James Marriott is a London Times columnist and the author of the Substack Cultural Capital, covering society, ideas, and culture. He is the author of The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and James Marriott discuss whether the decline of reading is as severe as the data suggests, whether television or social media is more to blame, and why this is bad news for democracy.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: You say in the introduction to your book that there’s a new genre of people wringing their hands about the end of reading, but you are a little earlier to that genre than others, and your book is really quite a lot more ambitious than just pointing that out. But let’s start with a straightforward factual finding: how reliable is the evidence that we have really seen a genuine decline of reading, and how worried should we be about that?
James Marriott: I do think the evidence is at this point really reliable. As you say, the non-viral essay on the decline of reading is pretty much its own genre of magazine journalism now. There have been lots of these sorts of articles. I always like to point out now that everybody has done this. I think I wrote one of the earliest ones back in 2023. I wrote an article about the future of the humanities in UK universities and spoke to lecturers and professors teaching English literature and other humanities subjects and began to find the sorts of comments and observations that have been reported in The New Yorker, in The Atlantic, everywhere now.
Professors told me that they’d spent their careers assigning books like Middlemarch or Ulysses and had assumed that this was pretty much what you did as an English literature professor. You assigned your undergrads these great monuments of English literature, and they were finding that they could no longer rely on their students to read the books. It seemed to them that their students were basically unable to read the books. They just couldn’t get through them.
I and probably everyone else who’s written this sort of article, was conscious that “university students aren’t as clever as they once were” and “the young are disappointing” is a sort of ancient theme of cultural commentary, as people like to say, going as far back as Socrates. I do think this is increasingly backed up by evidence. I guess the largest-scale survey for the decline of reading is this American Time Use Survey of almost a quarter of a million Americans, which found that in the last 20 years, daily time spent reading, defined quite broadly including audiobooks and newspapers as well as physical books, has declined by 40%. There’s a similar figure in the UK: a third of adults say that they’ve given up reading in the last 20 years.
On top of this we have these, I guess, probably more reliable studies about not only the decline of time spent reading but the decline of reading skill. So, declining literacy, which means—I always feel obliged to point out—not that people are literally becoming illiterate, but that our skills of interpreting, analyzing, and comprehending text are declining. There was an OECD report at the end of 2024 which went around the world with this really alarming headline that literacy was declining or stagnating in most developed countries. A really remarkable finding, for developed countries with good education systems to be sliding back in literacy. That’s some of the headline data on it.
Mounk: Let me stick to the data for a moment, and then let’s go to the wider significance of this. I’m a little bit torn on that data. I think there’s some data that is quite suggestive, and there’s certainly some anecdotes that seem very telling. At the same time, I worry that we’re always tempted to fall into these panics about things that are getting worse, and then ten or twenty years later you realize that actually we didn’t really change that much. I have to say that I’m struck that my students don’t seem to have gotten worse. Now, I’m lucky to teach at a pretty elite university and have pretty motivated students, but a lot of the anecdotes that you hear are also from people teaching at elite universities who should also have pretty motivated students. I also have shifted towards assigning some exams as pen-and-paper, in-class exams, and I really thought, my God, we have an hour in a classroom setting, in an exam, to write something coherent—we’re not really used to doing that that much, it’s going to be pretty rough. I found that actually the quality of the essays we produced in that time was pretty good. I find they’re able to read things and engage with them at a pretty high level.
There’s some piece of evidence that cuts in the other direction. For example, it was assumed that book sales were depressed for all kinds of reasons over the last 20 years, including competition from ebooks and audiobooks, but also obviously other forms of media. But my understanding is that by and large, the book market has sort of held constant, surprisingly well. It hasn’t grown very much—it’s probably still not a great business to be in, don’t become a writer, I say to my Substack audience—but it really hasn’t declined as much as you might expect if reading had really declined to that kind of extent.
