The Death of Reading (with James Marriott)

Welcome and introduction

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The new dark ages

0:36Today is August 16th, 2026, and my guest is author James Marriott of the Times of London, where he is a columnist. His substack is Cultural Capital. He was first here in July of 2025, talking about reading. Today we're going to talk about his new book, The New Dark Ages, The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. James, welcome back to EconTalk. Thanks so much for having me. It's actually, amazingly, I talked to you last in the middle of a sweltering London heatwave, and I'm in the middle of another sweltering London heatwave,

1:08although it's less hot. When I looked back at that video, I'm completely pink in the last time I talked to you. But we'll have to do this more often. Or it's a tradition. It's pretty dark to call a book The New Dark Ages. Is the situation really that bleak?

1:26Yeah, it's a funny one. It's a title that... My publisher said, what are you calling this book? And you know, something just springs into your mind, and you say it before you've thought about it, and I just said, well, The New Dark Ages. And then it got attached to the project. And then people have asked me, well, do you think we're literally returning to the Dark Ages? Is it really true that a society with self-driving cars and world-meeting research universities is remotely comparable to the situation of Europe in, you know, the fifth or sixth century or whatever?

1:57That's not the argument of the book. I guess... I mean, the other objection people make is, aren't you caricaturing the Dark Ages, which as historians now tell us we're a time of great technological innovation, which I think is a bit overdone at the moment. But no, that's not what I'm doing either. I guess the thought behind the title comes from a fairly common idea among the kinds of media theorists who've written about the implications of moving from a society based on

2:28literacy and reading to one that abandons literacy and reading and begins to look a little bit more, in some ways, like the kinds of societies that preceded the advent of literacy. We owe Marshall McLuhan this idea that a post-literate society will resemble in some ways a pre-literate society. The things that, you know, the things I sort of say in my book and the things people like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong would say is, you know, more mystical, more emotional, more face-to-face interaction, not mediated by the written word. So I guess the thing that my title is pointing at is this, you know, sort of well-known thought

3:11in media theoretical circles that a society after literacy in some ways resembles a society before literacy. And I try not to press too hard on the historical parallels. You may think I've overdone it, but I guess the sort of, if the book has two themes, it's the idea that the decline of literacy may push us back through a kind of reversal of many of the gains of the enlightenment, which I think was a, which I think was a sort of phenomenon symptom of literacy. And also that it may push us back to a political situation that resembles one that existed before literacy. So I guess the theme

3:43is sort of slightly going back in time to a time before literacy. I'm not sure I agree or disagree. I think it's a really interesting idea to think about. And your book starts with a really interesting, it's a very short book, by the way, I want to tell listeners. It's about 170 pages on my Kindle. I ironically read it on my phone. We'll talk about that later,

History of reading

4:05maybe. But your book starts off with really a history of reading. And I've never thought about the question of when did reading become common? When did literacy become common? So when did reading take off? It's a really good question. And I think this is something I really wanted to hammer home in the book, which is that I think we're so used to reading, we're so used to literacy, and it's so ubiquitous in our society, and we spend our entire lives reading, that we very easily forget to think about how unusual it is and how recent it is. So the statistics of literacy rates in ancient societies

4:42are fascinating. By some estimates, in ancient Mesopotamia, I think in a Mesopotamian city-state, you might have had 20 people alive who could read and write. The early history of literacy for thousands and thousands of years is incredibly fragile, and it's not at all a cultural phenomenon. It's a kind of esoteric elite code or secret that's passed down among the very, a wealthy scribal elite. And some rulers in some societies would have learned to read, some wouldn't. That's the

5:13situation that prevails. I mean, in ancient Rome, the literacy rate is probably about 10%. It goes up, it's edging up a little bit by the end of the Middle Ages. The obvious big event for literacy is the invention of the printing press, which means that books can proliferate enormously. When people have more access to books, more people can read, books become useful for more things. Driven by Protestantism, a strand of Christianity, which places a huge emphasis on the written word, more

5:43people become literate to read the Bible. And one story of literacy is that these things interrelate and feed each other up until the middle to the end of the 18th century, when there's this phenomenon that's called the reading revolution by some historians, which is this idea that reading has sort of been increasing steadily since the printing press. And you reach this point in the middle to the end of the 18th century, where it suddenly seems as numerous journalists and authors were writing at the time, but absolutely everybody is reading. And there are all these wonderful accounts of people

