What We Lose When We Lose Literacy

There has been much discussion of a lengthy essay by Rose Horowitch in the August issue of the Atlantic declaring “The End of Reading.” Horowitch surveys the landscape and finds, depressingly, that fewer Americans are reading than ever. She paints a portrait of a society in cultural and intellectual collapse, in which more people gamble in a given year than read a book:

Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

There is some positive news buried deep in the essay. Sales of print books have actually risen over the past ten years; the number of indie bookstores continues to grow. What’s more, the folks who are passionate about reading seem to have become more passionate: the average reader spends more time reading per day than she did twenty years ago (which may partially account for the increase in sales). Overall, though, the news is dire. Horowitch mentions a student at Harvard who, “struggling to read a book written in Old English,” had ChatGPT translate the book to make it more readable. The book in question was A Clockwork Orange, published in 1962. She hears from grade-school teachers who tell her that kids on their first day of class used to cry for their moms; now they cry for their tablets. We (and I blame the makers of these devices, not the kids) have created a generation of digital Gollums who would sell their own mothers for a gaming app. This is what societal collapse looks like.

One of the weirder responses I see to the looming prospect of collective illiteracy is this: “Most of the world was illiterate before the invention of the printing press and we managed.” Surely a reversion to the oral and visual cultures of the pre-literate world won’t be so bad? But as Neil Postman, cultural historian Walter Ong and others have argued, it’s dangerous to assume that post-literacy will look anything like pre-literacy. For one, we owe the modern world and its institutions to mass literacy (there’s a direct line running from the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the rise of democratic states, back to Johannes Gutenberg). We live in a highly complex society that was built by a literate people and needs literate people in order to function. (As W. Baskerville said on Twitter, “You don’t have an illiterate society but there’s still doctors and engineers.”) I don’t think I’m being alarmist when I say that once literacy goes, the world in which we were born and have lived most of our lives goes with it.

There’s a story from the Cold War that has been haunting my dreams of late. Shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis in the autumn of 1962, when nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union (and thus the likely end of humanity) seemed imminent, President John F. Kennedy had been reading Barbara Tuchman’s recently published The Guns of August, which outlines the disastrous series of miscalculations that resulted in the First World War. Kennedy became fixated on the book, urging it on the members of his cabinet and ordering copies to be delivered to every American military base in the world. According to then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the book continued to preoccupy him during those thirteen days in late October when it seemed the fate of the world was being decided. Happily for everyone now living, Kennedy seems to have absorbed the lessons of the book. Privately he told his cabinet, “We are not going to bungle into war.”

What troubles me is this: supposing in future we faced another crisis of similar magnitude? In the previous crisis we were blessed with presidents and officials who had read widely, who were well-informed, who had a deep understanding of history and an ability to make rational calculations without letting emotion and anger cloud their reasoning. It is not likely that in a similar future crisis we would be so blessed. (As Horowitch writes, “If Trump is the first postliterate president, he won’t be the last.”) Sam Weller, authorised biographer of Ray Bradbury, once drew an unsettling link between the world of Fahrenheit 451 (in which books have been wholly replaced with screen entertainment) and the book’s conclusion, in which (spoiler alert) much of the United States, and possibly the world, is destroyed in a nuclear war. Bradbury was warning us, he wrote, that a culture in which games and amusements have destroyed our ability to think is precisely how you get wars “that begin and end in a moment.” And people say to me, “But at least the leaders of our country will be educated,” but I’m not sure you can count on that always being the case. We are fortunate that the Cuban Missile Crisis happened when it did, in a world and among a people that were highly literate. In the future we may not be so fortunate.

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