The dawn of the post-literate society

Plus chivalric love and the world's most tasteless hotel

Hello,

Welcome to Cultural Capital - renamed in spite of substantial reader resistance. If you are still not reconciled to the new name in a couple of weeks I will change it back.

I am increasingly convinced that the collapse of reading is one of the most profound social and cultural developments of modern times. For years surveys have shown that rates of reading have been falling precipitously since the advent of the smartphone. Now a report from the OECD finds that reading proficiency is falling around the world for the first time on record. Sarah O’Connor has written interestingly about the findings in the Financial Times:

Among adults with tertiary-level education (such as university graduates), literacy proficiency fell in 13 countries and only increased in Finland, while nearly all countries and economies experienced declines in literacy proficiency among adults with below upper secondary education . . . “Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child”

I think O’Connor is right to say that we are becoming a “post literate” society as scrolling and short form video rapidly replaces sustained reading. I know many intelligent educated adults who never read. Friends who are teachers and academics tell me that the practice of “reading for fun” is virtually dead among their students. Reports from universities confirm this impression. A recent piece in The Atlantic, The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books, found that many university academics no longer assign long or complex texts because their students are now unable to cope with them:

Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

… Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

The great prophetic book on this subject is Neil Postman’s books Amusing Ourselves to Death. I spoke to Ian Leslie about it on the latest episode of his Ruffian podcast. Postman’s argument is that a culture of literacy is not just a nice thing to have but that it underpins our entire political culture. The habits of sustained attention, logical argument, and calm impersonal communication are fundamental to a democratic society. All modern democracies are products of the highly literate societies of the nineteenth century. Without literacy, democracy may not survive.

Indeed, the decline of reading is already transforming our political culture. O’Connor interestingly (and alarmingly) speculates that the decline of reading means that our society is already returning to some of the characteristics more usually associated with oral cultures:

I think we can’t underestimate how profound these changes are, which is why I argued in my column this week that the looming end of the mass literacy of the twentieth century is an important reason why we are entering what might seem to future historians to be a new “era”:

Above all, we are living through one of the great shifts in modern cultural history. To future historians the most distinctive cultural feature of the twentieth century will not be cinema or jazz but the mass literacy which flourished after late Victorian education reforms abolished what HG Wells referred to as the social “gulf” that once separated readers from the “non-reading mass”. The long twentieth century was the greatest age of reading the world has ever known: newspapers, magazines, self-help books, popular classics, airport bestsellers.

But literacy is now declining for the first time on record. A recent OECD report finds that adult reading proficiency is falling around the world. The crucial moment may not have been the arrival of the iPhone but the more recent dominance of short video. The first smartphone customers used the twenty-first technology in a twentieth century manner – to read articles and news stories. But the advent of apps like TikTok has created a new video-based culture that is truly indigenous to digital technology.

This is the best edition of Chaucer in existence

Other Things

Courtly Love
I’m still reading about the Middle Ages. I’ve been re-reading Chaucer, especially The Miller’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. I suspect Chaucer isn’t read for fun as much as he should be. But if you have the Riverside Chaucer (pictured above) all the usually Middle English words are glossed and the experience is basically painless, especially when you’re in the rhythm of it.

I wrote last week about CS Lewis’s excellent book The Discarded Image. I’m now onto another of his books about the middle ages, The Allegory of Love, which is a study of medieval romance through its distinctive preoccupation with allegory. He’s very good. Here he is on the social and cultural revolution unleashed by the medieval discovery (or invention) or romantic love:

