Can democracy survive without reading?

People around the world are reading less. In the U.S., the share of people reading for pleasure dropped by 40% in the last 20 years. Writer James Marriott says that puts democracy in danger.

James Marriott, columnist at the British newspaper The Times. He writes the Substack newsletter “Cultural Capital." Author of a recent piece titled “The dawn of the post-literate society."

Adam Garfinkle, senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. Author of the Substack “The Raspberry Patch.” Author of a 2020 piece in the journal National Affairs titled “The Erosion of Deep Literacy.”

Also Featured

Eric Levitz, senior correspondent at Vox. Author of a piece titled “Is the decline of reading poisoning our politics?”

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: People around the world are reading less. In the United States, the share of people reading for pleasure dropped by 40% over the last 20 years, according to a study from the University of Florida and University College of London. And literacy levels are, quote, declining or stagnating in most developed countries, according to a 2024 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or the OECD.

Writer James Marriott says this dramatic decline in reading is dangerous for democracy. His recent essay is called "The dawn of the post-literate society." And in it, Marriott writes, quote: Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print, many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous, as medieval peasants moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking.

The world after print increasingly resembles the world before print." James Marriott is a columnist at the British newspaper The Times. He also writes a Substack newsletter called Cultural Capital, and it's there that we found his recent essay on democracy and literacy, and he joins us now. James Marriott, welcome to On Point.

JAMES MARRIOTT: Thank you very much for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so first of all, this is a pretty stark diagnosis you're providing, that democracies cannot survive with the reduction of literary or literacy, or I should just say more broadly reading. Are you truly that apocalyptic for lack of a better term?

MARRIOTT: Yeah, I guess I am pretty apocalyptic. I think it's a real inflection point in our culture. It's a slightly difficult point to make; I guess. Because it's been made so many times before. The idea that people are reading less, students aren't reading as much as they were. I guess these are ideas that feel pretty familiar.

But I think it's the kind of statistics that you mention that really drive home the fact that something is going on here and it's much more than just a change of habit. I think it's a real shift from a civilization that used to be structured around print and books and journalism and articles, moving into one where the information environment and the environment where we communicate and to some degree even think is just going to be totally different.

And I can't see a way in which this doesn't have massive consequences.

CHAKRABARTI: I mean that 40% in the United States over 20 years is so fast that it does make one step back in like horrified awe. But let's go back, and when you define the age of print, I presume that is from what? The invention of the printing press and thereafter.

MARRIOTT: Yeah, exactly. In my essay I took it a little bit later. The age of print is conventionally dated to the beginning of the 15th century when Gutenberg invented the printing press, the case I made in my essay, and this is something that historians could quibble about endlessly, was that the real age of the beginnings of mass literacy began in the middle of the 18th century.

We know that literacy has always been an elite skill for basically the whole of human history, and that was still somewhat true after the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Books were still expensive, education was still expensive, and literacy was still pretty much limited to a relative social minority of fairly wealthy people. It was in the 18th century books began to get a bit cheaper, and this infrastructure of knowledge began to grow up.

Things like reading clubs, lending libraries, coffee houses where you could go and read a newspaper. And suddenly for the first time in history, it began to be the case that ordinary people had access to books and journals and newspapers.

And I think this is really the crucial inflection point. Because this is the point at which for the first time in history, ordinary people have access to literacy and have access to the power of knowledge that is contained in books. And it's so easy to be blase about that now. We're surrounded by information, but that world before what's sometimes called the reading revolution in the middle of the 18th century, in the middle of the 1700s.

It's really hard for us to grasp quite how restricted that knowledge environment used to be. If you lived in a village in rural France. Your understanding of history, your understanding of political developments, your understanding of geography, all these things were just, it's really hard for us to get our heads around how limited that intellectual world was.

So this, when suddenly all these amazing reports, people knew something was happening as well at the time, there were all these extraordinary reports saying, you go into a lending library in Berlin, even the most common soldiers are reading newspapers. This is really massive. This is the first time in history that ordinary people have had access to information and or serious access to serious information, and it's a really big moment in my view.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So before we get further down the road of connecting the rise of mass literacy, as you said, and the spreading of liberal democracy, let me just ask, are you making a causal relationship or are they just correlated that they both roughly began to emerge in human history around the same time?

