The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society by James Marriott; Doubleday, 208 pp., $28
As reading habits wane, we devotees of books rally to one another like the exiles on the train tracks in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Those noble book memorizers defied their dystopian darkness. “They weren’t at all certain that the things they carried in their heads might make every future dawn glow with a purer light,” Bradbury writes. Yet this “odd minority crying in the wilderness” saved books for the hoped-for readers to come. Since we fugitive readers are often in need of consolation, I’ll note that on the same day James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages was published, William Vollmann’s five-volume, 3,000-word novel A Table for Fortune was also released. We can meet on the train tracks to discuss it.
Many worried voices cry out in our own wilderness. This past summer, articles in Fortune and The Chronicle of Higher Education despaired of college students who can’t read long texts or finish a book, while The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch announced, “The End of Reading Is Here.” The subtitle of Marriott’s book darkens the “end” of reading as its “death.” Surely that’s premature and hyperbolic. But overstatement is prophecy’s mode, and there is plenty for prophets to be anxious about.
Marriott’s first task is to show us how much is lost when older modes of reading are displaced. His is a brief book that moves quickly from the rise of literacy as an elite practice that enabled the growth of civilizations, to the acceleration of text production following Gutenberg’s printing press, to the era of mass literacy which tracked the growth of modern democracies. One of Marriott’s core contentions is that democracies require literate populations—not simply because people need to be able to read voting ballots but because the act of reading provides the kind of deliberative, rational practice that complex societies require to self-govern. He acknowledges that the spread of books and newspapers in the past wasn’t all Federalist Papers and Oliver Twist, that “the age of print was also the age of Nostradamus, witch-hunts and supernatural fantasies,” but all in all, like the saucer that cools the tea, the culture of reading made society “a better and more rational place.”
Marriott believes that this age is already behind us. Here, he follows Neil Postman, whose now-classic Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) saw the transition from the era of the “typographic mind” to the era of electronic media, which has brought forth the “vast triviality” of cultural life. In this new screen-centered world, readers became viewers. Chapter breaks became detergent commercials. Postman told us we were wrong to have worried about George Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia. Instead, it was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World that showed the ease with which we would simply give ourselves away to amusement and distraction. “Big Brother,” Postman quipped, “turns out to be Howdy Doody.”
While Marriott sees the later advent of the smartphone as the real death knell for reading, he helpfully documents the longer genealogy of screen enchantment. In addition to television broadly, he also explores the launch of 24-hour news with CNN and the invention of the remote control, which he dubs “the original addictive portable entertainment device.” Channel surfing taught our fingers how to scroll. Television itself marked the beginning of organizing our needs around a screen. It taught us to think of “entertainment not as a diversion but as a constant feature of our lives.”
Postman died before the iPhone arrived and before what Marriott calls (in a nod to Martin Amis, Saul Bellow, and Wyndham Lewis) “the moronic inferno of social media” could confirm his prophecies. With more landscape to survey, Marriott asserts that it’s all much worse than Postman imagined: “It is not just that twenty-first century society lacks seriousness, it also seems to be growing dangerously chaotic and irrational.” He goes on: “I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal and autocratic.” In her Atlantic essay, Horowitch offered a similarly bleak framing: “The literate era will prove to be a brief interlude between the oral and digital ages.” When defenders of ruminative reading start pulling the alarms, perhaps it really does signify the end of something.
But we can’t scold ourselves away from our screens. We have to help convince each other that there is something better offscreen, that difficult habits and tasks are somehow preferable to easier rewards. This sounds calm enough on the page. To humble the confident moralist, Marriott quotes a Google whistleblower on the real conditions of the struggle: “You can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.”
Still, lapsed readers, young and old, will have to be convinced of the worth to be found in quiet hours spent with Moby-Dick or Middlemarch. They will have to glimpse a reverie and wisdom that simply cannot be attained through passive watching of a video or a scroll through AI summaries. They will need to sense that some rewards are deeper and better than others. Marriott quotes Gurwinder Bhogal’s observation that screens are offering “a kind of fast food for thought.” But if screens don’t nourish us, still they please us. Fast food is popular for a reason.
“We have everything we need to be happy,” the hero of Fahrenheit 451 observes, “but we aren’t happy.” Maybe that’s the ultimate lever to pull: the growing awareness that our devices are exhausting and eroding us. Maybe our own nausea will help turn us away from the misdirection of those Google engineers. At the end of his skeptical assessment of our milieu, Marriott’s portrayal of an emptiness is, paradoxically, a seam of light on the horizon: “The problem, we are discovering, is that to immerse yourself in nothing but distraction is not a recipe for a happy or meaningful life.” When we look up from our distractions, though, convinced of that emptiness, what will we decide to look to?
For most of The New Dark Ages, I thought I was holding on to more optimism than Marriott. Reading is not dead. It’s just shouted down for the moment by short-term noise and vertical videos. The remnant holds on. Marriott holds on, too. This book is a voice crying in the wilderness, telling us not just what we’re missing but why it matters. He concludes with this resonant affirmation:
In an age that has elevated entertainment almost to the status of the highest possible value, books, especially good books, remind us that there is more to life. … Ironically, it may turn out that the best argument for reading ever invented was the smartphone. The smartphone has not shown us that books are obsolete. It has shown us that books are irreplaceable.
