imagination which is Spiritual Sensation & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason.”

That was a couple of centuries ago. Now, a generation or more of academics have overtly treated language as a form of play and the assumption has infected the wider population. Unsurprisingly, the devices in their hands treat them as playthings.

As Blake also spotted: everything manifest was once imagined. Hence when literature is imagined to be an evolutionary invention, the byproduct of an elaborate strategy for survival, reading is bound to be discounted. STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) learning offers far better odds of survival. Why care about truth if there is no truth to care about? Capture is all.

And yet, there is always hope; all is actually good. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” Blake affirmed because, ultimately, the divine ways are the only ways there are. Post-literacy is, perhaps, the path modern society is destined to take. But, “If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise,” Blake added. The troubled soul will cry out for succour, the lonely mind for a deeper, connected learning.

Time will tell. And there are signs of a turnaround. Some students of digital trends are wondering whether peak social media may have passed. Alternatively, one of the greatest living literary writers, Irvine Welsh, told us on “A Drink with the Idler” that he has ditched his youthful love of Humean scepticism. He is now more inclined to trust the divine origins of the words he loves so well.

“One Power alone makes a Poet,” Blake wrote: “Imagination, the Divine Vision.” The good news is that this transcendent source keeps pouring life into the minute particulars we call words, whether the writer believes their power is divine or not.

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Mark Vernon appears on our regular online event “A Drink with the Idler”.
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