Are we living in a post-literate society? A lot of evidence points that way. People are reading less and less as we succumb to the enticement of our screens. A writer in The Atlantic recently wrote a much discussed article on the matter, and Michael Kirke examines it here in his In Passing column. Certainly given the terrible impact the online world has had on the reading of physical books, literacy is in trouble. What is particularly worrying is that students in particular appear to be particularly affected by this: “Professors are reporting that students struggle to finish assigned books, prefer summaries of great books, expect lectures to replace reading, regard reading itself as an unnecessarily inefficient method of acquiring information.” And AI is only going to make the problem worse as it strips books down to their bare bones to get at the “relevant information”.
Perhaps the fact that we’re so time strapped (or we think we are), and just want the information without any “padding” is one of the reasons we live in a “myth-impoverished” world as Martin Shaw asserts in his Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us, reviewed here by Luke Power. But we need stories as much as we need information, for as Power says, “without a healthy dose of stories and fairytales, we have little hope of becoming complete men and women.”
But perhaps all is not lost. Fr Damian Ference in his article on Flannery O’Connor and the spiritual quest of Gen Z, suggests that Gen Z has a greater desire for “what is real and true” – the authentic – than young people usually have, and this because they are exposed to little of the real and true, and now even less with AI. Great literature – and he looks at the work of Flannery O’Connor in particular – pierces to the real and true in profound ways. So one could reasonably hope that a revival of love of the written word, and of literature in particular, will go hand in hand with a revival of the Faith.
This is a theme we will be returning to next when we carry a review of James Marriott’s recent book The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society.