The Great Dumb-Down is here — the effect of the decline in literacy. By Paul Sagar at UnHerd.
What appears to be in mass decline is the reading of complex, long-form prose. This is particularly obvious when it comes to reading books, where the statistics are stark. In America, reading for pleasure has declined by 40% in the past 20 years. In the UK, The National Literacy Trust reports that the number of children saying they read for pleasure is the lowest on record. But it is also a story about the loss of widespread reading in the form of daily newspapers. As well as the disappearance of local journalism, national publications have seen circulation drop from the millions to the low hundreds of thousands. The very fact that you are reading this means that you are now firmly in a minority of the population.
What has increasingly replaced both books and newspapers is screens — and specifically the screens we carry around in our pockets, upon which we watch short-form videos. This is the dawn of the post-literate society. People can read; it’s just that most of them choose not to.
Western Civilization was built on reading books:
OK, so what’s the problem? Let’s start with the fact that it is only through the written word that human beings can engage in long, complex, critically verifiable chains of thought. An oral culture can bequeath a story, but it cannot become The Odyssey until somebody writes it down. Even more dramatically, imagine someone trying to dictate from memory (let alone listen to, understand, and analyse) something like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
More than that, however, reading literally rewires our brains. [James Marriott, in The New Dark Ages,] marshals the relevant neuroscientists, and they are clear: the kind of complex cognition that our civilisation depends upon is possible only for humans who can read. Humans who can read more complex things are (on average) able to have more complex thoughts. Those who struggle to read complex things struggle to have complex thoughts.
Smartphones literally make people stupider:
This is why smartphones are nothing short of a civilisation-threatening disaster. What a smartphone removes is the need for reading anything complex, let alone long-form. Indeed, they are designed to do the opposite. Thousands of very smart engineers devote their entire careers to diverting as much of your attention as possible to short form videos, the scrolliest of scrollbait. When watching short videos delivering the dopamine hits to which we are now addicted, our brains are rewiring. This time, to make us stupider.
What about podcasts? There is some evidence that the precipitous decline in the sales of non-fiction books is partially due to the fact that we’re listening to more podcasts — at least some of which are highly intelligent. The problem is that doing so returns us to something like an oral culture; the inadequacies of oral culture are most apparent when you transcribe the kinds of things that people say on podcasts. …
Because our ears work differently from our eyes, we find oral testimony persuasive even when it is filled with glaring errors, inconsistencies, and even a basic lack of coherence. The collapse of reading correlates with the rise of conspiracy theories, flat-earthers, false beliefs about vaccines, and all the rest of the internet-enabled bullshit. …
Did the higher IQs of the 1800s cause literacy, or the other way around?
Mass literacy is a recent phenomenon, and by no means the historical norm. It only really got going in Western countries around the 18th century, and he persuasively makes the case that it is no accident that democracy arose in the 19th. It first required a print culture where everybody read a lot — and what they read was more cognitively demanding than what is more readily on offer today. We have reliable records of working-class children choosing to read Dickens, Defoe and Shakespeare in the Forties: in other words before television became ubiquitous. …
[Marriot] puts forward a plausible underlying explanation of what has driven, or at least exacerbated, so many of the problems we now face: “the literate foundations on which liberal democracy rests are crumbling beneath our feet”. The fact that he must make this case in a book is a vicious, if fitting, irony.
Technology drives politics:
Throughout human history, whenever underlying technologies have changed, the politics have changed. Reading is a case in point. The invention of the Gutenberg press eventually made Western democracy possible through the rise of literate populations. Along the way, it also helped undermine absolute monarchies, as well as unleashing the European wars of religion, resulting in millions of deaths. …
Today:
I came away not optimistic, but convinced that we are now hurtling firmly downwards.
I recently spent a Saturday afternoon compiling reports on the students who seem to have submitted pure AI copy-and-paste for their resits. … I’m doing this because I’m mad and actually think that education and scholarship matter. The incentives strongly suggest to me that I should just pretend I haven’t noticed, and enjoy my Saturday. (The students are also under perverse incentives; if you don’t cheat but the others do, aren’t you just the mug?) … Until we find a way to sort this out, university degrees really are going to be pretty much worthless.
If you stand at the back of a lecture hall these days, you see a sea of screens, students flicking through their dopamine suppliers. At the front, some relic from a previous generation drones on. A couple of times a week, the relic is me.