This month James Bradshaw reviews what he considers to be “one of the most important books of this year, or even this decade”, and having read it myself I tend to agree. The book is The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society by James Marriott. The decline in reading in recent years is certainly dramatic. The review quotes the statistic that there has been a forty per cent drop in reading for pleasure between 2000 and 2020.
The concern about the decline of reading is not a new one, but Marriott does sound the alarm with a particular urgency. Fundamentally he argues that the problem with the decline in reading is not merely that we become less cultured, but that we become less able to live in a democratic society. Democracy presumes the ability of citizens to engage seriously with the questions of state; an illiterate people – or a people who can but simply don’t read – cannot do this. They are lost in things superficial, or even worse, they are prone to manipulation since they are led by their emotions, not reason.
This applies to podcasts also. As Bradshaw says: “A culture of podcasts is no replacement for a culture of books. Even the best podcasts often degenerate into self-absorbed conversations that can do little more than skim the surface of a subject.” If we were to analyse the actual language used in a podcast (something Marriott does do) we would be surprised to find that while it may have sounded substantial, it is often in fact quite trite. Style tends easily to pass for substance online. Podcasts can be very interesting, and podcasters tremendously entertaining, but podcasts simply cannot compete with books if we want to study something deeply.
Surprisingly, however, Marriott places more of the blame for the decline of reading on television than on the smartphone. The decline was already in place before the advent of the smartphone in 2007, and attention had been drawn to this phenomenon by the likes of Neil Postman in his 1985 work Amusing Ourselves to Death.
In his In Passing column Michael Kirke writes about the phenomenon of the “quiet awakening” to the Faith taking place among young people, men in particular, in the secularised West. He observes that what many of these young converts describe “again and again is loneliness, and a hunger for something more than the endless communication that leaves us more isolated. It is the distinction Allen Tate drew in the 1950s between communication and communion…”. Someone I spoke to recently in the Netherlands made a similar observation about young Dutch people returning to the Faith abandoned by their forefathers – they were seeking a tradition to belong to; for many, this tradition included that of the great books, the classic works of Western civilisation.
In this many young people seem to reflect that other great classic which made another comeback through cinema this summer: The Odyssey. Odysseus’ journey through a multitude of weird and wonderful experiences is precisely aimed at a rootedness, a permanence: his marriage bed, which has literally been carved from a living tree. Odysseus details how he built his bedroom around a sturdy, rooted olive tree, shaping its stump into a bedpost and constructing the surrounding room and house around this one permanent centre of his life. Postmodernity is premised on the rejection of permanence, and the “metanarratives” of the Western world. Throughout the West universities have dropped their study of the works of “dead white males” and even closed whole departments of classics. Many of the young appear to be seeking out these metanarratives once again, and I suspect this phenomenon is destined to grow and grow. So paradoxically while many are abandoning (or never learning in the first place) the practice of reading, there is a small number who are rediscovering reading, and for whom the practice of reading is leading them to the ultimate Ithaca: the Catholic Faith.