The other point here is that a lot of the things that are replacing traditional forms of literacy still involve literacy. People are now spending more and more time interacting with AI agents, and even though we can talk to them, and perhaps eventually AI will be some sort of hot avatar that is following you around the kitchen as you’re preparing your lunch, or as you watch a robot preparing your lunch, for now most of the way that people are interacting with AI agents is reading and writing. So I’m trying to steelman the case of a skeptic here. What would you say to those responses?
Marriott: Really good points. I think there are a few things to say in response. The first thing is the health of the publishing industry. I think it’s important to disentangle that from the number of books that are being sold. My understanding is that publishing has either, in terms of profits, stagnated or slightly declined over the last 20 years. It’s important to separate total profits in publishing from volume of books sold. What we find when we look into the disparity between those figures is that the volume of books sold has declined, but publishers have managed to maintain profits by bumping up cover prices. Books are more expensive relative to inflation than they were 20 years ago.
There was actually a report at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I think last week, that was one of the first concrete pieces of evidence of the publishing industry admitting that it has a problem. The headline was that in the EU, publishing turnover had declined in real terms 30% in the last 20 years, which is a pretty severe decline. One of the points that article was making was that some of the difficulties in publishing have been slightly masked by inflation and increased cover prices, and that there was an increase, not only in this sort of literacy stuff, but that it was beginning to affect the publishing industry.
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There are other factors that have kept the publishing industry a little more buoyant than it might otherwise be. One of them is that in most Western countries, certainly here in Britain, a lot of public libraries have closed, and public library usage has really—certainly in Britain—fallen off a cliff. I think a lot of people who would once have borrowed books from public libraries are now being driven to bookshops because that’s not an option. So I think publishing has been soaking up some refugees from public libraries, and that has kept the headline figures healthier than they might otherwise have been for a while.
“Big Library” is finally being defeated—it’s what we all wanted as book lovers. I guess the other thing would be, you could also look at the quality of books that are being sold, whether we believe that publishing is shifting high-quality text of the kind that idealistic people like me might hope they’re shifting, or whether books themselves are getting a bit simpler and a bit less of the kind of complicated, rich text that we might hope for. I think there’s evidence that that is happening. So that’s my brief overview on why things in publishing are more melancholy than the publishing PR machine might want us to believe.
Mounk: I really felt like I was playing devil’s advocate when I was saying that things are fine in publishing. That’s a tough case to make.
Marriott: No, it’s true. I think it certainly has been the case that, until recently, it seemed that publishing profits have not been tracking the supposed decline in reading. I think they are now, and I think that previous phenomenon is explicable.
The second point I would make, as to the utility of the data overall, is a general point that I actually wish I’d made clear in the book: you don’t have to believe in every single data point about the decline of literacy to believe in the overall story that’s going on here, which is a story about the shift from a culture whose emphasis is on the written and printed word to a culture which has an emphasis on the image and the moving image. The great book on this subject, by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, was the first polemic to sound the alarm, and I’m really just following in that book’s wake.
Neil Postman’s anti-television polemic, written in 1984—it’s striking that Neil Postman doesn’t cite a single piece of data for the decline of reading, the decline of literacy. We know now that he could have done; reading did decline when television arrived. But he was making, I guess, a wider and more vibey, but perhaps also, I think, more compelling and more watertight point, which is that it’s not necessarily that you can measure these things in data, but the emphasis of the culture is shifting. People are moving from a world in which they understood and comprehended the world through text to one in which they understood and comprehended the world through image. He would have said that images are more visceral, more powerful, easier to watch, and therefore they will tend to overwhelm text just because they have more immediate power. So that would be my attempt to steelman the case.
Mounk: Where do you locate the beginning of the end of reading? I grew up in the 1990s, I suppose—I remember, which tells you a lot about the kind of teenager I was, that I had some t-shirt that said something like “movies are art, theater is life, TV is furniture,” or something like that. Neil Postman identifies television as the enemy of literate society. But if you think television is the beginning of the end of reading, then it goes really all the way back to the 1950s and 1960s in the United States—the sixties, seventies, and eighties perhaps in Europe—which, by the way, is also coincidentally a period when universal literacy in many countries was just emerging. So the time period in which most people are literate and television isn’t yet the main form of entertainment is like seven years.