MARRIOTT: I think there's a very strong argument that mass literacy and mass democracy are intimately related. One never wants to say definitively. It's very hard to draw straight lines of causation in history. People will doubtless dispute this, but I think it's pretty much accepted among serious historians that literacy has at least something to do with democracy.

Mass literacy and mass democracy are intimately related.

James Marriott

I think it has quite a bit to do with democracy. I don't think that's a controversial thing to say, although in history, nothing can ever be definitively proved, obviously.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay so connect some more of the dots here. What are some specific examples or other points in history where you say this happened because more people were able to read and read more, I should say, as well?

MARRIOTT: Yeah, I think there are a few really interesting and notable examples about the way that literacy began to transform politics in Europe in the 18th century, before the 18th century, people sometimes talk about an age of European absolutism, absolutist, autocratic monarchs that sometimes referred to as a culture of representation.

The monarch relied on very visual, very imagistic propaganda to impose his authority on his people. This was a world of parades, of magnificent paintings, of fireworks, displays of Louis XIV dressed up in thousands of jewels, taking part in a ballet. It was a culture that was all to do with power expressed through visual display.

It was a very impressive culture, and it was not a political culture that particularly relied on the idea that it needed to be intellectually justified. The feudal hierarchy in Europe was a kind of emotional and visual experience that aimed to persuade through the image and through feelings.

What began to change in the 18th century was that people began to have access to information about how power worked, and they began to be able to see behind that amazingly impressive visual facade constructed by kings at Versailles and all the amazing European palaces that were constructed in the 18th century.

One important thing is that people began to write accounts of injustice and the way that power was abused, that because there was a readership for print that could be circulated through the population.

So there's a historian called Robert Darnton who sometimes talks about the forbidden literary bestsellers of 18th century France, which is quite, I think quite a kind of fun, spicy way to talk about it. And a lot of these books were political books that exposed abuses of power. There was a kind of genre of people who would be imprisoned by the French state without trial by a mechanism known as the Lettres de cachet, and they'd go to the Bastille often, and people would be imprisoned in the Bastille, arbitrarily by the state, and they would write a memoir about it.

So two of the famous memoirs are by a writer called Linguet, and another writer called Mirabeau. These became huge underground bestsellers and were widely read, and people had access to information about the way that power was being abused, which in a way, in our world of newspapers and the internet and tweeting sounds so obvious.

This was really quite unprecedented, detailed and fairly accurate information about abuses of power by the government had just never really been able to circulate like this before. And there are all kinds of other instances where that enormous, impressive facade of autocratic absolutist power just begins to have light shone behind it and light shone through it and people can see what's going on behind the facade.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm thinking of what democracy ... as it emerged in the age of enlightenment, what actually it meant on the ground versus how we understand it today. But I do still see some of the connections that you're talking about, James, because it's not just the rise of literacy itself.

I also feel that literacy allowed people who did not have the time or the leisure to do the writing that we're talking about that was so subversive to more traditional forms of power, but then people who did not have that time. Who are working constantly, except maybe Sundays. They had a chance to actually read those.

It was faster to read those documents if they could get ahold of them, than in finding someone who knew someone who had spoken to someone that said, perhaps we should look at, say, hereditary monarchy differently.

MARRIOTT: Yes, exactly. And you're right that it, especially in a very metropolitan areas of Europe, like Paris, certainly information about what was going on at court might have leaked out in the form of gossip or songs, but that information was very unreliable and not particularly detailed.

And yeah, as you say, it's the access to relatively detailed information, among for a wider and wider portion of the population that can read. The other thing is that the effect of literacy. Spreading literacy reaches a tipping point where it begins to be the case that you don't have to be literate to read a newspaper. Because there are enough literate people around that you can gather together and your literate friend will read out the news from the daily news sheet or whatever it is, how you're getting that information.

So the effect really compounds and estimates for the numbers of people reading a particular newspaper in the 18th century are really high. As many as hundreds of people could read a single copy. So this information really, when it crossed that tipping point, a real floodgate opened.

