“Society is a better and more rational place thanks to the advancement of reading,” writes Times columnist James Marriott in his book, ‘The New Dark Ages – The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society’.
It follows that if reading declines, we will live in a worse and less rational society.
And… reading has declined.
In the US, Marriott reports, “reading for pleasure declined by 40% in the first two decades of the twenty-first century,” whilst in the UK, “more than a third of adults say they have given up the habit”.
Reading, even when it is for pleasure, takes effort; it requires concentration. Watching videos doesn’t.
We read less as a society, know less and, as a consequence, make less rational decisions. This is particularly evident in the political sphere.
Marriott describes a 2018 congressional race in Buffalo when Democrat Nate McMurray lost a closely fought election to the incumbent, Republican Chris Collins, despite Collins having been indicted for insider trading. Not so long ago, such a scandal would have spelt certain defeat. But, out campaigning, McMurray found that “voters were blithely unaware their congressman was facing a possible jail sentence”.
In the heyday of the Buffalo News, when its circulation was in the hundreds of thousands, rather than the tens, voters would have read about the scandal and taken it into account when casting their vote.
As Marriott observes, “the familiar democratic script was no longer running the way it was supposed to”.
Marriott chronicles the losing battle reading has had with the screen, firstly the television and, more recently, the smartphone. The big difference between the two being the latter’s portability – it’s always with us, allowing us to fill our leisure time with endless distraction.
It’s an enlightening, if at times bleak, book. Its penultimate chapter is titled, ‘The end of democracy?’.
Yet, despite the decline in reading he writes about, Marriott ends on an upbeat note. He concludes that reading “still has a future… reading and a cultural reverence for reading will be around for a while yet”.
Let’s hope he’s right.
You can catch James Evelegh’s regular column in the InPubWeekly newsletter, which you can register to receive here.