Now, it seems to me that really your concern is driven more by the internet and social media and short video, TikTok and Instagram, and perhaps podcasts and all of those kinds of things. But there’s this kind of tension between relying on Postman and the emergence of television for the theoretical and conceptual frame, and pointing to social media and so on as the thing that really is going to put an end to literate society. So are we going to be nostalgic for the world of television, where at least we had a unified culture and broadcast news as a kind of thing that gives us a unifying sense of the world, as we see in Britain? Was that actually part of a golden age, or was that already part of a fall from the golden age? And if so, when was the golden age?
Marriott: When you talk about the way that technology has disrupted literacy, you can find yourself becoming ludicrously nostalgic, and if you’re not careful you end up railing against radio. Neil Postman began his story with the electric telegraph, which he thought fragmented news and put us in a world dominated by useless information because you could just communicate too much. I think you can overdo it.
I think this story does begin with television, basically. The first really significant drops in literacy and reading are dated to the 60s and 70s. I think those declines—I don’t have the statistics at my fingertips, I’m afraid—but I think those declines, some of the data seems to suggest, may actually be more severe in terms of the loss of reading time than the declines we’ve seen with the advent of the smartphone in the last 20 years.
I think if there was a golden age of literacy, it probably occurred in the early 20 or 30 years of the 20th century. I think it was a short window before books and literature seriously had to begin to compete with radio and cinema. As to whether TV was a golden age, I think it’s mixed. I think one part of the story is that literacy and reading undoubtedly declined with the arrival of television—the drops are huge. It’s not hard to imagine why: when you have an incredibly entertaining screen in your front room, suddenly the most entertaining and diverting object in your house is no longer a book, it’s the TV in your front room, and understandably everybody was watching television.
Mounk: Some of the most striking studies are on the effect of having a television on the number of children women have—I think it’s the famous study in rural India—and it’s just like getting a television is the most amazing contraceptive. The average number of children goes down from something like eight to five the year the television is introduced. Part of it may be the spread of cultural values and things like that, but a lot of it is literally just that you now have an alternative form of entertainment to the thing that produces children.
Marriott: Yes, I think that’s absolutely true. The data for the way that TV changes social life, the way it changes friendships—Derek Thompson writes about all this very well—I think is fascinating and overwhelming, and should lead us to believe that it also had this huge impact on reading. It’s no surprise that it also has a huge impact on reading; it’s a kind of direct competitor to reading in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily expect it to be a direct competitor to sex.
Mounk: Derek points out, just for those who don’t know that line of writing, which is really interesting—for example, I think the number of barbecues in America has declined by over fifty percent, the number of dinner parties has declined by sixty percent, I’m making up these numbers sort of from what I remember as best—huge drops over the last twenty, twenty-five years. Perhaps that’s because everybody is sitting at home alone rather than socializing, and we’re doing that, and perhaps we’re also reading books, but it’s quite plausible to think that really the effect here is that it’s being eaten up by this entertainment time, which nowadays is no longer the television, but mostly online streaming, TikTok, Instagram, and other forms of social media.
Marriott: Yeah, absolutely. In my book I quote some of the observations made by social anthropologists in the UK going to people’s houses and looking at how working-class life was changing in Britain. There’s a really terrifying quote from a famous anthropological study done, I think, in the early 1960s: they go to a working-class house and everyone’s sitting around watching the TV, and the father makes some comment like, “It’s brilliant, we’ve got the television, we never have to go outside now,” or something sort of unintentionally dystopian and revealing.
As to your point about whether TV constitutes a golden age, I would say there are two things to say. I think TV sets us off on a route towards a visual culture—I think it’s the beginning of the decline of literacy. But I think it has two advantages over the world we’re currently in. The first, I think, is that television, especially in its early decades, was run according to values that were still very much shaped by literacy. It’s hard to say that every technological revolution instantly changes a culture in every single way—that’s true in some ways, and we can talk about these striking statistics about birth rates and socializing, but in some ways it takes a while for the values of the technology to be absorbed by the culture.