CHAKRABARTI: I promise you a little later in the show, James, that that I will try my best to poke some holes in this theory.

MARRIOTT: Please do.

CHAKRABARTI: For the sake of conversation and good faith argument. But before we go to our first break, which is about 30 seconds away, do you really think that the past that you just described prior to mass literacy could be something that looks very familiar to us today or in the near future?

MARRIOTT: Yes, I think there is a case. In a way this is more an attractive and interesting symmetry in history than I'm saying that we will return to the past. But I do think that incredibly visual culture and that incredibly hierarchical culture where power is confined to a few people who have a lot of money and the power to project their visual image, that does seem, if not in every way familiar, quite familiar and at least an interesting thought experiment to explore.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: James, in your essay, you frequently cite the work of Walter Ong, right?

He's a Jesuit priest, or now deceased, but Jesuit priest and professor who studied oral cultures and literacy. And we have a little bit of tape here from a 1972 lecture that Ong gave where he explains how he thought writing and literacy changes how people think.

WALTER ONG: Once you get writing, you can write a thing that we would call it, treatise, something like Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric.

This is a completely new experience for the human mind. No human mind had ever gone through that kind of motion where you show that this is due to this and this is due to this, and this is due to these three factors, and each of those are due to these four others. You can't do that in the moral culture.

You can't get 'em lined up like that. You can't have this linear or causative development to any extent.

CHAKRABARTI: James, why do you cite Ong so much in your piece?

MARRIOTT: I think he's an extremely interesting, extremely prescient thinker. I have to say, I'm hardly the only person to mention him. I read that book a while ago and I've noticed since I read it that he's very much in the air.

I think Walter Ong interests people so much because he is such an acute critic of the way that literate societies, societies whose communication is structured through writing and especially through print, differ from oral societies. And I think people find him particularly interesting because he posited this idea of what he calls secondary orality, which is the notion that as we move away from the age of print, and as our communication is increasingly structured through oral mediums or audio visual mediums like television and the radio, and, he didn't live to see it.

But things like TikTok and Instagram Reels and YouTube, we, our society begins to look a lot like the kinds of societies, or at least strikingly the kinds of societies that preceded the invention of print. So he says that some of the things that print gives us is the ability, as he explained in that clip, to hold, to develop connected and detailed analytic, abstract thought.

He says that's a kind of phenomenon of writing. He says that writing has tended to cool argument and tended to rationalize argument and a lot of the things that he says about preliterate societies. They tend to be somewhat restricted in the complexity of thought that's available to them. They can't write long, philosophical treaties.

They tend to be more agonistic in their debating style. They don't have that kind of cooling, rationalizing influence on thought that you have when something's written down in the book and taken out of the sphere of human beings talking and arguing and fighting with each other. So his idea that we might be returning to this more irrational, more conflictual and I guess less intellectually complex society I think has chimed with a lot of people and it certainly chimed with me.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so here's where the causal chain wobbles for me a little bit James, because I think back to, let's say, the ancient Greeks, they had writing, of course.

But as we celebrate to this day. The concept of a Socratic dialogue, which was oral or is oral even now, is one of the highest means of the deepening of thought and knowledge. And unlike what Ong says, I think you can make an argument that through things like Socratic Dialogue, you can actually build a logical chain of evidence and therefore present a coherent thought in the way that Ong is saying. Only writing can do, and even to this day in U.S courts, and I believe it's the same in Britain it, the court itself, separate from the writing, the documents that are submitted in evidence, but the actual things that happen in court is almost entirely based on the persuasiveness of an oral argument.

So I guess what I'm trying to say here, James, is that regarding things like TikTok or social media in general, perhaps the problem isn't necessarily that things are coming at people in tiny five second, ten second bites, but it's the type of orality that is favored on social media.

Meaning the problem is the business model, which favors basically brainless brain rot content and not a means by which to actually deepen knowledge, even if it comes in smaller chunks.

MARRIOTT: Yes, I agree with you, and I don't think anyone would mistake most TikTok videos for a Socratic dialogue, although in a --

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) But the point I'm making is that the social media companies could, they're terrified of not making money.

