Won't read, can't think

We are living in The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, James Marriott writes. "The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours."

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The popularity of reading exploded in the 18th century as the printing press provided affordable books, pamphlets and periodicals, he writes. "Print changed how people thought."

As media theorist Neil Postman writes, readers “follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

"The growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science," writes Marriott. Historians have linked the "reading revolution" to "the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution."

The revolution is over. Professors say they are trying to teach "post-literate" students "who have grown up almost entirely in the world of short-form video, computer games, addictive algorithms (and, increasingly, AI)," he writes.

The tradition of learning is like a precious golden thread of knowledge running through human history linking reader to reader through time. It last snapped during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as the barbarian tides beat against the frontier, cities shrank and libraries burned or decayed. As the world of Rome’s educated elite fell apart, many writers and works of literature passed out of human memory — either to be lost forever or to be rediscovered hundreds of years later in the Renaissance.

That golden thread is breaking for the second time.

"Reading is associated with a number of cognitive benefits including improved memory and attention span, better analytical thinking, improved verbal fluency, and lower rates of cognitive decline in later life," Marriott notes. As people read less, measures of cognitive ability are declining.

"The art of mass deliberation, rooted in reading, reason and thinking," is rapidly becoming obsolescent, threatening the "foundations of liberal democracy," writes Andrew Sullivan. We "think and read less, and see and feel more."

AI is making it worse. "No wonder that Gen Z and younger — having been denied the solace of knowing actual history, experiencing serious religious faith, and being transported by big, complex novels into other distant minds and places — feel adrift, searching for meaning and perspective, lost in phones, prey to cults," he writes. "Trans-furries and budding neo-Hitlers: an emotive, irrational, grievance-obsessed generation of lonely souls — increasingly prone to violence."