6:14complaining that you can be walking in the street and the people walking down, bumping into you because they're reading a novel, or you go to the pub and there are just loads of peasants sitting there reading almanacs, or, you know, you go and see what on earth your servant girl is doing and she's in the kitchen reading a newspaper. And, you know, journalists are always prone to exaggeration, but it really did seem to strike people at the time that there was this point in the middle to the end of the 18th century when it seemed like not many people had been reading and then suddenly everybody was reading and books were everywhere and magazines were everywhere and newspapers were everywhere. And if you're going to find an inflection point, that's not mass literacy,

6:47but I think that is the beginning of this modern literate world that we know. And we did an episode with Janine Barkas on inexpensive paperbacks and Jane Austen and how the widespread availability of affordable books launched the popularity of a whole bunch of people, one of whom was Jane Austen. One of the challenges, I think, with this claim

Democracy and literacy

7:12that reading is important, but by the way, you and I share something in common. We love books. We read an enormous, I think, an enormous amount. We spend an enormous amount of our life, I'm older than you, but I've spent a huge part of my life immersed in a book, reading in times where I should have been watching where I was going. So I totally, we're on the same page there. But the question that's hovering in the background of this book and that comes forward in the last part is whether it matters to civilization, whether it matters to our political process. Certainly,

7:49it should, on paper, it should be the case that a literate population should make better decisions, you would think, you would hope. But I'd have to say that if I think back to this revolution, which was a big deal, it wasn't like a 20% increase in people reading books or a 10% increase, it was an enormous increase, again, mainly through the printing press and the fall of the price of owning a book and access to books. Shouldn't the world have looked radically different? And you try to

8:27make the case that it did. But I'm skeptical. So make that case again. It should have been a revolution in how the world turned out. It should have been almost visible in political outcomes. And I'm not sure it is. So give me your best shot.

8:46Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't go so far as to claim that literacy is the only factor that matters in the history of politics. I think it does look pretty radical. For instance, I don't think, I think the important thing to say about literacy, perhaps, is that I think the more literacy spreads to a society, the more of a democratizing effect that has on the society, the more people who can access information and ideas, the more people can become politically involved, and the more people are thinking critically about power. And, you know, it used to be the case, the historians would claim

9:18that the French Revolution was basically a consequence of philosophers like Rousseau publishing their anti-monarchical and, you know, sort of proto-republican ideas in books like The Social Contract. That's probably overstated. But I think if you look at the history of, in Britain, perhaps more you're talking about the end of the 17th century. In Europe, you're talking about the 18th century. You begin the 18th century in which Europe is a society, you know, run to a very large degree by absolutist monarchs who have total power of their populations, surrounded by ministers. Political

9:51affairs are basically palace secrets discussed by a small minority of a political elite. When you get to the end of the 18th century, into the beginning of the 19th century, society is looking a lot more democratic. You have newspapers. The phenomenon of the absolutist monarch has radically waned. In France, you have a republic. In England, the monarch is much less the sole authority in the country than they were at the beginning of the century. You have reports of parliament being written, ordinary people

10:21involved in politics. Public affairs are no longer just debated in state rooms. There's a kind of collective decision made by the public sphere. And I do think politics really looks radically different. I think that sort of end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century, is a great age of democratic revolution and democratic reform. And I think that is directly linked to the spread of literacy through society. Well, it could be there's a sweet spot. It could be it's a U-shaped or an inverted U-shaped function. So, for

10:53example, you mentioned Social Contract. You know, Thomas Paine gets a lot of credit for influencing the American Revolution. We could think of many, many books, Uncle Tom's Cabin, that electrified the public and led to important movements, although it's hard to know whether those claims are true. But it's certainly there's a plausibility to it. The problem I have, and this is, you know, it's the same issue with the internet. The internet has democratized information beyond imagining and beyond what books

