Goldfish-Brained Chaos

The New Dark Ages:
The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society
by james marriott
doubleday, 208 pages, $26

Has Elon Musk read the Odyssey? Despite the trillionaire’s endless carping about Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the Homeric poem, I have yet to see anyone ask this simple question. Musk has accused Nolan of “desecrating” Homer, but his own preferred translation remains a mystery. (Perhaps he reads it in the original Greek?) He has even pledged to employ AI to make another, “historically accurate” Odyssey film, which is somewhat confusing given that Homer’s epics were themselves a historically inaccurate, not to mention mythical, record of events in a dimly remembered past. 

It is a sign of how far reading has retreated from mainstream culture that even arguments about the interpretation of literature can ignore the texts they claim to be honoring, like people arguing about the character of a city that none of them has visited. When the Odyssey was committed to parchment sometime after 550 b.c., having been passed down orally for generations, it marked a glorious new dawn of literacy. The debates over the same poem today suggest that we are sliding into a postliterate Dark Age.  

One writer who has been energetically sounding the alarm about the decline of reading is James Marriott, an opinion columnist for British newspaper The Times. “What happens to a democracy that forgets how to think?” asks Marriott in his book, The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. He argues that a society which exchanges reading for smartphones, social media, and podcasts is heading for a “future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal and autocratic.” So much about this book is precisely tailored to my prejudices: I defer to no one in my love of reading and in my exasperation at the stupidity of contemporary culture. Yet the relationship between the three key elements in this story—reading, the culture of the screen, and liberal democracy—is not as straightforward as Marriott assumes. 

There was, as I have described in these pages (“The Future of Reading,” June/July 2025), a great hinge moment in human history when literacy boomed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, spreading far beyond the small circle of elites who had sustained it for millennia. This explosion of reading and writing, Marriott argues, transformed Western societies not just by bringing knowledge and information to a greater number of people, but by introducing them to habits of skepticism, critical inquiry, and abstract reasoning. As Marriott puts it:

When we write our ideas down we externalize part of our minds. We can look at our thoughts from the outside. And that means we can walk around them: adding to them, criticizing them and refining them. Writing meant that traditions and received ways of thinking could not only be passed on but also set down where they could be analysed, challenged and improved.

As more and more people gained access to these intellectual tools, culture changed at a fundamental level. The public sphere was born: a continuous exchange of opinions and ideas through books, pamphlets, newspapers, and letters, involving a section of society large enough that rulers and governments were forced to take account of it. 

Our twenty-first-century media culture has inherited the responsibilities of that public sphere—spreading news, facilitating debate, holding the powerful to account—but really offers little more than a parody of it. Marriott writes with great wit about the surreal landscapes of nonsense that much of humanity now inhabits via the smartphone. TikTok, he observes, is “a kind of dadaist absurdity, a nihilistic tornado of content,” making “a Salvador Dalí canvas look like an oasis of rationality and order.” Voters fed with propaganda and tribal sentiment are increasingly incapable of making informed judgments about politics, while the growing dominance of short-form video ensures the triumph of charisma over intellectual substance. Driving home the difference between watching or listening versus reading, Marriott notes that “few of the broadcasters who spread conspiracy theories and lies would be able to have public careers if they were compelled to set out their ideas logically in writing for the close attention of readers. But conversation is simply much more forgiving of exaggeration and bullshit than print.”

The problem is that this contrast does little to explain the madness engulfing us today. That digital technology has had a deranging effect on politics and culture is, to my mind, beyond dispute. But to argue that the decline of reading bears a similar degree of responsibility is an entirely different and more questionable claim. As Marriott details with admirable clarity, the screen which broke the back of the popular culture of reading was not the smartphone but the television, a device which conquered the world’s leisure time with shocking efficiency from the 1950s onward. The digital era has done enormous damage, too, crushing concentration spans and displacing reading habits among the significant minority who still had them, while infiltrating those settings—commuter journeys, holidays, university classrooms—which TV could not reach. Nonetheless, if the average person two decades ago was much more likely to be a TV addict than a bookworm, it is difficult to argue that the subsequent debasement of culture owes a great deal to the decline of reading. 

Marriott could answer that the change described in his book is a more subtle, insidious one: the gradual depletion of “deep literacy” across decades, as older generations died and younger ones were formed by an ever more vacuous TV culture, so that when the iPhone arrived, it met a population already primed for digital barbarism. There is, I think, a lot to be said for this version of events. But it still doesn’t imply a strong case for reading as a safeguard against irrationality and credulousness. For the other point to consider is that the most literate and literary parts of society, namely, institutions staffed by humanities and social science graduates, have been no less vulnerable to these tendencies in recent years. 

