In George Will’s most recent Washington Post column he remarks on the “death of reading”:
Engaging with the printed word in book form, Marriott writes, “changed how people thought.” Long-form prose strengthened the mental muscles necessary for prolonged concentration on arguments and complexities: Readers, Marriott says, began to question received ideas: “Where does power come from? How should we classify whales? How do we know the Bible is true?”
Today, numerous literature professors report that they formerly expected students to read a novel a week, but no longer assign such masterpieces as George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” or James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Students are not just unwilling, they are unable to comprehend sophisticated, nuanced narratives. As deep reading becomes, Marriott says, a “rare, even esoteric accomplishment,” our culture becomes unmoored “from its foundations in the written word.”
I wish I could say “Welcome to the fight” but I’m afraid that “the fight” is already over and we lost. You can see it all around you in our political discourse: the agonistic modes of expression, absence of logical arguments, division into tribes.
He’s actually understating the matter. It’s more than “strengthening a muscle”. There are actual, physical differences between the brains of the literate and the post-literate, as I have documented in my many posts over the last 20 years on what I’ve deemed “visualcy”.
Here’s a sample:
The Visual Imagery Society
Orality and Iraq
Visualcy, Newspapers, and Political Communication
Visualcy, the Flynn Effect, and the End of Abstract Reasoning
Learning to read changes the brain, and sustained reading gives us repeated practice in following arguments that unfold beyond the length of a clip or a slogan. We know much less about what happens when a literate society stops making that practice commonplace. The question is no longer simply whether people can read the words. It is whether they can derive meaning from an extended written argument.
I read 3-4 books a week now and multiple blogs and substacks. I largely agree. People now watch some person they never heard of on Youtube who is a self described expert and believe everything they say, if it agrees with their priors. Along with this a loss of basic math skills and little grounding in basic statistics is a big issue. Also, reading is faster I think.
One point of clarification is that while I love books I think there is some merit to less book reading and more longish form ie 5-25 pages long material. It used to be difficult to not finish a book I started but I now often find that in non-fiction books its not unusual to find that an author makes their point then spends a lot of time embellishing it. Lots of people need better editors.
Steve
Socrates on the invention of writing:
How many people nowadays can recite The Odyssey by heart in ancient Greek? Huh?
It’s been downhill ever since.
That is from Plato’s Phaedrus. Not only did Socrates not say it but in the dialogue Socrates is allegedly quoting King Thamus’s reply to the god Thoth. We know Phaedrus solely because Plato wrote it down.
Dave Schuler: Not only did Socrates not say…
Socrates, in the dialogue, explicitly adopts Thamus’s criticism of writing. But your clarification is fine.
Dave Schuler: We know Phaedrus solely because Plato wrote it down.
Well, at least you got the irony.
New inventions have often caused vast changes in how people use information: writing, the printing press, radio, television, email, internet, social media, and now AI-LLMs. Each change brought good things and bad things and visions of paradise and fears of hell. So, the printing press brought violent upheaval and the spread of liberty, radio brought Hitler and FDR, television brought McCarthy and the moon landings into the home, social media brought together people who wanted to learn knitting and brought together people who wanted to blow up buildings.
That is not to say we shouldn’t look at the good and bad things that might happen. That’s how we avoid the latter and steer toward the former. But it’s not new.
As noted above, people today are (arguably) stupider today because they can’t recite The Odyssey by heart. (Kids today!) Or learn to read and write Latin, which was considered essential to an education not so long ago. (Goodbye, Mr. Chips.) Just weak minds that can’t recite Shakespeare. (How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman?)
As a firm aficionado of long-form reading, it is somewhat sad that more people don’t read tomes, but times change. New ways of knowing are inevitable. (Darn kids with their computers!) Turns out that writing didn’t mean the end of knowledge. (But try to tell that young whippersnapper, Socrates, that!)