11:26could be. And of course, the problem is, is that half of what's on the internet is wrong. You just don't know which half. And the same would be true of books. And you can see this, by the way, I don't want to make, have listeners think this book is, it is a bit of a screed, although I don't think James Merritt is capable of a real screed. It's a meaning, it's a, you're making the case for something is the way I would put it. But the problem, of course, is that there's a lot of bad books. And there's a lot of books that are lies. And they're books that encourage people to do awful things. So I can imagine that in the early days of literacy, when there was limited access to the

12:05publishing books, some of the best books got published, we would hope, and they were very provocative and influential. Eventually, it got so democratized, and I'm not criticizing democracy, I just mean that there was a lot more available to a lot more people. It's pretty mixed bag. I mean, I think you'd have trouble defending the idea that the internet is leading to better political outcomes, because people have more information. They do have more information, just not so reliable.

Why books work

12:36Yeah, no, I agree. And I think, I mean, this book is a bit of a polemic, I guess my argument would not be that... That's a nice word. That's a better word. Sorry. Yeah, polemic, isn't it? It's not a screed. Well, Jeremiah does the thing that it's also been called. I guess, I guess my argument would that would be, not at all saying that books are perfect, and not at all saying that every book has, you know, a benign influence. My argument would be that the way that books structure information and present us with a picture of the world is fundamentally more rational and more coherent

13:07and more intelligent than the picture information that you get, if you are just talking to someone, or if you're watching a video, or a TikTok, or, you know, God forbid, even listen to a podcast. And, I mean, there are sort of various, I mean, there are various arguments made about this. When we write, we're forced to consider our ideas more carefully. You can go back and refine your ideas until you've thought of the best version of what you want to say. Writing allows you to externalize a part of your mind, so you put your idea on the paper, you see how it stands up, you go back and you refine it. Readers, when you're given a written text, you have the ideas of the

13:42author fixed in front of you, so you can submit them to greater critical analysis. You can think about them more, you can reread them more. I think all this stuff is harder to do in conversation or over video. Writers can't bypass logical argument through things like charm, or shouting at somebody you disagree with, or crying to persuade someone that, you know, you're being so horrifically mistreated, you should believe me, even though my argument isn't logical. So the range of illogical appeals is much more restricted in the book than it is in person or on a video.

14:15And I think these things don't make books perfect, but they mean that books tend to make more rational arguments about the world. I guess my other point would be, I think every argument has to stand up to its reductio ad Hitler. You know, someone will inevitably bring the... I was thinking about it, you know, I was thinking about Mein Kampf. Well, exactly. I mean, my argument there would be that, you know, you could say there are two very famous arguments made for Nazism, perhaps, in different forms of media. One is Mein Kampf,

14:52the book that Hitler wrote, the sort of semi-autobiographical, mad, illogical, rambling, deranged book that he wrote. And the other is the Lenny Riefenstahl film, The Triumph of the Will. Yeah. Mein Kampf was found unreadable, even by senior Nazis. You have letters from sort of senior Nazis saying, oh my God, this book is awful. I can't be bothered to read it. And although millions of copies were sold of Mein Kampf, there's good evidence that very few Germans ever managed to get through that book to the end. Because Nazism, when you attempt to present it coherently in a written, in the form of a written text, makes no sense at all. And nobody wants to hear about it. And it's just

15:24hard to fit that terrible idea into the logical argument that's required of a book, I would say. The other argument for Nazism, Lenny Riefenstahl's film, The Triumph of the Will, is, you know, we wouldn't agree with it politically, but it's often regarded as an artistic masterpiece. And it's shown on university film courses. And that's a film that is thought to make a very powerful argument for fascism. And I guess the comparison there would be that a bad idea translates much better into a film than it does into a book. A book requires you to

15:58fit the idea into a logical form. And if you can't explain it logically, it all begins to fall apart. In a film, you have music, you have dramatic imagery, logic and argument are much less important. And therefore, Nazism can be much more effectively expressed over a film than in a book. And I think that goes for all bad ideas. You can sort of launder about a bad idea better through a screen than you come through a book would be my case. Yeah, and I think that's true. And I think a lot of what I loved about your book is its attempt to put into words, which is not easy, but would only really be

