The Art of Manliness - The New Dark Ages： The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

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00:01:04.680 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AOM podcast, which since 2008 has featured

00:01:09.280 conversations with the world's best authors, thinkers, and leaders that glean their edifying,

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00:01:30.720 the Strenuous Life program at strenuouslife.com. Now on to the show.

00:01:42.100 You can't help but notice, in yourself and in others, how much less people seem to be reading

00:01:46.560 these days. When it comes to content consumption, we're often replacing articles and books with

00:01:50.940 videos and, well, podcasts. My guest says that this shift is having consequences, not only for

00:01:56.240 our shrieking individual attention spans, but for society and Western civilization writ large.

00:02:01.480 His name is James Marriott, and he's a columnist at the Times of London and the author of The New

00:02:05.500 Dark Ages, The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. Today on the show,

00:02:10.200 James explains how people thought and interacted before the rise of reading and writing,

00:02:13.700 how literacy changed our minds and made possible everything from democracy to modern science,

00:02:17.740 and how television and smartphones may be returning us in some ways to a pre-literate age.

00:02:22.240 We then explore how our increasingly visual culture is making public debate more emotional

00:02:25.740 and influence more personality-driven, and what it might mean for the future.

00:02:29.880 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash darkages.

00:02:44.760 All right, James Marriott, welcome to the show.

00:02:47.440 Thanks so much for having me.

00:02:48.500 You got a new book out called The New Dark Ages,

00:02:51.120 The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society.

00:02:54.780 there's been a lot of ink spilled digital ink about how westerners are reading fewer books

00:03:02.880 and fewer westerners are reading in general put this decline in perspective for us because you

00:03:09.640 say well people are reading less but how much less i guess measuring reading has always been

00:03:14.460 difficult because it's something that people tend to lie about people always like to overestimate

00:03:18.640 how many books they read and it's hard to get an accurate picture measuring the way that people

00:03:22.340 use their leisure time is relatively recent. So I think measuring reading is difficult and

00:03:28.560 it's been patchy and unreliable through history. And I think some of the data for reading now is

00:03:34.020 probably still to some degree dubious. I think one statistic we can look at is some of the data

00:03:39.360 we know about what people are reading in the Netherlands before the arrival of television.

00:03:44.020 This is some of the best data we have for the way TV changed our media environments and our

00:03:48.420 consumption. And the survey of the Netherlands found that in 1955, people were spending about

00:03:55.360 five hours a week reading, which is quite a lot. And that statistic is in my book in the context of

00:04:01.160 the collapse of reading that took place in the aftermath of the arrival of television. Five

00:04:07.100 hours a week on average is an awful lot. And I guess a statistic like that also doesn't capture

00:04:12.540 the cultural place that reading and books and literacy had in an age before TV and an age

00:04:17.180 before the smartphone. And we are kind of now so distant from that world. The great age of reading

00:04:22.520 is probably the early 20th century before radio and before television. And I think we're so distant

00:04:27.340 from that world, we can struggle to imagine what it was like. But this was a world in which people

00:04:31.140 might read multiple newspapers a day, in which a major city would have multiple newspapers. I think

00:04:35.560 New York had something like 17 newspapers for that one city. And writers and journalists were

00:04:41.580 huge celebrities in a way that is just inconceivable in the modern world. There are those

00:04:47.360 famous stories of a new Dickens novel being published and people besieging the ship that's

00:04:51.780 coming into New York trying to get their hands on it. You have the amazing story of the funeral of

00:04:58.140 the great French author and journalist Victor Hugo, which I think was the greatest gathering

00:05:03.200 of humanity in France at that time, was Victor Hugo's funeral and all the people rushing into

00:05:08.960 the streets of Paris to see the funeral of this writer. The Arc de Triomphe was draped in black

00:05:15.020 crepe in mourning. And I think it's by looking at some of those, you know, we have that statistic

00:05:20.380 that, you know, people reading five hours a week in the 1950s in the Netherlands, and probably

00:05:24.860 something similar was true throughout the Western world. I think also thinking about the kind of

00:05:28.280 culture that this was part of, in which the written word and print was important in a way

00:05:33.360 that's just hard to grasp, I think, so far into the age of TV and smartphones, how important it

00:05:38.740 was and how much it just pervaded and structured people's view of reality yeah so i think now the

00:05:44.520 people in the netherlands they read something like 40 less than they did in the 50s and it's

00:05:50.300 there's probably been a similar decline in other places so people were reading a lot more in the

00:05:55.100 mid-20th century but what's interesting typically we think of reading books as something you know

00:06:00.000 that the middle class or the educated elites do but you mentioned this book that talks about how

00:06:06.460 even in the 19th century, the working class read some pretty heavy books, like the kind of books

00:06:13.140 we assign in high school or college classes. And they did it for fun. Yeah, absolutely. And I find 1.00

00:06:19.180 this a very inspiring, and I think also a very important part of the story. The book that I

00:06:23.520 mentioned is a great book by Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes,

00:06:28.200 which is all about what working class people were reading in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

00:06:33.700 One of the kind of points of pushback you sometimes get on this argument about reading

00:06:36.560 declining is, oh, well, most people never read that much.

00:06:40.020 Reading has always been just a middle class hobby.

00:06:42.220 This is like a niche concern. 1.00

00:06:43.880 There is definitely truth in that criticism. 1.00

00:06:45.800 Reading has probably been a more middle class thing than not historically. 0.93

00:06:49.640 But this amazing book is a chronicle of the working class autodidact movement.

00:06:55.480 These guys who are working in mines, in mills, in factories, in some of the worst jobs that 0.99

00:07:01.500 have ever been created for human beings in the aftermath of the industrial revolution they were

00:07:05.120 coming home from brutalizing work and they were going to the mining education institute or they

00:07:12.940 were going to the library or they were sitting down and they were reading thomas carlisle or

00:07:18.160 edward gibbon or tennyson or teaching themselves latin and living this unbelievably rich life in

00:07:24.760 books even while they were doing these appallingly difficult jobs and you know that's not the

00:07:29.600 universal story of working class reading but it's a part of it that I think is often overlooked and

00:07:33.740 often forgotten and is a testament to how deep the culture of literacy once went in our society

00:07:39.180 and I think maybe because we tend to think that these declines in literacy that we're talking

00:07:44.300 about are a recent phenomenon to do with iPhones we actually don't realize how disconnected we are

00:07:49.400 from the great age of mass literacy in the early 20th century which was eroded by television and

00:07:54.200 then you know by other entertainment devices that we kind of forget that world existed and we don't

00:07:58.440 see it because we think the base point is the year 2000 and in fact historically the base point for

00:08:03.400 the all-time peak of a you know a culture of mass literacy is probably sometime in the first half of

00:08:08.240 the 20th century yeah i think the the point that television is really what kick-started this decline

00:08:12.640 in literacy is really interesting and it's something we forget when we're focusing on the

00:08:16.060 smartphone we're going to get back to that but with the way the british working class were engaged in

00:08:21.360 a surprisingly literate culture i mean there's something similar that happened in america around

00:08:25.940 the same time in the 19th century with like the lyceum movement you had farmers getting together

00:08:31.040 and listening to you know ralph waldo emerson and reading books and discussing them and debating

00:08:35.480 them i thought it was interesting i i remember reading this article about the tv show boardwalk

00:08:41.760 empire remember that one on hbo about the mobsters um in new york and this article highlighted all

00:08:49.180 the pretty heady books these guys were reading these 1920s mobster guys who were kind of you

00:08:55.560 know rough and tumble but they're reading like some heavy books but yeah it just goes to show

00:09:00.140 like this culture this culture of literacy that existed in western culture and that has

00:09:05.860 waned significantly i mean but people might hear this and think well you know big deal we're not

00:09:12.000 reading long complex books or articles and newspapers or magazines we can still get

00:09:19.560 information, be entertained from really short, snappy articles or videos or podcasts. But you

00:09:27.160 draw on the work of this guy named Walter Ong to help explain why with reading and writing,

00:09:34.260 especially the deeper variety, there's more going on than just simply absorbing or transmitting

00:09:39.140 information. So tell us about this. Who was Walter Ong and what was his big idea?