If you look at a lot of especially factual TV programming broadcast by the BBC in the UK, it seems obvious, watching these programs, that this is a kind of television shaped very deeply by the values, the culture, and the assumptions of literacy—people talking in coherent sentences, debates that take a long time. There’s a famous debate about Britain’s membership of the EEC between Roy Jenkins and Tony Benn that goes on, I think, for more than an hour, and they get into economic statistics, and it’s sort of print-inspired in its mode of communication. A lot of early factual programming is less like the sort of stunt-driven, very wacky kind of TV that you’d get nowadays if you were trying to popularize an academic subject to a mass audience—it really is just a guy almost reading a lecture to an audience on television with some moving images in the background. I think the fact that that age of television was shaped by the values of print made it a better engine for democracy than modern 24-hour cable news is.
The other point to say is that a really fundamental thing about television is that it’s static. A TV sits in the front room of your house—you can’t take it on the bus with you, you can’t take it on the train with you—and if, in the 1980s and 1990s, you were bored commuting to work or bored in an airport, the most entertaining thing available to you in that situation was a book or a magazine. I think literate culture had a crucial place to cling onto in our culture. I think what the smartphone does that’s important and perhaps undernoticed is it just makes screens ubiquitous, and it wipes out all the other cultural space that literacy used to occupy—literacy has nowhere to thrive now.
Mounk: I remember getting on the subway, I think in New York, a couple of months ago, and seeing somebody with a newspaper—a physical newspaper. I remember thinking, wow, how eccentric, having a newspaper on the subway. But of course, it would have been the case that you look at the subway and half the people, more than half the people, are reading either a newspaper or a book or something like that. It’s funny how quickly that has happened—what used to be ubiquitous has come to be exotic in a certain kind of way.
I think you set out very nicely both the fact that this is happening and some of the broader effects it’s having. But again, there’s a bunch of think pieces that are going on about the decline of reading. You really make a more ambitious argument that is trying to explain what the historical role of literacy has been beyond the world of literature, and why, therefore, we should expect much more far-reaching consequences from these transformations. Tell us how it is that the spread of mass literacy and the role of the book has really shaped the things we take for granted about the modern world.
Marriott: Really, following people like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, who are the pioneers of these arguments—our culture is shaped by text in ways that we’re so used to, being surrounded by books, that reading and writing seem so obvious to us, almost so banal to us, that we forget to understand how profoundly they’ve shaped our civilization. I’m here in the Times Book Cupboard, and I am literally surrounded by books.
My book is trying to assemble an argument that I personally don’t think is particularly controversial, which is—you can go into history and look at, I guess, the two pillars of my argument: the phenomenon of the Enlightenment and the phenomenon of modern mass democracy. I think those two stories don’t happen at all without literacy. One of the fundamental points that media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong would make is that there are certain forms of knowledge which basically don’t exist without literacy. It’s easy to assume that things like philosophy, complex narrative history, logic, and mathematics are innate forms of human knowledge and intelligence that spring out of our brains fully formed, and that any human community will be able to have these kinds of intellectual activity. They argue, I think very persuasively, and I really agree with them, that’s not the case at all.
Mounk: Why is that? Explain the reasoning.
Marriott: One of the great ways to prove the advantage of literacy over talking and oral culture is to have to explain your ideas on a podcast, and you find yourself doing a much worse job of it than you can on the printed page.
Mounk: It’s funny, I actually find the relationship between oral culture and the written word to be the other way around. Some people tell me, “I’m bad at writing,” and I’m always too polite to say it, but I always think, well, that just means you haven’t thought through this very carefully. The point actually is that when you’re speaking, you can jump over holes in your argument quite easily—you have a little rhetorical flourish, you distract the person you’re talking to, even yourself, with some kind of little joke, and then you go on to the next point. Whereas in writing, it becomes really obvious when one thing doesn’t follow from the other, and that’s where people start getting stuck—that’s where they’re like, “I’m a bad writer because I can’t put my idea on paper.” Well, that’s because you hadn’t actually thought through the idea.