16:34effective in a book, to put into words what reading does to your brain and your ideas and your view of yourself and your view of the world. And by the way, just for inside joke here, I refrain from making a reference to Succession, the TV series and Tom's interview of a journalist, but anybody wants to find out about that, Kent, let's move on. I want to talk about the point you just made, though, which is

17:04the limitations of the visual arts, which I happen to love, and you love much of it as well, you confess as much, but it's limitations. And you say something, I think, quite deep here. Quote, a philosophy of Kant is an achievement inseparable from literacy, and understanding this kind of philosophy is probably an achievement inseparable from literacy. To properly get your head around a difficult concept about the ultimate nature of reality or the meaning of life, you have to be able to see the words in front of you. You can reread bits you don't understand, check logical

17:38connections and meditate on important passages until you really take them in. And I think, close quote, and I think the, you know, people will say to me, you know, I have a great idea, but I'm not, it's not worth writing a book because nobody reads anymore. Now, that's an interesting practical question. But the reason you write the book isn't to get the idea out in the world, because the idea is a sentence. You can describe many great books in a sentence or two, a paragraph at most, but you don't

18:11read the book to absorb the paragraph. You read the book to have an intellectual experience hanging out with an intellectual figure, a thoughtful person, and through the process of grappling with that person's ideas, ideally something happens other than that you're informed of something. And I think this distinction between information and knowledge or information and wisdom is, strike surprisingly misunderstood and under, and unappreciated.

18:43I remember, I remember you making this point brilliantly, I thought, the last time I spoke to you. I think you talked about, we were talking about the difference between memorizing a list of, a list of facts about a person and having read, I think we're using the example of Churchill, the example of having read a long biography of Winston Churchill, you know, 700 page book. And when you do that, I think you've gained much more than just a series of facts, series of isolated facts about Churchill. You've gained a sort of holistic, inexpressible understanding of a person with all their contradictions. And it would be something you simply couldn't summarize. And it'd be

19:17something you'd probably be hard pressed to regurgitate into your own words, but you just have in your head. You know, I think reading a long book on a subject gives you this very rich picture of reality that is much more, as you say, it's just much more than, is much more than a list of bullet points. It's composed of emotions and connections that you yourself have made. And I think only books offer that rich intellectual experience. That wasn't my example, but I don't think, but we can check it, but I appreciate it. And I think it makes, it's an example, I think, that's useful, a distinction that's useful to think about between

19:52a biography and a hagiography. A hagiography means treating the subject of the biography as a saint, right? If you, a hagiography of Churchill is probably a little bit misleading. He was a very flawed man. But a savaging of Churchill would also be uninformative. I recently heard about this reaction that John le Carré had when his, a biography of him came out, and he had been promised that it would

20:22be an honest biography, it would be warts and all. He said, well, where was, there was no all. It was just the warts. That's an anti-hagiography. And that's also uninformative. But a serious biographer gives you, like you say, a feeling of having known the person in some way. Yeah. My case would be that although not all books are perfect, the length and detail that a book requires, I think, tends to push an author towards a progressively more complex picture of a

20:52subject. I think, you know, we know that, I think the longer you're writing, the more boring polemic becomes. You know, I'm a newspaper columnist and I know that, you know, get much beyond 900 words and a one-sided argument becomes pretty tedious. You can listen to a podcast in which someone sort of presents their point of view. And I think it's probably another point for literacy that if someone's presenting their point of view in person, it's quite, you know, it's quite compelling. You've got their emotions behind it. You know how much it means to them personally. You can hear their voice. You can watch them getting animated about something. In a book, being ranted at for

21:23400 pages quickly becomes boring. And I think, I think books, books almost create complexity of thought in their authors. I mean, that is far from the only instance of a biographer who I think is set out to be nicer about their subject than they want it to be. I just think the more detail you go into and the book just demands detail, the picture of reality just becomes more and more complex that the, you know, the more you write. And a 500-page biography saying that John le Carre was a wonderful person would just be, you know, it would be unreadable. Apart from perhaps by John le Carre.