00:09:44.160 Yeah, Walter Ong is one of my heroes. I think one of the great prescient intellectuals of

00:09:49.340 the second half of the 20th century. Walter Ong, other than being a genius and a great scholar of

00:09:54.380 literacy, was a Jesuit priest. And he was also a student of Marshall McLuhan, who is the great

00:09:59.580 20th century media theorist, the guy we associate with the phrase, the medium is the message.

00:10:03.520 Marshall McLuhan is a great thinker and a fascinating one. A lot of his ideas are,

00:10:07.720 you know, if you read Marshall McLuhan, one sentence is a genius insight, the next three

00:10:11.600 sentences are like incomprehensible and, you know, impossible to understand. Walter Ong built on

00:10:16.880 McLuhan's work about the way that the media we consume and the way we communicate shape the way

00:10:23.040 we think and shape our cultures. I guess it's easy to think that information, we just pass it

00:10:28.700 backwards and forwards. And whether you're passing information through a book or through a newspaper

00:10:31.980 or through a TikTok or through a podcast, that makes no difference. All you're doing is just

00:10:36.420 swapping information through different media. The very famous Marshall McLuhan phrase that

00:10:40.340 many people know is the medium is the message. The way we communicate determines what we can

00:10:44.300 communicate. And I think Walter Ong built on McLuhan's work really convincingly. And the

00:10:48.020 argument of his book, or one of the arguments of his book, Orality and Literacy, is that there are

00:10:52.380 whole spheres of human knowledge and whole ways of thinking that only exist because of reading and

00:10:57.980 writing and because of literacy. I think because we're so used to reading and writing, we live in

00:11:01.960 a world in which we're surrounded by text and we're surrounded by books and articles and signs,

00:11:06.720 we forget to think how weird it is. And I think we can fall into the trap of thinking that

00:11:10.420 things like philosophy, or history, or science, or mathematics, or logic, are intellectual

00:11:16.660 activities that can just spring out of the human mind fully formed. And this is just part of the

00:11:21.100 way that human beings think. One of Walter Ong's arguments was that these things are not natural

00:11:26.400 to human beings. He called them artificial creations. Complex philosophy, complex narrative

00:11:31.240 history, especially science and logic, are not natural products of the human mind, but products

00:11:36.520 of the human mind interacting with the page. So I guess this seems obvious to us, but one of the

00:11:41.200 fundamental points that he made was when you write down your ideas on the page, what you're doing is

00:11:45.940 you're externalizing a part of your mind. You have a thought and in your head, you know, you can try

00:11:50.080 and look at that thought. But when you put your thoughts on the page, you can look at a bit of

00:11:53.180 your mind from the outside. And the thought is there in front of you, separate from your mind,

00:11:56.960 and you can criticize it and you can rethink it. And you can have another thought and add that to

00:12:01.540 the thought, another one and add that together. And you can build your arguments and refine your

00:12:05.500 arguments and organize them logically all of this is incredibly difficult to do without writing

00:12:09.900 if you think about the challenge it would pose you or I to just try and speak a major work of

00:12:14.920 philosophy if you or I were a philosophical genius and we just wanted to do our version of

00:12:19.200 you know Immanuel Kant or Heidegger and I just decided that I was going to speak forth in

00:12:24.740 spontaneous speech 800 pages of genius philosophical insights that would basically be

00:12:29.500 impossible to do the human mind is not constructed to do that and it's not constructed to be able to

00:12:34.660 sustain thought logically, sequentially, and in detail over that stretch of time.

00:12:40.580 Works of philosophy like that depend on literacy.

00:12:43.000 You can't create an 800-word work of philosophy, and you can't create the kind of complex intellectual

00:12:48.520 phenomenon that work of philosophy is without reading and writing.

00:12:52.440 And he also talks about what the preliterate mind or preliterate culture was like.

00:12:56.780 Because again, like you said, we tend to take reading and writing for granted, but it hasn't

00:13:01.160 always been with us.

00:13:02.000 So, you know, writing was invented, you know, around 3400 BC, but then we didn't reach mass

00:13:07.180 literacy for like 4,000 years. So what Ong tries to figure out is, well, if you don't have literacy,

00:13:15.440 you know, if you can't read or write, like, how do you see the world and how do you interact with

00:13:20.780 the world? So what did he say that the preliterate mind was like, that maybe we as literate people

00:13:27.080 living in the 21st century can't really even entirely conceptualize like it's hard for us to

00:13:32.540 think about how they thought exactly that's so well put and I mean Ong made exactly that point

00:13:37.220 that it's almost impossible for a literate person to think themselves into the mindset of a

00:13:42.080 preliterate culture our assumptions are just too formed by text and we can't get out of that textual

00:13:46.120 world I think to me one of the most fundamental and interesting points that Ong makes in that book

00:13:52.620 is about the importance of memory in a society without reading and writing.

00:13:56.860 If you can't write anything down, every single important thing in your society

00:14:00.340 has to be committed to memory.

00:14:02.060 And if you don't commit the important things to memory,

00:14:04.360 they will just vanish and they'll be lost in the great void

00:14:06.820 of forgetting that haunts preliterate societies.

00:14:09.620 If you forget something, it ceases to exist.

00:14:12.140 You can't store information in an archive or in a book.

00:14:14.320 And it's really hard for us to imagine how that shapes every single aspect of a society.

00:14:19.860 so Walter Ong said that in preliterate societies the imperative of memory is shaping not just

00:14:26.760 communication but the whole of culture and one of the examples that he gives and another great

00:14:30.940 writer on this the classist Derek Havlock gives would be a poem like the Iliad the Iliad is a

00:14:36.260 poem that wasn't written down by a single person it's the product of an oral tradition that you

00:14:40.800 know was passed down over the centuries and millennia and every single person who recited

00:14:44.520 the Iliad had to do it from memory and if you're constructing a story from memory and if you're

00:14:48.680 deconstructing myths and a culture from memory, you are pushed in the direction of the memorable.

00:14:53.000 So oral epics like the Iliad, but there are examples in other cultures, Beowulf,

00:14:57.540 the Mawindo epic from the Congo and Africa, major on really vivid, striking characters. You think of,

00:15:04.760 you know, Achilles, the swiftest of the Greeks. You think of Ajax, the strongest of the Greeks.