It's that capitalism is what's really changing a relationship to democracy and not necessarily a reduction in reading.

MARRIOTT: Yes, I think there's certainly truth in that. I guess my caution about Plato would be that I think those Socratic dialogues are not just written out conversations that just happened in the course of everybody sitting in their living room in ancient Greece, and they just got into these deep philosophical discussions. We seem to know that Socrates is famous for complaining about the advent of writing.

But his pupil Xenophon actually has recorded that he himself read a lot of books. And there are other quotes from Socrates saying, I love leafing through my favorite books and picking out the gems of past authors.

And so I think the idea that these Socratic dialogues are a purely verbal form is maybe a little bit misleading, because they were written down. It's not surprising that Plato wrote in the form of dialogue. Because ancient Greece, although writing had arrived, was still a largely oral culture.

And it had a tradition of argument and debate that was very deeply embedded in it. So it's not an accident that when Plato came to write those dialogues, write his philosophy, he wrote it in the form of a dialogue. We do know though, or we think we know from people who've written about Plato's composition process, that this was, the way he wrote was very deeply print-based.

There's a ancient historian called Dionysius of Halicarnassus who says that everybody knows this story about how when Plato was working on The Republic, almost to the end of his life, he was endlessly revising the first sentence in the first chapter and rewriting it and going back and rewriting it.

So although these appear to us like spontaneous, verbal, oral conversations that happened in Plato's living room, and he just drops into his friends and Socrates starts chatting away. I think that's a bit misleading, and I think the depth of analytic thought in these dialogues, I'm sure there was a deeply intellectual, verbal culture in ancient Greece. But a lot of it is a symptom of the fact that these things are written down, the words were fixed on the page where they could be analyzed, revised thought about and come back to.

So I think your cautionary notice is totally correct. The 21st century is extremely different to ancient Greece, but we shouldn't be led astray by the fact that written documents are presented to us as a spoken dialogue.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, no, your point is well taken, actually.

And it reminds me of a phrase that you refer to multiple times that many people know about the medium is the message. And the medium of a Socratic dialogue is actually, it's not, as you say, a common conversation or argument. It is a slow down, deliberative thinking process. So I do take your point very well.

Let me bring Adam Garfinkle into the conversation now. He's a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, and author of a Substack called The Raspberry Patch. And in 2020 he wrote a piece in the journal National Affairs titled The Erosion of Deep Literacy. Adam, welcome to On Point.

ADAM GARFINKLE: Thank you. It's nice to meet you.

CHAKRABARTI: Nice to meet you as well. I call this meeting full stop, but there's something I'd like to start with you with something that James wrote in his piece. Because he accurately described the advent of mass literacy as a shock to the powers that be at the time it was described as, James is right. It was described as a fever, an epidemic, a craze, a madness. And that the conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries. And I think, ah, this sounds familiar. Should we just check ourselves a little bit in terms of perhaps the critics doth protest too much?

GARFINKLE: Let me just say, first of all, that the subject that we're trying to get arms around on the radio here is a capaciously complex subject with many layers. And it tries the imagination even to just talk about it. This is why literacy is so important because when you can sit down slowly and at your own pace and read about it, I think it's much easier to gain the kind of understanding of this kind of complexity that we're talking about.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump in here, Adam, because I really appreciate that you said that. Because I wish I had a five-hour long podcast essentially. Sadly, I do not, but --

GARFINKLE: I'd be down for that.

CHAKRABARTI: I was, when our producer Claire was working on putting together this show, I thought, I told her how ironic is it that we're trying to have this conversation about literacy and democracy, but I still have to answer to the demands of the medium that we're going to be in. Meaning I have to start --

GARFINKLE: It's the business model.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, exactly. But go on.

GARFINKLE: It really is a very difficult, first of all, this kind of discussion is not familiar to most people, and it's so layered and it has so many aspects that one hardly knows where to start, but I'd like to just, If I can, try to broaden the discussion a little bit. It's not that I'm not an admirer of James Marriott. I am a recent great admirer of James Marriott because I was writing about this sort of thing six years ago. So it's so delightful to see James' piece that we've been talking about.