21:54Yeah. Well, his complaint was, it was that he's a horrible person, but let's talk about the Republic of

The republic of letters

22:02Letters, which I thought was a fascinating insight into the history of science and, and, and knowledge generally. Um, this is the idea that in the 18th century in particular, and I guess some of the 19th as well, people wrote lots of letters to each other and they were very wise people. Some of these folks, Benjamin Franklin, Leibniz and many, many, many, many, many others, but they basically had a community, a social network. It's, um, an enormous part of what allowed science to advance, uh, at that

22:39time. Talk about that. Yeah, I, I find this fascinating. So the Republic of Letters is, I mean, it was a, is, is this sort of, as you say, this community of writers, thinkers, philosophers, and scientists that grew up in Europe in the 17th century and existed into the 18th century who were writing to each other about their ideas, publishing journals, publishing magazine articles. This, it used to be, it used to, in that sort of old fashioned Whig view of history in which we view history as continually progressing towards greater progress and greater democracy and a better future. This used to be something that people talked about a lot. It went out of fashion a bit. I think

23:12the Republic of Letters was all viewed as a bit romanticized and idealized, but it's been very interestingly revived as an idea recently by, uh, Stephen Pinker talks about it very compellingly in his book, uh, The Better Angels of Our Nature. The economist Joel Mockier probably has done more than anyone to revive the idea that this community of intellectuals writing, writing to each other in Europe was immensely important in driving scientific innovation, economic growth, and ultimately the industrial revolution. I mean, Joel Mockier goes so far as to say it's the single cultural fact that

23:43explains the industrial revolution is this community of idea sharing that grew up in Europe. That sounds extravagant, but I think we need to, you know, the understanding the importance of literacy requires to stick out our heads around the world that existed before literacy. And if you have intelligent people alone in a village and they can't explain their ideas to anyone other than their, their immediate neighbors, scientific innovation is very hard to accumulate. The more literacy spreads, the more people are able to spread their ideas and the more people, and then they can spread, you know, ideas can spread further and

24:15further. More people are drawn to the conversation and you get this really, you get this crescendo effect. More and more people are joining the conversation, more ideas are shared. Joining ideas together becomes easier. People have a pool of ideas to draw on and the thought about science, thought about philosophy, thought about literature just becomes progressively more complex as more and more people are pouring their ideas into this, into this central pool. I guess the other point to make is that, you know, we might think that superficially sounds a little bit like Twitter, everybody tweeting their ideas out in this sort of, in this kind of crazed, crazed chaos. Um, the other point to make

24:49is that this was a literate community and their, their, their conduct and their exchange of information was, was structured in, in ways that we associate with the written word. So it wasn't just people shouting over each other and yelling at each other and whoever shouts loudest gets their idea heard or whoever's got the funniest meme gets their idea heard. Literacy tends to make, literacy as we were saying, forces are more logical and a more rational, evidence-based mode of, mode of, mode of expression. So you have this huge community of people who are communicating via writing, which tends to

25:23demand standards of evidence, standards of logical argument, uh, written text, promote, promote analysis and readers. And I don't think it's an exaggeration to say this huge community of, of ideas pouring together through the medium of writing was, as Joel Mocchia says, a major driver in, in, in science, scientific and, um, technological innovation in, in Europe. Yeah. I'd say two things about it. One, it was a conversation among a whole group of people,

25:53but it was done in writing. So there was the thoughtfulness that you talked about earlier, which is not unimportant. It would be tempting to say that the other important thing about it is that it was private. You weren't waving it about, uh, the way social media is to gain attention or so on. But I think that would probably be wrong. Uh, I think in the 17th and 18th and, and, and 19th century, great men, and they're usually men, there weren't so many women in this Republic, uh, knew that their letters would, might stand the test of time and be read by others.

26:28So there was probably some posing and, uh, preening and, um, uh, taking down of people that was, uh, very modern in, in these correspondences. I think the difference is who was doing it. And this kind of goes against your point in a certain way. It was a very elite group who were, who were in this community. It wasn't as democratized as social media. Uh, you know, when you, when you're interacting with Adam Smith, David Hume and, and, and Newton, uh, the standards

27:00are high. And so I think what the, I think what's missing from our current spread of information that was there is norms. I think the norms that these folks labored under were probably, um, you know, they were self-imposed. They were obedience to the unenforceable in Lord Bolton's phrase. And, um, that kept this, um, community in the direction of producing knowledge and not just rage or, you know, silliness. Yeah, I, I think, I think that's, I think that's definitely true. I,