00:15:10.540 They're full of big, memorable monsters, stuff that sticks in your mind if you're trying to tell

00:15:14.440 story. And this imperative of memory shaped the entirety of preliterate culture. It was the most

00:15:21.560 important thing about everything. So the Iliad is written in rhythmic language. It's written in

00:15:25.700 poetry, which is easy to remember. It's made up of these little memorable fragments. You know,

00:15:29.520 everyone has their little tag, swift-footed Achilles, shining helmeted Athena. And beyond

00:15:35.380 even poetry, when you are trying to store wisdom, you're storing it in the forms of memorable

00:15:41.020 proverbs we still have some of these in english you know red sky at night shepherd's delight

00:15:44.560 these memorable pithy little phrases which are like the most durable possible way of preserving

00:15:50.300 information because if you can't preserve it in memory it's lost and then another thing he talks

00:15:55.440 about too is that because you couldn't write things down if you wanted to have a discussion

00:16:02.740 or figure out like what what happened or what is going on in our world here the type of discussion

00:16:08.820 they had it leaned towards what he called the agon like conflict it was like very loud basically it

00:16:15.240 was like the guy who had the most charisma who was the most powerful who can tell the most persuasive

00:16:20.280 story he was the guy that got to decide like what is truth in pre-literate cultures yeah absolutely

00:16:28.040 that's so well put marshall mcclellan makes a similar point and i think this is actually again

00:16:32.600 something that we forget to realize about the literate culture that we live in although it

00:16:36.780 becomes more obvious to us as we're passing out of it. Marshall McLuhan said that from the

00:16:41.100 perspective of a preliterate society, literate society would seem almost eerie and alien and

00:16:48.140 emotionless. In a preliterate society, every single piece of information that reaches you,

00:16:52.420 every argument about politics and every idea comes from another person. And it comes with

00:16:56.260 that person's face and that person's voice and that person's emotion. One of the strange things

00:17:00.840 about literacy is that it drains all that emotion out of our world. You know, a book can't shout at

00:17:05.020 you it can't charm you it can't grab you on the shoulders it's telling you an idea and the

00:17:09.340 preliterate world was just a much more highly emotional one a much more human one in some ways

00:17:14.840 and the point that you make about it was also more agonistic because inevitably when human

00:17:21.160 beings speak to each other face to face they come into conflict more you know you're pushing up

00:17:25.160 against other human faces other human voices other human personalities in this world in a way that

00:17:29.120 you're simply not in the book and that really as you i think put it really well there it changes

00:17:34.480 your idea of what's true and it changes your idea of what can be true. In a literate culture where

00:17:40.220 the only opportunity to persuade someone of an idea is to make your case in print and set out

00:17:44.020 your ideas in writing, you're kind of just trying to make the best argument you can. You're trying

00:17:47.020 to persuade people by building a good argument and supplying evidence for it. In this environment

00:17:51.540 before literacy, you have a whole range of other means of persuasion at your disposal. If you want

00:17:57.640 to persuade someone of an idea, you can charm them around your way of thinking, or you can shout at

00:18:02.220 them. Or as you say, if you're like a physically big person, and I think we probably all have this

00:18:06.600 experience of conversation, like just being the tallest person in a conversation can bring immense

00:18:11.600 authority. And it has nothing to do with whether or not your idea is a good one or your argument

00:18:15.560 is a good one. But if you're in a group of people and there's someone, you know, very small, but

00:18:20.900 more well-informed, but shy, their point of view just gets much less weight than the point of view

00:18:26.440 of a big tall confident guy and that is a bad way to decide which is the best argument because

00:18:32.420 you're not thinking about the arguments you're thinking about the person delivering the argument

00:18:34.960 and this way that truth was decided in pre-literate societies was just I think very different to the

00:18:40.840 way that we decide truth when we are making arguments in the written word and in print

00:18:44.280 yeah in the extreme version so a lot of pre-literate societies had honor-based cultures

00:18:50.080 So the Greeks, the Vikings, and honor was all about your reputation, your standing in the group.

00:18:57.980 And there was this idea in honor-based cultures of giving someone the lie. It's like you accuse

00:19:04.000 someone of lying. That was a big, like you didn't do that. But the person who was accused of lying,

00:19:09.760 instead of making a case, here's what actually happened, like we would do, we would have a court

00:19:14.060 hearing and try to figure out the facts. They would be like, all right, I'm going to challenge

00:19:17.740 you to a duel. If I kill you, I didn't lie. I that's the truth. Like I won. The truth is I 1.00

00:19:24.340 didn't lie or that bad thing you're accusing me of didn't happen. And that that's what happens

00:19:29.360 in a preliterate society. Yeah, exactly. And our whole I mean, again, something so hard for us to

00:19:34.540 get our heads around because we live in a world that is still associated by literacy. I guess

00:19:38.360 it's that that way that all information and all truth is like personalized. And every single you

00:19:43.640 know, there's no such thing as objectivity, because every single opinion and argument you hear

00:19:47.500 comes from a particular person. Walter Ong argued that our whole idea of objective truth is basically

00:19:53.120 the creation of writing. Because when you write something down, you remove it from the person

00:19:58.400 who's speaking it, and you begin to think about the possibility that knowledge could exist outside

00:20:02.880 the human world on its own. And obviously, you know, writing something down doesn't make it

00:20:06.480 objective. But Ong thought that the fact of writing an idea down and removing it from the human world

00:20:11.500 began to give people the idea that could be such a thing as objective knowledge, that there could

00:20:15.960 be knowledge that was removed from a particular personality or a particular social environment.

00:20:21.680 Okay, so we kind of talked about what a preliterate mind might have looked like a preliterate culture.

00:20:25.280 And along the way, we talked about how literacy changed that. So yeah, as you said, you can write

00:20:30.560 down things on a piece of paper or a tablet, and it's less emotional. You know, we've all had this

00:20:36.700 experience where you get really angry at somebody and you just want to like, call them on the phone

00:20:42.100 and just tear into them. But then you have this moment, okay, I'm going to calm down,

00:20:45.420 let me write down some thoughts. And just the fact, I don't know, something goes on. It's like

00:20:49.400 basically you're directing your thoughts through your prefrontal cortex and it just drains the

00:20:53.600 emotion out of it. And you realize this is a dumb thing to be mad about. I'm not going to send it. 0.99

00:20:59.020 So writing and reading drains emotion out of things. It creates this idea of objectivity.

00:21:03.840 So there's facts out there and they're debatable. Other people can read what you have put out there

00:21:08.440 and they can argue with you through the written word as well. And all of this allowed for the

00:21:14.860 development of, as you said, philosophy, science, and also governments eventually.

00:21:21.560 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in a way, this is one of the kind of earliest impacts of literacy was

00:21:25.880 that, again, something that perhaps is, you know, almost too obvious to think about, but how do you

00:21:30.300 organize a state or an empire in a world of that writing, you just run into problems almost

00:21:35.380 immediately. If you want to run a complex society, if you want to conduct long distance trade,

00:21:40.300 you've got to write down what goods you're sending someone, you've got to write down

00:21:43.960 what they've sent you. You've got to, you know, if you want to control an army at a distance,

00:21:47.860 if you're a king, you've got to write down instructions to your soldiers. You've got to

00:21:50.780 organize supply lines. All of this stuff is just impossible without literacy. It just can't be

00:21:55.840 stored in memory. If you're a merchant trying to trade, you know, hundreds of thousands of goats

00:21:59.740 in the ancient Aegean, you're going to have to write stuff down. Otherwise your business will

00:22:03.580 collapse because you'll have no idea how many goats you've sold. You'll have no idea what people owe

00:22:07.480 you. And I think it's no accident that one of the consequences of the arrival of literacy is the

00:22:13.460 emergence of the first kind of complex states and empires in the ancient near east as people

00:22:17.720 societies can develop bureaucracies armies trade all of these things are enabled by literacy and

00:22:24.540 you not only get like an intellectual explosion with the development of philosophy you know i

00:22:28.460 mean this is later the development of philosophy in greece but you get before that a kind of

00:22:32.540 explosion of social complexity as people can just manage more information and store more information

00:22:37.160 okay so we talked about how you know literacy appeared on the scene and in several places

00:22:42.200 in the world. The first instance was like 3400 BC and Sumeria. But then, as I mentioned earlier,

00:22:49.400 it would take 4,000 years for literacy to become widespread. It was a slow technology

00:22:54.260 to diffuse throughout the human population. But then in the 16th century, thereabouts,

00:23:01.840 maybe say 15th century, there was just this rapid increase in literacy. What happened?