I sent it to Maryanne Wolf and she loved it. So I'm trying to make some connections here between the people who care about this subject and are deeply engaged in it. But two points. First of all. We've been talking about democracy. That's the sort of the title of the show.

And I think that's a little bit misleading. I think what James says is true. That democracy would be strained very much if the erosion of deep literacy reaches certain thresholds. But we're really not talking just about democracy, or in my opinion, even mainly about democracy.

We're talking about classical liberalism. In the United States in particular, when people say democracy, they mean liberal democracy. But this is misleading. Because classical liberalism and democracy have different histories and different ontologies, and they shouldn't be smashed together without some thought.

If you think about the elements of what liberalism was at the cusp of modernity and you then apply James' kind of analysis, which is not just his, of course, to how deep literacy changed the relationship between an individual sense of agency or at the beginning of the Protestant revolution, conscience on the one hand with what had gone on beforehand in medieval times, earlier times, where agency was more communal rather than individual.

All the hallmarks of modernity show forth in liberalism. Only some of them show forth in democracy, which is after all, just a way of electing leaders in a popular sovereignty framework. So that's the first point. We really should be thinking more about the contours of liberalism and how literacy aided. And now its erosion affects liberalism.

We really should be thinking more about the contours of liberalism and how literacy aided. And now its erosion affects liberalism.

Adam Garfinkle

Second point. When I talk about this in my writing, I speak of the evil twins. One evil. The older evil twin is the erosion of deep literacy, about reading all the things we've been talking about. But the newer evil twin is what I call the cyberlusion, which is basically the screens.

What it's done to our brains. My colleague Richard Cytowic has written a great recent book with MIT Press, Your Stone Age Brain on Screens. There is a very important neurocognitive aspect to this whole subject that we haven't touched on yet.

But so it's not just deep literacy. It's the twinning of deep literacy with the coming of the internet age, the smartphones and all the distractions, the electronic distractions of people staring for hours and hours at two dimensional screens. Because the former operates as an opportunity cost on the ladder.

You can't be spending a lot of time reading and doing slow thinking and trying to understand what you're getting at if you're spending four or five hours a day playing video games, staring at screens. And making yourself crazy with spectacular kinds of, everything on the screens, a lot of the entertainment is really, it reminds me a lot of the two-headed carnival calf or what used to see in Ripley's Believe It or Not!

It's designed to create astounding complexes. It's designed to be spectacular, right? It's designed to essentially addict you to distraction as the former Senator Ben Sasse put it one time. So I don't think we can talk coherently about just the erosion of deep literacy.

You can't be spending a lot of time reading and doing slow thinking ... if you're spending four or five hours a day playing video games, staring at screens.

Adam Garfinkle

We have to talk about it in a twinned way with the way the digital technology has changed cognitive routines and actually has started to rewire people's brains.

CHAKRABARTI: I don't think you'll find any disagreement here amongst James and I with that point because again, as a medium and a business model, there are certain types of dumbed down content that are absolutely favored and aggressively pushed into people's minds. So agreed there, but we have just a couple minutes before our next break.

Adam, give me your take if you can. I know this is a big question and not a perfect time to ask it, but about specifically how you see a reduction in the deep reading, the deep literacy that you talk about. Having an impact on the strength of liberal democracy.

GARFINKLE: Okay. If you look at the origins of modernity, if you take a definition of modernity, let's say Daniel Bell's definition of modernity, it really consisted of three things.

It consisted, individual agency over communal agency. It consisted of secularism not just in politics, but also in the arts. And it consisted of basically ... the idea of progress. That moral and material progress could walk hand in hand. And what these things have in common was a truly revolution in thought that was enabled by literacy, which was the end of the zero sum. The idea that there could be positive sum arrangements in social orders if institutions were designed with that in mind. And this was a confluence of discoveries in astronomy at the time.

The changes in religious philosophy at the time, a lot of things were going on at the time. But there were certain characteristic ways of social structure, ways of authority, for example, just to give two out of many, that were characteristic of preliterate society that changed dramatically when literacy came along.