So presumably part of the reason why we need writing, for example, for a really complicated mathematical proof, is that it’s just impossible to keep everything in our mind unless you’re really a savant, to a sufficient degree, to go back and double-check each step and make sure that you haven’t jumped in some way where you’re introducing an error into the proof or the equation.
Marriott: Yeah, I think that’s really well put. The phrase that Walter Ong uses is that writing allows us to externalize part of our minds. You can take ideas that, in an oral culture, before the arrival of literacy, only exist in your head, and you can put them on paper and look at your thoughts from the outside. You can submit them to criticism, you can rearrange them, you can analyze them, you can stare at them and reread them again and again and discover the flaws in them. You can have another thought and then join that to the next thought.
This can easily seem like a slightly banal point to make, but that simple action of being able to criticize your own thought, to externalize your own thoughts, to join together your thoughts, is impossible without literacy, and that simple act is the beginning of history and philosophy and mathematics and logic. The other part of that equation of literacy is not only the writer but the reader. Readers are able to submit written text to much greater scrutiny than a listener is to a spoken text. When you’re talking to me, I’m rolling on, going at your pace, having to follow every word you say, and you have all these persuasive techniques that have nothing to do with logic—you can be charming, you can be funny, you can skip around, and I just have to follow you, going forward and forward and forward.
One of the crucial things that we do as readers—and we know this now because scientists have tracked the way our eyes move while reading—is that we’re constantly skipping backwards and forwards over text. We’re not necessarily moving in this completely linear way; we’re looking backwards and forwards, and we’re always checking those connections, bringing greater powers of criticism and analysis to the written text. It’s just impossible to bring that to a spoken text. I think those two crucial things mean that literacy is just this huge driver of richness, complexity, and detail of thought.
Mounk: I’m convinced by that—though it’s two literature heads convincing each other, so it doesn’t take much. There are two different senses in which you’re talking about literacy, and I want to make sure that we don’t jump between them. The first one is just that you need the ability to write things down, the ability to fix our thoughts in this way, to make them subject to auditing in a way that they wouldn’t be in spoken language. But that could remain the preserve of specialists. When you’re talking about needing written mathematical notation in order to do complicated mathematical proofs, I’m sure that’s right, but it doesn’t matter if the average American or the average Brit reads fewer books—mathematicians are still going to be able to use mathematical notation, and they don’t become somehow less capable of communicating with each other about high-level math because the average person spends less time reading novels or magazines.
So, unless we really think we’re about to live in Idiocracy, the threat from the modern world presumably isn’t to the existence of the written word, or to literacy in sense one. The threat is to the broader culture in which communicating through writing and reading plays a very important role. So tell us a little bit about, beyond the importance of writing to mathematicians being able to develop those kinds of sophisticated proofs, how this culture of mass literacy—or, when we’re talking about the 18th and 19th centuries, semi-mass literacy—helped to inspire the modern world, and why, therefore, we should worry if fewer and fewer people are reading, or the number of people who buy books is going down slightly, and students at colleges read summaries of Ulysses rather than reading the whole of Ulysses.
Marriott: Of course. Telling the story of mass literacy and finding a starting point is always a somewhat arbitrary pursuit. You could begin anywhere in the last 500 years. The obvious place to begin is the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, which massively increases the volume of books produced in Europe—almost exponentially. It’s one of the great transformative technologies in history. It doesn’t necessarily lead to something that looks much like mass literacy immediately. Even in the aftermath of the printing press, it takes a while for books to be widely adopted; literacy remains a surprisingly elite pursuit, even though it’s growing in the first 100 to 150 years after the printing press.
My story starts in the middle to late 18th century, in this phenomenon known as the reading revolution—this point in history at which a number of factors seem to be driving the adoption of literacy in the wider population outside the elite. You have not only the printing press and the production of more books, but the emergence of increasingly complex modern states and economies, which demand literate bureaucrats and merchants who can read and write to conduct trade. You have the influence of Protestantism, a version of Christianity which places a huge emphasis on the written word. All these things culminate in an inflection point in the late 18th century, when more people are reading, and they also read more books, so more books are circulating and being read by more people.