00:23:08.480 why did literacy start increasing so fast in this period of time?

00:23:13.940 I think there are a few things. So in my book, I begin the story sort of in the middle towards

00:23:18.220 the end of the 18th century, which I think is, you know, the story of the journey to mass literacy

00:23:22.880 is a long one and you can begin it anywhere. But I think there was a moment in the middle and the

00:23:27.240 end of the 18th century when the modern world, there's a bit of an inflection point when the

00:23:30.580 modern world found itself on the road towards mass literacy, a world in which everybody can

00:23:35.220 read or write. What changes in the 15th century, obviously, is the invention of the Gutenberg press

00:23:40.700 by Johannes Gutenberg. You know, everybody knows the story, but this is one of the great

00:23:45.960 technological inventions in history. And it means that books, which had been incredibly difficult

00:23:50.880 and slow and laborious to produce previously, because you had to write every single book out

00:23:54.540 by hand, could be mass produced. And this caused an absolute explosion of books. I think it's been

00:23:59.640 estimated that in the 50 years after Gutenberg, more books were printed in Europe than in the

00:24:04.960 previous, you know, I think previous to five millennia combined or something. It was just

00:24:09.460 a huge explosion of printed material. The other force that is driving literacy in the aftermath

00:24:15.000 of the Gutenberg press is Protestantism, which is a version of Christianity, which places a strong

00:24:19.660 emphasis in the written word and was arguing that, you know, unlike Catholicism, in which faith was

00:24:25.140 based on the traditions and hierarchies of the church, everybody should ground their faith in

00:24:29.900 the text of the Bible. And if you wanted to be a really good and diligent Protestant, you should

00:24:34.240 be reading the bible for yourself and that was a huge spur to literacy at the same time you know

00:24:39.000 states are becoming more complex they're developing bureaucracies they're trying to manage more

00:24:43.820 foreign wars economics is becoming more complex you're getting the beginnings of capitalism you've

00:24:48.780 got people trading across europe again it's hard to trade if you can't read or write and there are

00:24:52.860 these incentives pushing more and more people to become literate and this all seems to reach a bit

00:24:57.200 of a head of steam by the middle of the end of the 18th century when we reach this phenomenon that

00:25:01.620 some historians call the reading revolution which describes these kind of intertwined phenomena

00:25:06.420 one which is this uptick in literacy and more people being able to read and write and another

00:25:11.100 is this huge increase in the different types of books that were available you get the beginnings

00:25:15.960 of lending libraries and more more books are just in production and more more different kinds of

00:25:20.440 books are in production not just religious books but secular books travel books history books

00:25:24.000 and it seems to be this moment arguably when the modern kind of literate world begins one in which

00:25:29.640 a lot of ordinary people can read not just social elites and in which they have access to

00:25:34.000 a wide range of texts on you know every imaginable subject yeah and during this time you saw the rise

00:25:40.980 of the republic of letters which was this it didn't actually exist it wasn't like an institution

00:25:45.560 like this is the republic of letters it was just this idea that if you were a guy thinking about

00:25:50.420 something whether it's some scientific principle or some philosophical principle you could put out

00:25:55.120 a book or a pamphlet, make your case. And it didn't matter if you were some aristocrat or

00:26:01.100 some farmer in America writing about something, you could put it out there and people would be

00:26:07.280 like, well, I'm going to pick this apart. This is dumb. Or like, hey, actually, this is a great 1.00

00:26:10.560 idea. Yeah, absolutely. And there's a great economist, Joel Mocchia, who won the Nobel

00:26:15.280 Prize for his work on the Republic of Letters a couple of years ago, who makes this exact argument

00:26:20.860 that as more and more people became literate,

00:26:24.100 more and more people were exchanging letters about ideas,

00:26:26.320 they were writing journals,

00:26:27.740 they were adding ideas together and creating new ideas,

00:26:30.800 you're getting a more and more complex intellectual landscape in Europe.

00:26:34.560 And one of the crucial features of this network

00:26:37.200 of people writing each other letters,

00:26:38.620 sending each other their books, reviewing each other's books,

00:26:40.740 is that compared to previous modes of knowledge production,

00:26:45.240 this was quite meritocratic.

00:26:46.280 As you say, in an age before literacy,

00:26:48.500 if you had the good idea,

00:26:49.500 you would have to turn up and tell it to someone and if you were dressed like a peasant and wearing 0.98

00:26:53.800 you know rags or if you're a woman for instance you'd have a hard time getting your idea across

00:26:59.320 because people make judgments about your physical appearance and it's that world in which information

00:27:04.400 and truth is like very much tied to personality and personal appearance and personal deportment

00:27:09.220 in the republic of letters when everyone's just communicating and writing no one has a clue what

00:27:12.940 you look like people are much less clued in about your social status people might not even know

00:27:16.960 whether you're a man or a woman, and suddenly ideas are competing in this much more meritocratic

00:27:20.760 environment. And the judgment about what is a good idea and what is a bad idea is not who is

00:27:24.980 purveying this idea, it's, is it a good idea? And this causes this just, you know, explosion of

00:27:30.380 intellectual activity, you know, revolutions in philosophy, revolutions in science, revolutions

00:27:34.860 in technology. I mean, the argument of Joel Mock here is basically that this is the beginning of

00:27:39.240 the Industrial Revolution. It's when all these minds across Europe and across increasingly the

00:27:43.960 western world start connecting through literacy and evaluating each other on the basis of the

00:27:50.420 strength of their written arguments that you get this kind of intellectual takeoff in society that

00:27:54.640 eventually leads to science technology industrial revolution and the modern world yeah you just had

00:28:00.400 all these ideas interacting with each other that wasn't happening before there was a lot of remixing

00:28:05.140 going on yeah exactly i mean if ideas were interacting with each other you know in the

00:28:11.000 world before this you'd have an idea about physics and who you talk to like the guy down the local

00:28:14.300 pub you just had no way of getting it out there but suddenly the world was just connected through

00:28:18.100 writing and i imagine too the rise of democracy in the west also contributed to that i know in

00:28:23.880 the united states a lot of americans were surprisingly literate we think people back 0.70

00:28:28.540 in the 1700s 1800s were dumb for men the literacy rate was was higher than women at that time but a

00:28:35.800 lot of men knew how to read because they felt like well if i'm going to be a citizen in this republic 0.94

00:28:40.200 I got to know what's going on. So I got to be able to read the newspapers, read the pamphlets

00:28:44.800 that are being put out. And so yeah, they just read all the time. Yeah, and literacy rates in

00:28:49.800 colonial America are astonishingly higher, higher than in Europe, I think basically the highest in

00:28:53.740 the world. And of course, you know, the political implication of lots of people being able to read

00:28:57.640 was that lots of people are able to write. And in that world before the reading revolution,

00:29:01.600 when literacy was restricted to the social elite, the political ideas that got written down were

00:29:05.760 the political ideas of the aristocratic elite, the only people in society pretty much who could

00:29:10.100 read or write. And as soon as literacy begins to spread through society, you begin to get not only

00:29:15.340 more people reading ideas and, you know, having access to them, but you get a huge social expansion

00:29:20.340 in the kinds of people who contribute to political debate. So, you know, the obvious American example

00:29:25.960 would be Thomas Paine, you know, the great voice of the American Revolution. Nobody would have had

00:29:31.180 a clue what Thomas Paine thought 100 years earlier, because he was a, you know, guy from a poor

00:29:35.620 labouring background, and he wouldn't have been able to read or write. And he could have told his

00:29:39.160 political ideas to someone in the pub, they would never have got further. You know, someone else,

00:29:43.060 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from a sort of artisanal family in Geneva, but another kind of writer of

00:29:47.900 incredibly influential, you know, anti-monarchical political works, someone who had he been born a

00:29:53.320 hundred years earlier, would not have been able to read or write. But he could, because literacy

00:29:58.220 had spread through society, and his ideas were able to set the world on fire. And, you know,

00:30:02.520 would be way too much, as people used to say, cause the French Revolution, but were highly

00:30:07.000 influential on things like the French Revolution, the same way that Thomas Paine was influential in

00:30:10.580 the American Revolution. And when you expand, you can read and write, you're just completely

00:30:15.500 transforming the nature of political debate and the ideas that are in that debate.