We call our social order basically, the way we think about our roles in society as modular. And that's a function of being able to balance, juggle more identities than just one in a much more interdependent kind of society before literacy.

The main social structure was tribal. And I think we've seen lots of comments recently about how we are returning to a virtual, tribal way of thinking. About who we relate to. That's one. But the nature of authority is just as important, perhaps more important. We have, if you take, if you go back to Max Weber, Weber very famously distinguished between three kinds of authority.

Charismatic authority, traditional authority. And formal legal authority. Formal authority. And James already mentioned that you have to be literate in order to have rule of law, because the law's written down. That's exactly right. But so we have been in the third stage of Max Weber's forms of authority now for many years.

Basically, since the end of the divine rite of kings and the rise of democracy, but now we are retreating to charismatic authority. I once wrote an article which I called Donald Trump the shaman in chief. And I think he relates to his followers like a shaman related to his accolades in preliterate times.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: James, let me return to you. Because Adam brought up a good point about as he calls President Trump the shaman in chief, rather than a president of a liberal democracy, or that's how his relationship to his base is. You make a similar point in your essay about how a post literate society really favors populism or populism feeds on a post literate society.

Tell me more about that.

MARRIOTT; Yeah, totally. I thought, I think it's such a good point, and to me he's totally shaman as well. There's been some interesting research that's beginning to be done in this phenomenon as well, which is the association between TikTok usage and the propensity to support populist or far right parties.

One particular, I guess there's a kind of obvious anecdotal fact, which is that certainly here in the UK, by far the most popular politician on TikTok is our populist right leader, Nigel Farage. Far more followers in TikTok than any other rival politician from a mainstream party. I think the reasons are pretty obvious, because that populist message is, it's very emotional, it's very quick to say, it's not very complex.

It offers easy, simple emotional answers which go over far better on TikTok than they do on the written page where there's more room for complexity. There was an interesting study that was done I think last year in Romania that found saturation of TikTok usage in the population correlated with propensity to vote for a far-right candidate in the election.

And I think it seems to me pretty obvious that the causes behind that correlation are the same, that easy, simple, emotionally satisfying messages really work on TikTok. And the old fashioned, I guess maybe to me a new, more thoughtful and more complex politics that's more prepared to deal with difficulty, and more prepared to feel with ideas that sound a bit counterintuitive really struggles in this new medium.

CHAKRABARTI: I wonder if, I'm pausing here because I'm not quite sure how to put it. I wonder if we're idealizing what we believe a liberal democracy to be. And Adam, I'm going to turn this one to you. And here's why I ask that. Because it's within this very, this liberal democracy that the United States currently.

We'll see for how long, but currently still has, that some of the most deeply literate people. I'm not talking about the president of the United States, but maybe folks that surround him, right?

Russell Vought. He's absolutely bringing about a new way of thinking about what American power should look like.

Vice President JD Vance, these are all highly educated, highly literate people, and yet they're in fact using this medium of writing at times to advance very illiberal policies. And in fact, this is something that Eric Levitz, who's a senior correspondent at Vox, that he mentioned. Now, he shares the concern about declining literacy.

But he argues that you don't need to be someone with a lower level of literacy to support far left or far right political views.

ERIC LEVITZ: In the United States, some of the most foremost proponents of right-wing authoritarianism. Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, this Silicon Valley blogger who supports monarchy. And the Vice president JD Vance are all well-read men. And they're authors, they write.

CHAKRABARTI: Adam, what do you think about that?

GARFINKLE: That's certainly true. There are some new right intellectuals and they are to, I think, a kind of a sense of discontent with the functioning of democracy in the United States among middle classes and others.

There are many reasons for it. But part of the reason is that the tenured elite, and I'm not talking about the digital corporate elite that are now inside of the second Trump administration. I'm talking about just the elites, the cognitive elites from the both Democratic and Republican party and from universities and from high journalism, haven't really done a great job in a lot of people's estimation.

People are pessimistic about the future of the country. Middle class feels as though it's been, it's kinda strung out and taken advantage of. And a lot of that happens to be right. I don't want to get, we don't have time for detail, but, so there is, a lot of the populist grievances don't come out of thin air.