27:34I mean, I think compared, compared to the social world that had existed before literacy, it was a Republic of letters. It was called the Republic of letters, not the kingdom of letters or the dictatorship of letters for a reason. Fair enough. One of, one of, one of, one of, one of the points that people like Joel Mockier would make is that if you are a scientist and you walk into a room of scientists in a London scientific institution, or you walk into a court where scientific ideas are being discussed in the court and you're a bit shabby and you come from a slightly lower class and you have a poor accent and you have a brilliant idea about thermodynamics or hydraulics, you're very

28:10likely to be looked down upon. And your ideas are very likely to be, the seriousness of which your ideas are accepted is very likely to be influenced by your personal appearance and your social background. When you write those ideas down in, in, in, in, in a letter or you print them in a journal, the test of your ideas is much more, are they good ideas than are they being purveyed by somebody who is wearing a fabulous jacket and a wonderful wig as people like people to, as people wanted in the, in the, in the 17th century. So there's definitely a democratizing effect there. I guess, I guess, I mean, I, maybe I am a little bit of elite, maybe I'm a little bit of an elitist. Now I guess to, to your point about the kind of the norms and the standard of

28:45conversation demanded by that community, writing, unfortunately, expressing, expressing ideas coherently in language is actually, I think, quite a minority skill. I think a lot of people, we live in a world where everybody does it and we find it easy to forget that not, not, not everybody is capable of it. And there is perhaps a little bit of an element of benign elitism that if the, if the standard of, standard of admission to this community is, can you express your ideas logically in writing? There's already a bar that probably restricts you to talented, thoughtful, intellectual people. And maybe there's sort of, it's democratizing and

29:24a creator of elitism in a way that is perhaps quite a benign combination of those qualities. That might sound a bit snobbish, but I imagine that probably was, you know, you couldn't turn up into the Republic of Letters, you know, like a sort of a troll on Elon Musk's ex and just start screaming at everybody incoherently because no one would take you seriously. You could, you would just be, well, you just couldn't communicate. You wouldn't be able to, those ideas wouldn't work in writing or you wouldn't be able to write them. And therefore, therefore you just wouldn't participate in it. So I think there probably is a little bit of benign, literacy probably does, you know, there's an element of benign elitism to the restrictions of

29:56literacy. I want to talk about a purely aesthetic concern and you, I think you talk about it

Aesthetic concerns and prose

30:04implicitly. I don't remember if it's explicit, but, you know, and I think about, well, the great works of literature that some of which I have read. And as you point out a number of times, the sentence structure in St. Henry James is very off-putting. I personally think that's for the best, but that's just a difference. D'Agustin was done as dispute tandem. But certainly much of the great writing of the past is more complicated than, than what is expected now. Adam Smith's a

30:38good example. You can read Adam Smith with, with profit, either his, the Wealth of Nations or the Theory of Moral Sentiments. It's accessible, but it's a little challenging compared to a modern writing that you'd find on Substack, say. And what will the world be like if the greatest works of the past are not accessible to people, not because they're illiterate, but they don't have the patience, they don't have the practice, they don't have the Sitzfleisch, the patience to actually work

31:08through them. And that just makes me sad. I don't think, I don't think the world's a poorer place in any practical way if, say, Shakespeare is inaccessible to modern readers, which it in many ways is, of course, for all kinds of reasons. But it just, there's something, there's something terribly long, some, a real tragedy there for me, aesthetically, that great works are not accessible. You know, to the flip side, many of the movies that I, that my parents loved, and they wanted me to love,

31:40I couldn't stand because they were so slow from their time. And similarly, I discovered that my children could barely sit through High Noon, which I consider one of the greatest movies of all time. And I suspect I'd have trouble sitting through it these days. So, many, many things are lost for all kinds of reasons as culture and as modernity, as the world moves on. But does this aspect of our current world sadden you? Yeah, it does immensely. And, you know, if we, I agree, if we all stopped reading Shakespeare,