00:30:20.000 And then, as you said earlier, you make the case that maybe the early 20th century was probably

00:30:25.340 the golden age of print culture. That was kind of right before television came on the scene.

00:30:31.460 Yeah, totally. You know, the story kind of continues to the 19th century,

00:30:34.280 more and more people are learning to read. In Britain, you have the Education Act at the end

00:30:38.260 of the 19th century, the introduction of primary education. And yet it is this little golden moment

00:30:41.920 in which reading and writing becomes basically something that everyone can do in Northern

00:30:46.140 Europe and in North America. And I think it's just no accident that the age of mass literacy

00:30:51.920 is also the age of mass democracy. This is the age in which the franchise is extended to all adult

00:30:56.000 citizens. It's the age in which women get the vote. And this is just a product of a world in

00:31:00.520 which it's not just the elite who are controlling ideas and who are contributing ideas, it is like

00:31:05.120 everyone in society and people who are in low-paid jobs or working in factories can argue their case

00:31:12.000 in newspapers to their social superiors and advocate for political change, sign petitions,

00:31:17.540 communicate through newspapers, organize rallies. This is kind of where democracy comes from. I think

00:31:22.140 that the story of literacy and the story of reading and writing is inextricable from the

00:31:25.460 story of modern democracy. We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

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00:32:46.360 All right, and then everything started to change.

00:32:48.440 I think lately, all the talk about why literacy is going down or reading is going down is

00:32:53.580 because of smartphones, which of course, that's contributed to all this.

00:32:56.660 But as we mentioned earlier, the shift really began with television. We take television for

00:33:02.340 granted these days. It's kind of just woven into our lives. So can you give us an idea of what it

00:33:06.940 was like in the 1950s for Americans or Europeans when television first came on the scene? I mean,

00:33:14.360 for us, you hear a lot of like this, I don't like smartphones. They're not good for us.

00:33:18.460 We see all these think pieces about how smartphones are bad. Was there the same sort

00:33:23.420 of thing going on with television where its popularity really took off but there was also

00:33:27.800 this concern about what it was doing to people's lives yeah it was massive and again it's a kind

00:33:32.940 of big social debate that's kind of been lost from view i think eventually complaining about

00:33:36.560 television became a completely hackneyed and cliche thing to do so people became embarrassed

00:33:40.680 about it and stopped doing it and people got used to tv was just part of life but i mean yeah tv was

00:33:46.460 i think arguably as revolutionary as the smartphone in society you know that again that report from

00:33:51.840 the Netherlands. When TV was introduced between 1955 and 1975, time spent watching TV rose from

00:33:59.000 the very first year of introduction on average 10 minutes a week in the population to more than 10

00:34:03.100 hours. Like TV was just a monster devourer of leisure time. And it just transformed people's

00:34:09.220 lives. You know, people socialized less, people went out of the house less. Membership of things

00:34:13.840 like churches and the Rotary Society and golf clubs and knitting circles all begins to decline

00:34:19.520 in this era because people are just spending more and more time being entertained at home by

00:34:23.160 television. And, you know, there was a moral panic about it at the time. There were lots of

00:34:27.740 anti-TV screeds written. I mean, very amusing to read in hindsight because it seems so much like

00:34:31.580 the smartphone debate. But my argument would be that that moral panic, you know, for a while,

00:34:37.400 I think it seemed kind of absurd. And we were like, oh, TV, you know, that's just part of life.

00:34:41.940 It's fine. People are way too het up about it. I think actually a lot of that stuff seems quite

00:34:45.760 prescient now because I think this story that we're talking about, the decline of literacy,

00:34:49.520 and this move from a kind of written culture, a culture in which we experience the world

00:34:55.080 mediated to us through text and through writing, to a visual culture, that story begins the

00:35:00.580 television. And so much of what people are saying about television, I think, is directly continuous

00:35:05.100 with what we're saying about smartphones. And I think it's kind of an important thing to remember

00:35:09.800 that this whole debate about like smartphones and reading is not a phenomenon of the last 10 years.

00:35:13.900 This is like the end of a story that goes back pretty much half a century now. This is a long

00:35:18.940 term cultural transformation we're living through from a world in which people are spending time

00:35:22.440 with books and you know socializing more that's the beginning of a story of a world in which

00:35:26.720 screens are just like taking over more and more and more of people's free time and just dominating

00:35:30.860 their lives one of the writers you mentioned the book that talked about the effect that

00:35:36.420 watching screens was having on us was a guy named neil postman wrote a book amusing ourselves to

00:35:43.000 death i think it was like in the 80s he wrote this what was postman's critique about television he

00:35:49.000 was talking about television because the internet didn't exist yet what did he say television was

00:35:53.160 doing to how we were thinking so on talked about or even mcclum he mentioned the medium is the

00:35:58.940 message the way we consume information changes how we think what was postman saying television

00:36:04.540 was doing to how we think yeah that book amusing ourselves to death is just unbelievably prophetic

00:36:09.480 and it was criticised at the time by a lot of people for, you know,

00:36:13.360 old man shouts at clouds, an old professor hates TV, what's new?

00:36:17.300 It's the world that he was describing that came into being with television.

00:36:21.160 I think he really saw the beginning of where society was going

00:36:23.880 and it reads very freshly, which is unusual for a polemic written in the 1980s.

00:36:26.840 Often they age appallingly badly.

00:36:29.100 He had several arguments about television.

00:36:31.240 I guess the first one is that one of the things that was happening

00:36:34.380 as we moved from a world dominated by the written word

00:36:37.920 into a world dominated by images and moving images was that we were beginning to erode our

00:36:43.440 capacity to have serious arguments. One of the things that we're doing when we're writing,

00:36:47.540 we're writing newspaper articles, we're writing books, is we're setting out what's in our minds.