But what someone like the people you mentioned, Russell Vought, Vice President and Curtis Yarvin, those folks do is they have essentially megaphoned this using new kinds of technology as well as old kinds of technology to create a kind of a conflict entrepreneurship in order to use it politically, to gain audiences.

That's part of the free for all of a democratic, mass Democratic politics. And by the way, the sort of level of irrationality and the appeal of spectacle and the emotional, visual emphasis of the kind of media that most people are looking at now, it doesn't only have effects, deranging effects on the right.

It also has had plenty of deranging effects on the left. And there isn't a liberal left in the United States just as there is in a liberal right. And because of the clickbait nature of the media, which thrives on the 'wow now,' the astounding complexes, the media has been bouncing off extreme left against extreme right and creating this cacophony of extremism.

Yeah. And the middle, the moderates in the middle, in a situation like that effectively disappear, whether it's a fighting war or only an intellectual kind of a war. And this is not good for the country. This is not good for the idea of a loyal opposition. This is not good for deliberative discourse.

This is not good for actual policymaking as opposed to just screaming at each other. So this is not good.

CHAKRABARTI: So James, let me turn back to you. And I wanna continue to stress test this theory, alright? Because I'm thinking that, even after the advent of mass literacy, it in fact was that mass literacy and the fact that people could shape a message that could reach many more folks than it did before. More human beings knew how to read, that actually allowed some aspects of repression and suppression to endure.

And here's what I mean. For women in this country, for Black Americans, they should very justifiably look on this conversation and say, yeah, because everyone could read the Bible in the 18th and 19th. And even through the first half of the 20th century, it was frequently the bible that misogynists and that racists looked to, to find justification for denying women the vote, denying them the chance to own property, for denying Black Americans their basic human rights. And they were able to get that message across by saying, by writing, et cetera, et cetera, that look, God says X. Okay.

And that couldn't have happened without, I'm just going to finish my argument here really quickly. That couldn't have happened without many people, many of them having learned how to read because they were told they needed to read the Bible.

Okay. So you can reject that in a second, but I just want to add one more thing. Because this is where Eric Levitz, who we talked to, is heading to, he actually makes the argument that it was non-literal or non-literary technologies that came around. That in a sense, actually helped expand the benefits of liberal democracy to these very groups I'm talking about, to women and Black and brown Americans. And here's what he said.

LEVITZ: The 1960s is when television is really penetrating throughout the entire society. And it's also when we have the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement, which were directly aided by news coverage of Bloody Sunday, these protests.

And that helped to galvanize the sense in D.C. that something needed to be done.

CHAKRABARTI: Go ahead, James.

MARRIOTT: Yeah, you make a series of extremely good points. I'll do my best to answer them in a non-boring way. I guess the first thing to say is that when I talk about the benefits of literacy, my argument is not that every single book is better than every single TikTok video, or that every single newspaper article is better than every single YouTube video.

That's clearly not the case at all. And there have been many disastrous and depraved very well-read people in history. The argument is more about general biases and culture. And the argument is only that a literate culture is more generally biased towards rational argument, analytical thought than a pre-literate or post literate culture.

So I don't want to over claim there. The second point about literacy as an instrument of oppression, I've no doubt that you could find historical instances of that, that would be convincing. I have to say, I think probably the overall effect of literacy has been in the other direction.

Yes. There's a great book by a historian called Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights. Where she talks about the role of the novel and the role of literacy in pioneering ideas of human rights. And the point that she makes is that novels and the growth of the novel in the late 18th century was a really important opportunity in history whereby ordinary people sitting alone in their living rooms could insert themselves into the consciousnesses of people quite unlike them.

And rather than being restricted to your immediate personal environment that your family, your town, your tribe, you suddenly have this opportunity to time travel or space travel into other minds. And she said this was a really important part of a really important means of expanding empathy. And I think you mentioned slavery, but we know that a really important tool of persuading I think many white liberals in America that slavery was evil were things like novels about slavery.

Memoirs of former slaves. People suddenly had access to the consciousnesses of people they could never have met in their ordinary lives, and suddenly were able to put themselves in their shoes. And yeah, I've no doubt that there are instances where literacy can be used in a aggressive way.

