By Rohan Punnoose, Contributor
I don’t think too much anymore. I remember the days when I would spend hours outside, trying to imagine what the dinosaurs in my encyclopedia would look like, balancing on two legs. The late nights of puzzling out who opened the Chamber of Secrets, and early mornings trying to understand why the pigs deserved the milk on Animal Farm. Why are those times disappearing?
With the title of his article, James Marriott fires back an answer: The dawn of the post-literate society. Levels of reading have severely dropped in recent times. According to Marriott’s graphic, the percentage of US teenagers who read in their leisure time almost every day has decreased from above 35% in the early 1990s to lower than 15% in the early 2020s. Marriott blames our phones.
He remarks, “Once upon a time a social scientist confronted with statistics like these might have guessed the cause was a societal crisis like a war or the collapse of the education system.”
However, there was no war in the past years that could have affected the nation so gravely, and the education system hasn’t collapsed (yet). The radical drop in literacy can be pinpointed to one thing – the smartphone. The device is a gateway to a world of instant and limitless gratification, where reading is less than second-rate entertainment.
As Rose Horowitch writes in The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books, “Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube.” Digital media is simply more stimulating.
There can’t be anything wrong with society switching its preferences for entertainment, right? This shouldn’t affect how we think, right?
Wrong.
When literacy first spread through society, it widely disseminated knowledge of once-elite subjects like history, philosophy, science, mythology, and theology. Alongside permeating information throughout the ordinary classroom, it trained people to be cautious, skeptical, rational thinkers.
As Marriott says, “Philosophy cannot exist without criticism… writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny” (The dawn of the post-literate society). In an age when reading is disappearing, so do the practices of creating logical arguments, thinking deeply, and understanding the complexities of the world. Addicting streams of forgetful, digital content have replaced thought-provoking, complex writing.
“The result is a media environment that seems like the cognitive equivalent of the junk food aisle and is every bit as difficult to resist as those colorful, unhealthy packages,” writes Mary Harrington in Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good. We have turned from reading and understanding nuanced topics to mindlessly scrolling through social media looking for the next short video that makes us smirk for half a second. The world is becoming a place where we would rather see funny, controversial, or highly-shared content, rather than something meaningful. A shallow society.
What does this mean for education? Nataliya Kosmyna, an MIT researcher, reports in Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?, “Our brains love shortcuts; it’s in our nature. But your brain needs friction to learn. It needs to have a challenge.”
With an endless supply of short-form content that requires almost no deep thinking to understand, people don’t exercise their brains like they once did. In The dawn of the post-literate society, we see clear evidence of weaker cognitive skills from the drop in average assessment scores for teenagers in reading and maths.
It’s a scary thought that for the first time, our intellectual capabilities are declining. Could we be regressing in societal progress?
In the feudal ages, most of society existed to work the land owned by a few elites. Those elites portrayed themselves in sculptures, art, and public appearances as ordained by god to rule for their moral character, intelligence, and wisdom. By curating their image as superior to the common people they ruled, they were able to maintain unquestionable authority over their subjects.
And then people started reading.
“People began to know too much. And to think too much,” writes Marriott (The dawn of the post-literate society). The introduction of print and the spread of literacy forced long-established power structures to crumble. For the first time, the common people had access to the knowledge that once justified why only elites were fit to govern. The public began reading about past policy failures and how elites were exploiting their power. People asked radical questions: “Where does power come from? Why should some men have so much more than others? Why aren’t all men equal?” (The dawn of the post-literate society). In the ensuing decades, the old social order fell apart, and the middle class rose to prominence. Democracy has its foundations in those revolutions where the common man thought critically and realized he was capable of governing himself. What allowed him to think critically? Reading.
Now, we’re going in reverse. No more reading. No more thinking. No more democracy. If we stay on this path, the public will become zombified by the never-ending conveyor belt of digital rubbish. The majority will lose the capacity to identify the increasing corruption and power imbalances in our world. Who cares what the government’s doing unless they’re going to ban TikTok, right?
If we don’t change course, there will soon be a new feudal system. Those in control will be “skilled at code-switching between the elite language of policy and the populist one of meme-slop” (Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good). They will have trained themselves in complex comprehension to understand and create convoluted laws that benefit themselves. To get to positions of power, they will charm the media-drugged public with simple, emotional appeal.
The rest of society will be labeled not “serf” but “consumer”. The common man will become an addicted worm, consuming pleasurable, frictionless products without a desire or an ability to stop. As Kosmyna mutters, “It’s only software developers and drug dealers who call people users” (Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?). The elites who own software corporations will fill their pockets from psychologically hacking the brain-dead masses.
We are at the brink of a mass eradication of reading. Following close behind, the eradication of thinking. But what if there will be an eradication of something greater: humanity.
Ask anyone what separates humans from other animals, and the answer’s quite consistent: We think. Animals don’t. If we extrapolate the trend of rapidly declining reading and thinking, that distinction will no longer exist. The consumers of the world will turn into vegetables, living only for the next hit of dopamine. High thought – the capability that made humanity the most dominant creature to exist in recorded history – will be dead. The future human will be only a husk of the great species that planted a flag on the moon, voyaged into the vast oceans, and built shelter in every corner of the Earth.
But there is one “unless.”
If people begin reading again, we can stop the spread of mindlessness while we still can. If we reject being spoon-fed informational garbage, we can bring back logical reasoning and knowledge into the population. We can reclaim a critical view of our societal power structure and defend democracy. We can protect the most precious, species-defining ability we have – thought.
If we begin reading again, maybe the days of thinking can reappear.
About the Author