00:36:51.040 We're presenting people with their ideas. What books and newspapers do is present ideas,

00:36:55.000 stories, and arguments. It's writing a long-form text as a way of kind of imposing coherence on

00:36:59.600 the world and giving someone a bit of your mind and a well-presented bit of the way that you

00:37:03.800 think about the world. When a world is dominated by moving images, as it increasingly was by

00:37:07.560 television, which was what Postman was observing, TV is not exchanging the insides of people's

00:37:11.440 minds. It's exchanging images. It's exchanging the exterior world. So you are looking at pictures

00:37:16.040 and you're looking at what is exciting and grabby and sensational. And it's just much less easy to

00:37:23.840 have serious arguments on television than it is through writing. You know, in the book, I say,

00:37:28.340 you know, compare a newspaper article about a war in the Middle East, even in a tabloid newspaper,

00:37:33.160 the newspaper article will probably tell you you know where is the war happening who's involved in

00:37:38.100 it why is it happening and in text you know we're setting out causes where contextualizing things

00:37:44.480 we're providing evidence if that war is covered on tv there might be voiceover from a tv anchor

00:37:49.580 kind of explaining a bit of what's going on but what you're seeing and what is really dominating

00:37:53.460 your impression of what's going on will be the exciting visual images it will be like tanks

00:37:56.700 driving across the desert it will be planes swooping out the sky and your experience of the

00:38:01.580 world is much more sensational and much more to do with what looks good and this kind of like

00:38:08.800 exciting exterior world and much less to do with the interior world of the mind, arguments, ideas,

00:38:15.320 generalizations, causes, abstract thoughts. And Postman feared that this more visual world was

00:38:21.460 going to really struggle to sustain a complex democracy because democracy requires us to have

00:38:26.320 arguments about ideas and set out what's in our minds. He just really doubted how possible that

00:38:31.080 would be in a world in which the visual image is predominant and it favors the sensational and the

00:38:35.640 good looking and the striking. Yeah. Another argument he made that stuck out to me when I

00:38:39.680 read that book was as soon as you bring in television or screens, you take on the culture

00:38:44.560 of showbiz and everything has to be entertaining. Even things that are, you know, this is information

00:38:50.900 like the news or an education television show. The first thing, the priority is it has to be

00:38:57.260 entertaining has to captivate people's attention. And the information transmission or the learning

00:39:03.220 that's secondary. And he thinks that's not good. Yeah, absolutely. And you can be so much more

00:39:09.300 entertaining with television. I mean, you know, I love books, but a book can only be so entertaining,

00:39:13.800 you know, next to a TV show or a video game, a book is just inevitably a more boring object in

00:39:21.120 a good way, I think. But you just enter this world of I mean, especially, you know, when you kind of

00:39:26.500 bring in this element of capitalist competition between cable news shows and eventually the same

00:39:30.160 thing happens algorithms on tiktok through this arms race to become more and more entertaining

00:39:34.340 and the capacity for tv to be entertaining is like massively more and tv becomes you know it's

00:39:41.800 been measured through the 20th century it becomes faster paced shots last less long music becomes

00:39:47.540 simpler and louder and it just becomes more and more desperate to colonize our free time and you

00:39:53.700 know, it did. TV just completely, you know, really kind of dominated people's lives in a way that I

00:39:59.360 think would have been astonishing to think about standing at the beginning of the story in the

00:40:03.080 1950s. I think the statistic that Robert Putnam has in his book Bowling Alone is that I think it's

00:40:08.600 between the 1970s and 1990s, or 1960s and 1990s, the average American gained four hours of extra

00:40:15.540 free time. And they spent almost all that time watching television, because television can just

00:40:20.760 be hypnotically entertaining in a way that is very hard for a book to be it's very hard to spend

00:40:24.540 like literally hours reading a book because it's exhausting reading is a cognitively taxing

00:40:29.060 it's hard it's mental hard work and eventually you know you become tired of reading but you

00:40:33.000 really can watch a lot of tv you can watch a lot of tv because it's more passive less demanding

00:40:38.940 experience and people did you know that is the story of the kind of domination of leisure time

00:40:42.840 by tv in the late 20th century okay so postman argued that television the moving image was

00:40:49.340 starting to chip away at this literate mind that we had developed in the age of reading.

00:40:53.540 What's interesting though, is that it didn't happen right away. There's this period when

00:40:59.060 television was first introduced where you still saw television have a bit of a literary flair.

00:41:06.860 And I think Ong calls this secondary orality in his book. And whenever I watch television shows,

00:41:12.260 like talk shows from the fifties, sixties, or seventies, and I listened to the people talk,

00:41:17.300 they talk more like writing you know it just sounds more structured and smart they have these

00:41:22.600 complex clauses like if you watch an interview with rod serling the guy who wrote twilight zone

00:41:27.580 you just think wow this guy this guy was really smart and then you watch you know people on

00:41:32.920 television today it's different from those shows from the 50s and 60s because what they fed in

00:41:38.320 their brains came out in how they spoke yeah absolutely i think the phrase that neil postman

00:41:44.580 uses is printed orality. In an age that is saturated in books and reading, in a way that

00:41:50.140 we really kind of fail to get our heads around, people are so saturated, and especially highly

00:41:54.720 literate people, and a lot of politicians used to be highly literate, are just saturated in

00:41:58.920 the way that communication is structured in writing, which is more logical, it uses more

00:42:03.380 sub clauses, it's more dense with ideas. And if that is almost the major way that you're consuming

00:42:08.420 information, you kind of begin to talk a bit like a book. And it is remarkable, as you say,

00:42:12.480 watching those old TV shows, people open their mouths and speak in perfect paragraphs. It's

00:42:16.620 because their minds and their speech patterns have been formed not by listening to other people talk,

00:42:21.720 but to a very large degree by reading written texts, which are more structured, which are more

00:42:25.920 organized, which are usually kind of more logical in their progression. I always think about the

00:42:31.000 way that if you read a novel from the 19th century, Jane Austen or George Eliot or something,

00:42:35.540 a character will open their mouth at a moment of emotional high drama and basically deliver

00:42:39.860 this kind of impeccably structured, logically ordered speech that seems completely implausible

00:42:45.100 to a modern reader, and obviously is the product of literary artifice, but I think also reflected

00:42:48.960 an age in which communication, even spoken communication, was just shaped really deeply by

00:42:55.640 the intellectual habits of the written word. And you're right that you see that fade away in

00:43:00.680 television. Yeah, and it's just faded away even more. It's interesting, whenever I've had guests

00:43:06.140 on the podcast who are older so you know like they're in their 70s or 80s they talk differently

00:43:11.740 than a guest who was born in the you know late 20th century it's hard to pinpoint exactly how

00:43:17.960 it's different it's just sort of like this ineffable difference and i think it's because

00:43:22.320 these older people they grew up with more of that literary mind than the people who grew up watching

00:43:28.400 television and then scrolling smartphones it's really it's weird like once you notice it you

00:43:33.380 can't not notice it yeah i've noticed exactly the same thing you know my day job as a journalist

00:43:38.060 when you interview people there's a real difference between someone who talks to you full of ums and

00:43:42.680 ahs can't really sustain a thought for more than like two and a half sentences and then it is

00:43:47.300 often you're right often older interviewees who often you know if someone is eminent and you

00:43:50.780 interview the newspaper they often are quite literate scientists and they will just deliver

00:43:53.340 you like flawless paragraphs yeah i'm sure part of that is getting old but i think it is just

00:43:57.060 belonging to this world in which you're used to like structuring complex ideas encountering

00:44:01.900 complex ideas joining thoughts together in a way that exists so profoundly in every book or almost

00:44:08.160 all books and just is much less apparent on tiktok where you know you're talking for like 20 seconds

00:44:13.360 and it disappears again and it's just really a kind of different way of it's just completely

00:44:17.480 different kind of communication yeah and then the introduction of the smartphone this just put the

00:44:22.200 literary atrophying effect of the screen on steroids basically yeah i think it did i mean

00:44:28.300 And I think this is also more apparent to us now than it might have been, you know, around 2007 when the iPhone came out and all the other companies rushed, scrambled to provide competing devices, competing kind of smartphone screens that people could have.

00:44:40.760 I think in some ways, one of the initial strange consequences of the smartphone was that probably for a while people were reading more.