But I do think the overall effect has been to expand us intellectually and expand our capacity for empathy.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. No, agreed. And just to be clear, I'm not at all advocating that we return to a time where reading is something that we all barely do. I think literacy, excellent, is one of the greatest advancements in human thought and eventually human equality that we've had.

I'm just trying to temper my own skepticism about the medium, right? Because I think what we're all talking about here is digital technology being this accelerant towards less sophisticated or less engaged thinking that's required for a liberal democracy.

And I am on the record on this show on countless numbers of episodes we've done being horrified by things like social media and its effect on people. But I'm trying to temper that in this conversation.

CHAKRABARTI: And Adam, let me just, I'll give you a minute or two here, then I'll have James have the last word here. I'm trying to temper my own skepticism on that. Because Eric's example of once people master all the different kinds of potentials of a new technology.

They turn out to be less expressly bad than they were before. Literacy is one example. Television, another, obviously radio has its own colorful history, but even with social media, we're already, we saw years ago, the Arab Spring, that happened effectively because of the speed with which social media was able to connect people.

And I'm just wondering as we get further on in the digital age. Could we look back and say okay, we learned how to best use the technology and so therefore it wasn't as catastrophic, Adam.

GARFINKLE: Oh, you pick the Arab Spring. That's quite an example because after the Arab Spring from 2011, ever since, there still isn't a single Arab democracy.

So I'm not sure that's the best example.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, good point.

GARFINKLE: It caused a lot of civil war and a lot of mass murder. I'm not sure. But that's a good point that you raised. Look, television and even just literacy before, just a newspaper. Especially the increasing rates of literacy among women in the United States in the 1840s and the 1850s corresponding to the Second Great Awakening.

All the great advances in social justice in the United States, the Abolition Movement, Women's Suffrage, the Labor Movement, all of that was propelled largely by female literacy. And there's lots of examples of terrible people using literacy to do terrible things.

All the great advances in social justice in the United States, the Abolition Movement, Women's Suffrage, the Labor Movement, all of that was propelled largely by female literacy.

Adam Garfinkle

My favorite example. Comes not that long after Gutenberg starts printing all those Bibles in 1455. And this is a guy named Heinrich Kramer who writes a book called Malleus Maleficarum about witchcraft. And he starts a trend that gets hundreds and hundreds of women lynched for witchcraft all across Europe.

That was a use of literacy, but not a very positive one. So this is a very mixed bag. Yeah, and it will always be a mixed bag.

CHAKRABARTI: Adam Garfinkle, I'm gonna have to take it back from you there. Adam is a senior fellow at the ... Niskanen Cente and author of The Erosion of Deep Literacy.

Definitely worth a read, everybody. Adam, thank you so much.

GARFINKLE: My pleasure.

CHAKRABARTI: James. Let me give you the last word here, because of course I want to ask you what can be done about this. And here's where my skepticism runs very deep, because I don't know if this is true in the UK, but in the United States, in schools right now, K-12, teachers are less and less using whole texts to teach.

Because they report actually even in college that children don't even, or young people don't have the endurance to even read an entire book. So what can we do about this?

MARRIOTT: Yeah. I have to say, I'm pretty pessimistic. I think we really are living through a civilizational inflection point, and I think we may discover that just as the feudal autocratic Europe was a function of an information environment that was highly visual and pre-literate, we may discover that the democratic world that we knew was basically a product of a highly literate information environment that is now disappearing.

And I think we'll very likely take democracy with it. My personal kind of call to arms is that I've got rid of my smartphone. I've got a dumb phone. I don't, I find it quite sinister that these addictive personal entertainment devices are increasingly, I think almost virtually compulsory and everybody has to have one.

I don't think by any means that everyone will give up their smartphone. I would say there are good options for dumb phones out there, dumb phones that have WhatsApp and Google Maps, for instance, as mine does. And I think if you can opt out of the dawning age of the screen, we can create a little band of people who perhaps can be a bit of a resistance to this and perhaps can stand up for, I think a more, a better and more deeply thoughtful way of doing things. I think in historical terms, we're probably not going in a good direction.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.