It seems pretty obvious to me that it’s no coincidence that that time in history is also the time in which you get the Enlightenment and the beginnings of democracy. More different ideas are diffused; ideas can be compared and criticized in a way that’s just difficult when you have access to fewer books. You get the emergence of newspapers, the beginnings of the public sphere. You get information diffused down through society—political information which, for most of history up until that point, had been the preserve of an aristocratic elite, becomes capable of being understood, interpreted, and criticized by ordinary people.
This is just a transformative moment in our history. There are kinds of arguments about politics that you can’t have without mass literacy—not only in terms of the diffusion of political information among a wide population who can then read it, absorb it, and draw conclusions about it, but also in terms of the participation of ordinary people in political debates. I always think it’s interesting to consider some of the democratic thinkers of the 18th century: people like Thomas Paine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau came from backgrounds which, had they been born into those families 100 or 200 years previously, would never have been literate, and would never have made their arguments about democracy and rights to a large audience beyond the local pub, because they wouldn’t have had the means to. I just think there’s this inflection point when political debate rapidly expands, and information, criticism, and knowledge spread to the population. That is basically the point at which Europe and North America begin to roll out of an age of monarchical autocracy toward the democracies we know today.
Mounk: Not to go all social science on you, but obviously there’s a question about whether the spread of literacy is the independent or the dependent variable here. Is it that the spread of literacy leads to more democracy, perhaps more economic growth, more inventions, and so on? Or is it that the spread of literacy among an elite group in 16th-, 17th-century Europe allows inventions like the steam engine and other kinds of things, which create huge economic transformations, and at the end of those economic transformations is the rise of universal elementary school and so on, which actually tends to happen in the second half of the 19th century?
So, is it that literacy rises and that leads to the creation of democracy, or is it that the spread of the Industrial Revolution leads to a much more affluent society, which leads to more democratic institutions, and part of what those democratic institutions institute is much more universal education? I think it’s probably kind of impossible to fully disentangle that, but why should we think of literacy as the motive force of those transformations rather than the result of those transformations? Or is it a little bit of both?
Marriott: I think that’s really well put. I agree it’s impossible to disentangle these incredibly complex historical phenomena, and I guess one of the problems of trying to make a polemical argument out of history is that history is just not simplifiable to provide useful strands of argument.
I do think that there is a very compelling case to be made that the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment are basically the products of the growth of literacy. The guy who I think makes this argument most compellingly is the economist Joel Mokyr, who’s got a book called The Enlightened Economy, another book called The Culture of Growth, and he won the Nobel Prize for his work on this stuff a couple of years ago. The case of these books is, if you are looking to explain why Europe had the Industrial Revolution, the predominant factor is its culture of literacy and its culture of the Republic of Letters—this community of thinkers, scientists, and inventors across Europe who are exchanging ideas, building on each other’s work—and without that culture of scientific exchange and intellectual interaction and criticism, you don’t really get the Industrial Revolution. He makes the case more compellingly than I could in five minutes.
There are a few interesting instances where particular innovations that were foundational to the Industrial Revolution do seem to have depended on this literate culture. For instance, I think the example he gives is that the first steam engine would have been impossible had its inventors not had access to a Europe-wide tradition of debate and criticism about issues like air pressure and valves. When they came to their invention, they weren’t just tinkering in a workshop—they were able to draw on technical information argued over by natural philosophers for the last five decades. That is a situation that can’t exist without literacy, because you just have no access to that information.
The other really interesting data point that I like—Joseph Henrich makes this point, or draws attention to the study, in one of his books—is that there does seem to be a causal connection between the number of copies of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, his great Enlightenment encyclopedia, that were diffused in various towns at the end of the 18th century, and how many inventions those towns and cities went on to send to the Great Exhibition of 1850. Which suggests—not that there were loads of kids who read the encyclopedia and then became inventors—but that it’s a kind of sign of a place that has access to knowledge and an intellectual life, that is plugged into the Republic of Letters. And being plugged into the Republic of Letters does seem possible to draw, if not a straight line, then a kind of causal connection to better inventions, better science, better technology.