00:44:49.600 In those days before ubiquitous 4G internet, when you can't stream video or music constantly, a lot of all you can do on your phone is like, you know, read a news article.

00:44:59.280 You were still kind of in this sort of like more textual world.

00:45:02.540 And I think what has happened over the last, you know, seven, even five years is that as mobile phone technologies got better, as memory has increased, as cloud computing has got better, as mobile data speeds have improved, we can suddenly stream images and we can stream video and look at moving images basically everywhere, basically constantly.

00:45:24.560 That's really only been possible for not that long in our culture.

00:45:27.400 and I think one of the reasons that this whole argument about literacy and the literacy crisis

00:45:33.800 is kind of having a moment and people responding to it is because I think people are seeing this

00:45:37.780 in their everyday lives you know smartphones have been a little distracted they introduce

00:45:41.340 it's much more kind of fragmented world you know reading a twitter feed is not the same thing as

00:45:45.720 reading like a long newspaper article or a book but I think people have sense like you know I

00:45:49.920 found this so striking as many people have that when you've gone public transport yes everyone

00:45:54.320 would be on their phone but 10 or 15 years ago you'd look over people's shoulders and in the uk

00:45:58.800 they'd be reading like the bbc website or the guardian website now you get the subway you get

00:46:03.780 the bus and everybody is watching a video like you walk past everyone and they're watching moving

00:46:07.500 images on the screen and i think that is so striking and so new and this to me is kind of

00:46:12.060 yeah as you say the culmination of this story away from a literate written culture to one which is

00:46:17.900 just saturated in moving images and in a way we're going back into a pre-literate world because the

00:46:26.600 way we consume information now is someone talking to us on a screen and this is just like us sitting

00:46:33.040 around a campfire you know 2 000 years ago looking at some guy tell a story we're just doing it on our

00:46:38.360 screens now yeah absolutely and i mean i guess you know the world that we're in is not an exact

00:46:44.260 replica of the preliterate world but there are there are some really striking similarities and

00:46:48.780 I think the one that you point to is the most striking one if we talk about the way that

00:46:52.060 Marshall McLuhan said that preliterate societies were kind of hectic and noisy and full of emotion

00:46:56.740 and anger and face-to-face confrontation and every single piece of information came from a person

00:47:01.660 and was charged with that person's emotion and energy and voice and personality and then with

00:47:06.700 the arrival of print and when we began to communicate ideas more through literacy and

00:47:11.360 political ideas were coming to you through newspapers and books, all that emotion kind

00:47:14.360 of drained away. And I think what we're experiencing now, or maybe what we've been experiencing since

00:47:18.380 the arrival of television and experiencing at warp speed now, is all that emotion and personality

00:47:24.300 is like rushing back into our world. Things are coming to you from people again. If you're scrolling

00:47:28.340 through a TikTok, every single idea you encounter is coming from a person. And I mean, you can hear

00:47:32.820 it when you sit on the bus and you're listening to someone scrolling through a TikTok. It's this

00:47:36.860 noisy, hectic, emotional, loud, busy world. And I think, yeah, that is just such a striking thing

00:47:43.740 that's happening to us. Yeah. And it makes debate about politics, about philosophy,

00:47:50.300 about technology. It just makes it more shrill because we're going back to that preliterate

00:47:54.360 world where it's the agon. It's going back to that Walter Ong agon. It's like whoever can make

00:47:59.580 the most compelling, not even logical cases, who can just seem more charismatic or more powerful

00:48:05.440 or just look like he's making a really good point

00:48:08.440 or he's got the really good zinger,

00:48:09.960 that's the guy that wins.

00:48:11.340 And you see, I mean, that's all you see.

00:48:13.040 Like you see these YouTube videos.

00:48:14.060 I hate, I haven't really watched one all the way through

00:48:16.660 because I look at them like, I'm going to hate that.

00:48:18.300 So it's that whole thing where it's like, 0.64

00:48:20.420 you know, one Christian against 20 atheists

00:48:23.860 or one atheist against 20.

00:48:25.600 And it's just like,

00:48:26.460 we're going back to the world of Homeric Greece,

00:48:30.240 basically with this.

00:48:31.680 And I don't think people realize that.

00:48:33.380 No, I went down such a rabbit hole

00:48:35.060 of these researching the book and they're and you're right i mean these videos you know one 0.99

00:48:39.500 progressive versus 20 nazis they're like unbelievably stupid and no one's saying anything 0.99

00:48:45.720 it's all bluster and posturing and yeah exactly it has nothing to do with logical argument or 1.00

00:48:51.580 trying to or trying to convey an idea or a thought it's all about spectacle it's about entertainment

00:48:56.780 as you say it's this kind of world of show business where the point of an argument isn't

00:48:59.740 can I logically lay out my ideas and convince you? It's, you know, can I shout at you? Can I

00:49:04.900 put in a good show? Can I be really charismatic and charm you around to my way of thinking?

00:49:09.120 All those things have basically nothing to do with logical arguments, but they make for a great show.

00:49:13.900 And people, you know, human beings are not rational animals. And we're often inclined to

00:49:18.900 be persuaded by these irrational forms of argument, even though we shouldn't be. You know,

00:49:22.660 we are persuaded by very charming people. Sometimes if someone seems really upset and

00:49:26.040 they're crying in person or on our phone and you can see them crying, you will come round to their

00:49:30.100 point of view or feel sympathetic towards their point of view, even if they would struggle to

00:49:34.040 rationally argue you round to their perspective. The other really striking thing, I think, to do

00:49:38.320 with those debates is that Walter Ong said that one of the really striking features of

00:49:42.600 preliterate societies was how much they loved verbal jousting and verbal conflict. It's called

00:49:47.260 flighting. And it's a feature of all preliterate societies that are obsessed with trading insults,

00:49:53.100 slanging matches. You get it, you know, in the Iliad, the Greeks and the Trojans will fling 0.90

00:49:57.300 these kind of crazy insults each other. You get it in Beowulf, people trade insults. And this is

00:50:01.800 really exciting in that kind of preliterate world, because you can see the people who are fighting.

00:50:06.040 People obviously can fight in written text. And, you know, you can write a snarky letter to a

00:50:10.320 newspaper, but it's just way less entertaining. And it's way less fun to watch people trying to

00:50:13.860 fight on the page of a newspaper, on the page of a book. A debate in person is way more exciting

00:50:18.580 when you get all the emotion, all the drama. And I think we're returning to this world in which we

00:50:22.960 kind of a loving that human drama of conflict because we can see it and it's exciting to see it

00:50:26.800 in a way that conflict is just way less exciting in books and magazines. And I think that is part

00:50:31.340 of the reason that the world feels so angry, which is because we just love watching people

00:50:34.660 fighting when we can see them doing it face to face in a way that watching two people have like

00:50:38.280 a debate via email is just not really fun at all. Yeah. And so this rise of the post-literate society

00:50:43.640 where we're shifting our information consumption to video, it's not only making debate more shrill

00:50:49.500 and just not enjoyable or productive,

00:50:51.360 but it's also making trying to figure out

00:50:53.540 what's true even harder.

00:50:54.880 Because again, like now, instead of being like,

00:50:57.400 all right, here's the written word,

00:50:58.580 here's the argument, here's the proofs or the tables,

00:51:01.780 winning an argument today,

00:51:02.820 it just depends on if you're the charismatic person

00:51:05.180 and what you say sounds convincing

00:51:07.220 or you look handsome or pretty.

00:51:09.540 And then people go, yeah, this guy's right.