32:12that's not the thing that will make our politics fall apart or make scientific innovation come to an end. But I think we're alive in this fascinating, rich, diverse, and interesting world. And I think if you're a thoughtful, intelligent human being, the thing that you want to do with your time on Earth, one of them is probably to understand it as well as you can, understand as much of what's going on here as you can, get your head around as much of the diversity as the human experience you can, inhabit as many different points of view as you can. I mean, this, to me, would seem almost one of the great purposes of life, to understand this world. We've been dropped on this bizarre planet

32:45out of nowhere. We want to see as much of it as possible. We want to understand as much of it as possible. It's true that some very important things can be expressed simply, you know, in slogans. And I could tell you something important in a, you know, 16-second TikTok video. But there's a whole range of human experience and a whole range of information about the world and understanding about the world that can only be accessed in books, that can only be accessed through the increased complexity of books. The richness of the world is only available in books. I mean, if you're

33:18Walter Ong, you would go so far as to say there are kinds of human knowledge that have basically been created by literacy. Things like history and philosophy, as we know them today, only exist in books. If you want to sort of, if you want the entire rich history of Prussia, say, the only option is to read a book. If you want all the detail, if you want all the stories, if you want all the philosophical thoughts all woven through about what this state of Prussia means, to pick a slightly random example, all you can do is read a book. That is a kind of information and knowledge about the world that you can't access in any other way. You couldn't, you know, there's no podcast that can

33:50explain 600 pages worth of the history of Prussia to you. And it just seems terribly sad to me because the book, in inventing writing, in inventing literacy, in inventing the book, we have expanded what we can understand about the world. If you're literate and if you're reading long books, there is a whole sphere of understanding about the world that is richer, more subtle, more detailed. And if you don't read it, you're just losing that. And that seems to me to be, you know, to be a terrible shame. And I'm not saying that literacy is the only way that we can understand the world. You can go traveling or, you know, you have relationships and you have friends and you see the world through those things. But we have this

34:25amazing other sphere of experience, which happens in books, and it would seem terribly sad to lose that. And our experience of the world, I think, really would just be impoverished without it. Well, I think you could learn a lot about Prussia from a really good podcast series. It might take 20 or 30 episodes. But of course, that podcast couldn't be created without reading a bunch of books about Prussia. So it would be an illusion. I think the deeper point which you make, which I think is quite profound and moving, is the following. You say, quote, I believe there was a kind of truth

34:59about life, which is only accessible through prose fiction, with its capacity to show us the inside of other minds. This recreation of human consciousness through words is one of our species' most remarkable inventions. The strange, empathetic hallucination induced by the novel, the feeling we have that we might know what it is to be Elizabeth Bennett or David Copperfield is perhaps the closest we can ever come to the experience of being a person other than ourselves. End of quote. I mean, that's a really beautiful idea I've never

35:33thought about. I mean, it's obvious you can learn something from fiction. It's not, even though it's not true. There's truth in it. But I think the deeper point is that this idea that you can, through the wisdom of an author, access what it means to be a human being, that is not a small thing.

35:56No, I mean, I quite agree. And I think other art forms can show us bits of this. A film can show you something about life. But I think there is something special about the way that when you read a novel, one of the things people say about reading is that it's an active and not a passive process. You are at work when you read a novel. Your imagination is at work. You are creating images in your mind based on the words of the page. And this is why reading is so immersive. And we've all had the feeling of reading books and feeling like we've lived another life and seen the world through different eyes.

36:28And I think you only get that through fiction. Films can't give it to you because you see the exterior world. A film can't give you direct access to the mind of somebody else. But writing is the medium we use to set out what's in our minds. It's the medium that we communicate with mind to mind. And through extended, concentrated reading of a novel, you do see the world through other eyes. And I think that is something special and unique to novels. And it doesn't exist in, for instance, oral poetry. Oral poetry is much less interested in the subtleties of human consciousness and

37:03the fine differences of human experience. It's a way of, yeah, this way of inhabiting other minds, I think only comes to us, only comes to us in prose fiction. And that to me is just an extraordinary thing. And again, something else that we would not want to lose. I don't completely agree with that. I think, I think a great film through dialogue, not through action, but through dialogue can give us insight in the same, similar way to a book. It's just that it's shorter. And when people complain that, oh, the movie wasn't as good as the book, there are many