I would say, given all that, I agree that literacy is profoundly important. I would not begin to say it’s necessarily the most important thing. I think you could argue that if you’re telling the story of modern democracy and you were to extract the single most important factor, perhaps it’s economic growth, and perhaps it’s the rise of the bourgeoisie and their increasing economic competition with the aristocracy that is the beginning of democracy. I can still buy that. I still think literacy is important. The argument of the book is not that it’s the only factor, but that it is a very important factor. That would be my answer.
Mounk: That makes sense. I guess I’m trying to think about what kind of literacy is necessary, and in what way, for democracy to be likely to sustain itself. Clearly there are some extreme examples in which you can get a reasonably functional democracy with very low levels of literacy. India is the obvious case. That’s atypical for a whole set of reasons—partially its democratic institutions are a strange kind of colonial inheritance from the United Kingdom. Partly, I think, the degree of what some political scientists call ethnolinguistic fractionalization—the degree of regional, linguistic, ethnic, religious, and to some extent caste difference—makes it such a fragmented society that nobody can really hope to dominate, and that helps democratic institutions. It tends to be the case that democratic institutions persist when you have very homogeneous societies, or really, really diverse societies, and the trouble often starts when you’re somewhere in the middle.
There are all kinds of reasons why India set out on its democratic experiment, and all kinds of reasons why it was able to sustain it so far, by and large. But it’s still striking that this is a case in which, going back to 1948, you had very low levels of literacy, and yet the country was able to sustain this democratic experiment for a very long time, with a giant population. Of course, you’re right that by and large we see that the more educated and more literate a population is, the higher the chances of democracy surviving have been. But what exact kind of form of literacy do you need in order to sustain that?
That, I think, does depend on the kind of causal account we give about the beginning of the 19th century. If we’re really saying literacy rose and that led to all of these other changes, and then you had democracy at the end, then you might say, well, if we have a lot fewer people reading, and they have fewer critical faculties, that is immediately going to lead to a potential decline of democracy. But if you’re saying actually what happened is a much more complicated, intertwined process, where of course you need literacy among some small elite group that was responsible for those technological innovations, and the result of that process was to spread literacy from 10 to 15 percent of the population—which I guess it would have been in Britain in the 18th century, I don’t have those figures to hand—to 90-plus percent by 1900 or 1950, then literacy here is as much the thing that is being caused as the thing that’s causing it.
You might say, okay, we’re not going to go into a world where the elites in society are not able to read and write. We might read a little bit less for pleasure, and there might be a larger portion of the population that really has trouble reading in any significant way, but that just gets us back to what the origins of democratic societies looked like. At the same time, we’re going to get other forms of engagement which can also serve to spread information. I’m listening to a lot more audiobooks than I did in the past. Is that exactly equivalent? Perhaps not, but I certainly get something out of listening to a French novel I’m listening to at the moment, or listening to the standard history of China that I listened to a few months ago. It’s not like none of that information enters my mind—it’s still a way of engaging with serious information. And of course, perhaps the median YouTube channel, and even the median Substack, might be full of empty inanities, but there are also conversations like these, full of great insights. So I guess the question is, we’re clearly not going to become a completely illiterate society.
We’re always going to use reading and writing in certain specialized contexts, in order to do things like mathematical proofs, or write the instructions for how to administer the nuclear codes, or whatever other kind of context. There are going to be other kinds of forms of intellectual exchange—a lot of the technologies now exist. So why should we be as concerned as you are that this slight change in the mix of different forms of communication, and the exact role that literacy plays in our society, is going to be that damaging?
Marriott: A really good question. I guess in my head I split the beneficial democratic effects of literacy up into two camps. The first is the democratization of information, which took place in the 19th century, and the democratization of the skills of analysis and abstraction that are associated with literacy. I know that sometimes sounds like a slightly woolly thing to say, but I think, being trapped inside our literate society, we can fail to see how the ways we think about politics are shaped by literacy.