We are tempted to treat ‘courtly love’ as a mere episode in literary history—an episode that we have finished with as we have finished with the peculiarities of Skaldic verse or Euphuistic prose. In fact, however, an unmistakable continuity connects the Provençal love song with the love poetry of the later Middle Ages, and thence, through Petrarch and many others, with that of the present day. If the thing at first escapes our notice, this is because we are so familiar with the erotic tradition of modern Europe that we mistake it for something natural and universal and therefore do not inquire into its origins. It seems to us natural that love should be the commonest theme of serious imaginative literature: but a glance at classical antiquity or at the Dark Ages at once shows us that what we took for ‘nature’ is really a special state of affairs, which will probably have an end, and which certainly had a beginning in eleventh-century Provence. It seems—or it seemed to us till lately—a natural thing that love (under certain conditions) should be regarded as a noble and ennobling passion: it is only if we imagine ourselves trying to explain this doctrine to Aristotle, Virgil, St. Paul, or the author of Beowulf, that we become aware how far from natural it is. Even our code of etiquette, with its rule that women always have precedence, is a legacy from courtly love, and is felt to be far from natural in modern Japan or India. Many of the features of this sentiment, as it was known to the Troubadours, have indeed disappeared; but this must not blind us to the fact that the most momentous and the most revolutionary elements in it have made the background of European literature for eight hundred years. French poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth. They effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched, and they erected impassable barriers between us and the classical past or the Oriental present.

Hideous Hotel
I very much enjoyed this piece in the FT about a preposterously expensive Zaha Hadid designed hotel in Rome that sounds like it is probably the most tasteless place in the world.

Pitcairn Trials
I am engrossed by a new podcast, The Pitcairn Trials, about the sexual abuse scandal that erupted on Pitcairn Island in the late 1990s. Most fascinating is the history of Pitcairn itself which was founded by the crew who mutinied on the Bounty in 1789. The community survives to this day and many (most?) of its members are descendents of the original mutineers and share their surnames. I wrote about it here.

The New Obscurantism
Anne Applebaum writes very well in The Atlantic about a movement she calls the “New Obscurantism”, mystical, the anti-enlightenment, wellness quackery strain in politics that is a powerful force in right wing political movements around the world, from Britain to America

. . .the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. Among their number are health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties, all over Europe, that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well. Strange overlaps are everywhere. Both the left-wing German politician Sahra Wagenknecht and the right-wing Alternative for Germany party promote vaccine and climate-change skepticism, blood-and-soil nationalism, and withdrawal of German support for Ukraine. All across Central Europe, a fascination with runes and folk magic aligns with both right-wing xenophobia and left-wing paganism. Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has become an apologist for Russian aggression, has claimed that he was attacked by a demon that left “claw marks” on his body.

Nosferatu
I enjoyed the new Robert Eggers film Nosferatu while feeling that it was importantly flawed in various obvious ways. One feels Eggers wouldn’t have minded not having a plot at all and would have been happy just supplying the viewer with a series of completely disconnected but atmospheric and beautifully-composed shots of ruined castles/Transylvanian mountains/gorgeous nineteenth century domestic interiors etc. This excellent review by the New Yorker’s Richard Brody best captures my feelings about it. I thought this was an especially interesting (and true) observation:

For all Eggers’s dramatization of unreason, his images sit heavily onscreen awaiting something more significant than mere admiration—interpretation. This tone is one that he shares with such prominent modern auteurs as Christopher Nolan and Ari Aster: a trend of academicism, of embodying their intentions in compositions that seem made to be viewed with the close-reading methods of a cinema-studies major.

Poem of the Week

This week’s poem is The Harvest Moon by Ted Hughes. I’d never read it until my sister sent it to me a couple of weeks ago. It’s seasonally inappropriate but marvellous in the audacity of its sonic effects. The “moon … balloon … doubloon … bassoon” stuff in the first paragraph succeeds precisely because its the sort of thing every creative teacher ever born would advise you not to do - all those “oo”s far too obvious and tasteless. But English does contain these bizarre sounds and Hughes’s has the poetic skill to slip behind the barriers of good taste to harvest their oddness. The nursery rhyme Edward Lear-ish extravagance of the “oo” rhymes strikes a superbly uneasy note against the eeriness of the rest of the poem. You can read it here.