00:51:11.320 I like this guy or this lady.

00:51:13.020 And so, I mean, I've seen this with my own work.

00:51:15.200 I don't have much of an online presence,

00:51:17.040 like visual presence.

00:51:18.340 I don't do social media.

00:51:19.500 um but i know that if i want to be more successful i got to put myself out there you know like create

00:51:24.880 a personal brand do video but i just don't want to do that like i just i just want the articles

00:51:29.760 and the podcasts i put out to be the thing that people follow i don't want to i don't want it to

00:51:35.720 be because they like brett i don't know yeah i totally agree and it's that you know screens and

00:51:42.660 seeing people's faces just makes it much easier to connect with people personally i mean the whole

00:51:47.520 phenomenon of an influencer is a kind of product of a visual culture it's really hard to be an

00:51:51.720 influencer in print because people can't see you you can't show them around your kitchen and it's

00:51:56.460 just very hard for people to develop that parasocial relationship but this world that we're moving into

00:52:00.520 is like way more personalized and everyone is a personality and you know you see it online people

00:52:05.020 become attached to some online personality and then they will follow them down all kinds of

00:52:09.460 rabbit holes not because they're being logically persuaded every step of the way but because they

00:52:13.660 find this person charismatic charming likable and therefore they're more inclined to accept

00:52:18.780 their ideas and human beings you know god bless us we are just not fundamentally rational animals

00:52:24.640 and we can be persuaded by charming charlatans and i think if you're charming charlatan you just

00:52:29.780 have a much easier ride online on tiktok on youtube than you would if you were having to

00:52:34.720 you know write out your arguments in a newspaper article every week yeah and the thing about the

00:52:39.100 visual stuff i mean you can fake it and a lot of these influencers fake it you know like

00:52:43.520 talking about this Andrew Tate guy, you know, come to find out all of his stuff was fake. He was just

00:52:47.700 renting cars, renting planes. It wasn't real, but people are like, oh, wow, this guy's got a lot of

00:52:52.660 cool stuff. I'm going to follow him. It's like, that's just fake. I mean, you can fake stuff with

00:52:55.720 text. You can just make stuff up, but the text, it's more scrutable. Like you can analyze it more

00:53:00.880 than the visual image. All right. Okay. So we're moving into this post-literate society. People

00:53:06.320 are reading less and we're going kind of back to the world of Homeric Greece in a way.

00:53:10.580 what's the future of reading i mean is this uh are we doomed are we doomed to

00:53:16.980 no one's going to be reading i mean people still read like people are going to read

00:53:20.840 articles online but it's going to be very shallow reading what do we do what's going to happen

00:53:25.920 yeah i've got to say i'm pretty pessimistic you're definitely right to say that you know

00:53:30.300 the argument of the book isn't post-literate doesn't mean illiterate and i'm not saying that

00:53:34.120 what's going to happen is everybody in the world is going to stop being able to read it's just that

00:53:37.840 we will learn to read at school? Will we then go on to read in our everyday lives? I think

00:53:42.960 less and less reading books is declining pretty steeply. Reading newspapers, we all know the

00:53:47.940 newspaper industry is in serious trouble. And I think this culture of, you know, long form text,

00:53:54.220 which is difficult to engage with, takes time, takes focus, takes a lot of cognitive work to

00:53:58.560 get through, you know, difficult textual argument is really endangered. There's a phenomenon that

00:54:03.240 people in education studies talk about, which is the 400 word wall. And what that describes is

00:54:09.600 this phenomenon that they're discovering among students who have come of age in the age of like

00:54:14.040 TikTok and video games and this kind of visual screen culture. 400 words is the limit of what

00:54:18.940 they can get through before they become distracted and they lose their focus and they can stop

00:54:22.120 following an argument. So, you know, one argument for the future might be that no written text is

00:54:26.720 going to be longer than 400 words because that seems to be a limit of attention for a lot of

00:54:30.820 students. I guess one possible future will be that some people will resist this culture of,

00:54:36.240 you know, smartphones, endless video, brain rot content, and these people will make a conscious

00:54:42.420 effort to avoid it. They will make more effort to read in their own lives. They will ban their kids

00:54:47.200 from having smartphones and will send their kids to the kind of expensive schools which ban tech.

00:54:52.000 I mean, we know ironically that, and it's quite a famous point now, that a lot of Silicon Valley

00:54:55.980 executives are sending their kids to these Waldorf schools where tech is banned for much of the time

00:55:01.420 in education. And in Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, he has this moment where he goes

00:55:06.520 to Steve Jobs' house and he says, what's happening at Steve Jobs' house at dinner is the kids are

00:55:10.520 banned from having iPads and everyone's sitting around the table talking face to face about the

00:55:14.220 books they've read. And that will be a world that I think if you are perhaps wealthy and educated

00:55:19.620 and have the time and resources to manage to separate yourself from your device, ban your

00:55:24.360 kids from having an iPhone, send them to a good school, maybe you will end up in that richer

00:55:29.020 information knowledge environment. And people without the money or the resources or the education

00:55:34.040 will not have access to that world. And, you know, one of the kind of themes of the book is that

00:55:39.140 for the whole of human history, societies have been characterized by massive knowledge divides

00:55:43.360 between a social elite, which has access to good information and good knowledge, because they can

00:55:47.540 afford it and they can afford to, you know, have the education, time with it, and everybody else

00:55:51.720 who lives, you know, for most of history up until 150 years ago, outside the literate world. And I

00:55:56.500 think it's not that the people outside that world in the future are going to be literally illiterate,

00:56:00.340 but you'll have a world of people, perhaps, wealthy, educated people who can afford to

00:56:04.440 live in this world of books can have subscriptions to newspapers and have access to reliable

00:56:08.660 information. And everybody else who doesn't have that privilege is perhaps lost in a world like,

00:56:13.360 you know, TikTok and scrolling. That's bleak.

00:56:16.940 Yeah, I mean, it is called the New Dark Ages. As everyone always says, where's the optimism?

00:56:20.120 I know.

00:56:20.760 I'm like, the book's title is bleak.

00:56:22.300 This is a barn burner for Jeremiah.

00:56:24.260 Well, James, this has been a great conversation.

00:56:26.960 Where can people go to learn more about the book in your work?

00:56:29.520 God, I mean, I would say buy the book,

00:56:31.060 which is available from all good bookshops.

00:56:32.700 And I have a sub stack, Cultural Capital,

00:56:34.680 which I often write about these themes on.

00:56:36.800 So I would check that out as well.

00:56:38.600 Fantastic.

00:56:38.940 Well, James Marriott, thanks for time.

00:56:39.960 It's been a pleasure.

00:56:41.120 Great.

00:56:41.400 Yeah, really good to talk to you.

00:56:42.280 Thank you for having me.

00:56:44.220 My guest here is James Marriott.

00:56:45.440 He's the author of the book, The New Dark Ages,

00:56:47.540 The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literacy Society.

00:56:49.680 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:56:52.400 You can find more information about his work at his Substack Cultural Capital.

00:56:55.740 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash darkages, where you can find links to resources

00:56:59.820 where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:57:08.700 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.

00:57:11.480 If you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review

00:57:14.500 on the podcast player that you use to listen to the show.

00:57:16.800 And if you've done that already, thank you.

00:57:18.160 please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think

00:57:21.240 was something out of it as always thank you for the continued support until

00:57:24.320 next time it's brad mckay remind you on list they win podcast but put what you've

00:57:28.040 heard into action

00:57:48.160 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - October 27, 2026

The New Dark Ages： The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

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