One of the things—there’s interesting writing by an Edwardian journalist called George Bourne, who was going to these rural communities in the UK where literacy had just arrived, and he was talking about the transformative political effect of the spread of even quite cheap newspapers. People were accessing information about their governments, and they were accessing what to us seems an obvious, more abstract way of thinking about politics. Something is going wrong in your local area, and it’s not just an item of gossip, not just something that’s arrived out of nowhere and exists in your life that you complain about and it makes things worse. The skill of literacy allows you to join it up, because you have more information, because of more abstract thinking, to a wider social story, and you can think about it as part of a systemic problem. I think literacy diffuses information and increases critical thinking through the population, and that’s its main role in the rise of democracy.
There’s a slightly separate point to be made about the way that it sustains democracy, which is becoming more apparent to us as we move into this post-literate age—which is that one of the most striking things that Marshall McLuhan says about literacy is the way it emotionally desaturates a culture and a society. He makes a really good point, I think it’s at the beginning of The Gutenberg Galaxy, that if you come from a traditional pre-literate culture, an oral culture as we call them, the thing that would strike you about a highly literate culture—like the one that existed in the beginning and middle of the 20th century—would be how eerily emotionless it is.
When you’re communicating in an oral culture, all the information you ever receive comes to you face to face from a person, and you receive every item of political gossip or knowledge about the world in a highly emotional context. You’re talking to each other, you’re excited, people have different personalities, some of them are charming. When people are trying to persuade you around to their point of view, they’re shouting at you, or charming you with their charisma, or maybe they’re just really tall, and we’re more inclined, irrationally, as human beings, to be persuaded by tall people because they seem more authoritative and we assume they have higher status.
What literacy really effectively does to our civilization is strip a lot of these irrational forms of argument out. When you’re trying to persuade someone of a point through writing on the printed page, you can’t charm them, you can’t shout at them, you can’t cry at them, you can’t impress them with your physical presence. Writing is by no means perfectly rational, but it places a much greater emphasis on rational argument than face-to-face communication does. I think one of the ways literacy has really benefited democracy is by biasing our discourse—not in every instance, but overall—more towards less emotional, more reasoned forms of communication and argument.
McLuhan was making this point in the ’50s and ’60s, and I think it’s becoming obvious to us now quite how right he was. I think a lot of what’s going on with our politics now is—I think not only that reliable information is becoming less available to people for various reasons, but that we’re just seeing the emotional temperature of our whole culture whoosh back up again, as this whole human world, which literacy had tended to exclude—of people’s voices and faces and personalities—is just rushing back in. If you want to make a point in person or over a video, you have a range of extra-rational or irrational techniques of persuasion you can draw on, compared to if you’re making a point in a newspaper column or a book, where you’re much more restricted in the number of irrational techniques you can draw on. I just think this much more personal, much more emotional culture is much more susceptible to the kinds of irrational and charismatic forms of persuasion that I think are very dangerous for democracy. It seems like an almost banal point to make, because to me the evidence is everywhere.
Mounk: I’m a little bit torn about this, because you meet certain polemicists who sound incredibly macho on the page, for lack of a better word—who dress down their enemies with the confidence of a field marshal—and then you meet them in real life and they’re just sad little homunculi. You think that clearly, all through their middle and high school lives, they dreamt of taking to the page to eviscerate the bullies, and now they’re hiding behind the featurelessness of writing, exactly as you describe it, in order to do that.
Perhaps it’s good that we’re able to look beyond the homunculus in the writing, or perhaps it’s actually hiding something deep about the character. But it’s helpful to know, because you’re like, you’re not the kind of self-confident, boasting writer you pretend to be. You’re just a sad little hurt man who was bullied too much in middle and high school.
Marriott: T.S. Eliot has a great line about the bombastic self-confidence of the mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind his typewriter, which has sometimes occurred to me as I’ve written some of my more bombastic opinion columns safely behind my desk.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and James explore whether artificial intelligence will impact literacy, how we can preserve the art of reading, and why the decline of literacy is bad for democracy. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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