Marriott mostly takes his examples of obscurantism and hysteria from right-wing populist politicians and media figures, who tend to court audiences with lower education levels. There is certainly no shortage of such examples. But their progressive antagonists have scarcely been less crazy or illiberal, even if their ideas enjoy the imprimatur of elite institutions and academic jargon. To take the most obvious case, the denial of biological sex and the associated web of dogmas about gender identity represent a descent into ideological pseudoscience comparable with Lysenkoism, the genetic theories that ravaged agriculture and ended the careers of honest scientists in the Soviet Union. The key point missing from The New Dark Ages is that the highly literate mind is exceptionally good at justifying, to itself and to others, the baseless ideas that it wishes to be true. It is not the case, in my experience, that people with master’s degrees and reading habits are necessarily more rational and fair-minded than those who work in manual jobs and have never read a book.

All of which is to say that Marriott has made his defense of reading on the wrong terrain. Intellectual skepticism, independent thought, democratic and liberal sensibilities: All of these things thrived with the spread of literacy during the Enlightenment, but they are not inherent to it. It is difficult to know what to make of the claim that “print tends to help make a society more rational, more egalitarian and more democratic overall and in the long term” when the best case study we have, European society between 1750 and 1950, ended in a conflagration of utter madness and unprecedented violence. Marriott insists he is not claiming that literacy can outweigh disasters such as war and economic collapse; but the fact is that literacy has been an integral part of political cultures that spawned such disasters. Besides, were Western countries really more egalitarian in the mid-twentieth century than they are today?

The truth is that the moral and political possibilities of literacy are as multitudinous as those of the human soul. What Marriott so eloquently says of writing as a means of developing thoughts—“we can walk around them: adding to them, criticizing them and refining them”—applies to poetry, mysticism, and polemic as much as to rational analysis. Sensationalist YouTube commentators would doubtless struggle to be persuasive in print, but more skillful masters of human emotion have always thrived in it. Marriott discusses the phenomenal popularity of eighteenth-century romantic novels such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, a work whose “hysterical sentimentality” provoked from its readers “what can only be described as a frenzy of empathetic connection with the book’s characters.” According to Marriott, such connection with the thoughts and feelings of others contributed to the “more egalitarian, more democratic spirit” of the Enlightenment. Yet the novelist’s art can also deliver devastating blows to that spirit, whether through the depravity of a Marquis de Sade, the misanthropy of a Louis-Ferdinand Céline, or the existential probing of a Fyodor Dostoevsky. 

What society loses along with its reading proficiency is not a political leaning, but something more fundamental: knowledge and intellectual depth. Reading allows us to grapple with sophisticated ideas, and books can impart to us a deeper and broader understanding of most subjects than any other media. Marriott himself makes the case succinctly: 

If you want to get a handle on the sweep of history or a scientific theorem or a complex philosophical argument, you have no option but to turn to a book. Such things can only really be adequately explained, and indeed only adequately comprehended, in paragraphs and pages of text.

But this is very much a secondary argument in The New Dark Ages, when it ought to be a primary one.

The ongoing demise of reading heralds a Dark Age in this simple sense: There are and will be fewer people around who can think deeply about challenging subjects. The effects will be most noticeable at the two ends of the social scale. We will no longer benefit from those brilliant individuals from deprived backgrounds who, in the past, have used reading as an autodidactic scaffolding to develop their talents. This may be less of a problem for the math and engineering geniuses the tech industry craves, but it will mean that their power in society is not balanced by other modes of intelligence. Meanwhile, as intellectual standards fall, the quality of elites in general—not least political elites—will continue to decline. I would argue that all these developments have already been noticeable for some time. As Marriott points out, “Britain and America are now led by what is probably the least literate political class in the history of their respective democracies,” leaders who “live in a glib eternal present, lacking any ability to think beyond the moment-to-moment goldfish-brained chaos of likes, trends and memes.”

Herein lies the real political virtue of literacy: not in its bias toward any type of regime, but in the fact that a flourishing society requires some number of people with the knowledge and perspective that reading affords. There is, however, a whole other dimension to this tragedy, surely the greatest of all, which must at least be mentioned. Reading is a cultural practice, a way that human beings apply themselves to experience, meaning, and beauty, cultivating their perception and developing their imaginative capacities. Only a cliché will do here: These are the kinds of things that make life worth living. It’s clear that Marriott is as sensitive to this as anyone else, but another consequence of his focus on political utility and rationality is that this most precious aspect of reading is neglected. 

Imagine if all the music that ordinary people have been able to hear over the past century of recording technology—the symphonies and choral pieces, the blues and jazz, the rock ’n’ roll and everything since—suddenly fell silent. Or imagine if the world’s museums and galleries were emptied of all their paintings, drawings, sculptures, and precious craft artifacts. That is the extent of the cultural riches disappearing as the modern mind loses its ability to enjoy literature, and that is what those of us who do continue reading can console ourselves with.