37:36things about the movie that are often much better than the book. But what always, almost always fails is the inner workings of the mind that is not merely communicated by dialogue. You can't have a character say, gee, I'm deceiving myself. But you can let the reader, the viewer start to suspect as much. So I just think it's just limited in its expanse. And I guess, to be fair to the visual medium, a really great, truly great series on television that stretches, and there aren't very many, but

38:13there are some, that stretches for over a number of seasons. And so for hours and hours, I think approximates the understanding of the human condition the way a great work of fiction does. I'm thinking of series like Stiesel, or The Americans, Crash Landing on You, while we're on it. These are lengthy looks into human beings. Now, you don't get the speculation that the author has

38:44can provide, but I think a great dialogue writer can get close. I do take your point, and there are plenty of, I agree, there are plenty of long TV series I like. I guess for me, I still think, you know, there's no shade on film or TV, you know, there are many masterpieces in those mediums. It's just an argument for, there really is something special about novels. Even a great film or TV show is constantly confronting you with the difference between you, the watcher, and the person on screen. You're continually confronted with difference

39:17because you can see it. And the experience that I have reading sometimes is that where I end and the book begins is almost impossible to say. You feel like you're incorporating this experience into yourself. And it's not only that, you know, a book can tell you about thoughts and an inner monologue in a way that often or almost always looks extremely clunky on film. It's that the active process of reading means that we incorporate a book, I think, into our lives and into our minds in a way that we just can't in a film. And I don't know about you, but I just feel like there are

39:48many films I love. No film feels to me quite part of my life in a way that, say, reading Anna Karenina has. You know, that almost my experience of life and my experience of reading Anna Karenina, there's a kind of blurring at the edges that I never have quite found watching a film. Or do you

Novels versus film

40:05think I'm just being overly romantic? Well, I wouldn't have picked Anna Karenina, but that's just me. I think it's a fair point in the following. This is the way I would say it. And tell me if you agree. When I watch, I just happened to rewatch Bridge of Spies, which I think is a masterpiece and underappreciated, really superb, superb film. And I'll watch, you know, you see Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance having a conversation of a lot in the background that we're aware of because we know

40:37a lot about them already. But I'm watching a conversation and it's true. I can have the suspension of disbelief and it feels real. This happens to be an historical incident, but we don't have these actual dialogues between these two people. One was an accused spy and one was a lawyer, American lawyer. But there's something different about reading a dialogue. I just finished the Radetzky March last night, which is a pretty obscure novel. It's by Joseph Roth. And there's

41:08many, many extraordinary scenes in that book. Not much happens. I don't think it would make a very good movie. There's very little action. Most of the effect of that book is to make you feel like you're living in 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire of 1914 before the First World War. That's quite an achievement. And in that sense, it does become part of your life because it's not like, oh, I'm listening

41:38to these people talk. I feel like I'm in the room with a great author. And that's, I don't feel like I'm in the room with a great movie. I'm watching through a one-way glass. It might feel vivid and real to me, but not the way a book does because of that process, I think, of having to use your imagination. I entirely agree. And I think it's a good example because I think if you were to film the Radetzky March, I mean, as you said, it'd be pretty slow. But watching, you'd be continually confronted with the alienness of the world. The costumes people were wearing, the way they walked,

42:13the houses they were living in, we would be continually confronted with the alienness of that human experience. The visual world confronts us with difference. I can see that I'm a different person to you. When you read a book, the extraneous stuff and the stuff that separates us as human beings, I mean, this is one of the points that's made about the importance of literacy as a force for human rights is that when we look at each other face-to-face, we see our difference. When we experience someone else's thoughts and feelings through a book, the thing that strikes us is our similarity. So, you know, an example that's often made is slave memoirs. It was quite common

42:50for abolitionists to ask freed slaves to write their memoirs for publication in the late 18th and 19th centuries. And the idea was that in a memoir, if you're a white reader and you're, you know, very racist and prejudiced, as most people were at that time, to speak face-to-face to a slave would just confront you with the human difference. And you might find it hard to get over that, that this person had different gut-coloured skin to you. To experience someone's thoughts and feelings through a book, the thing that's to the fore is the similarity, not the difference. And I think that allows us to access other minds. And I think it's the exact, and that's why these memoirs are

43:24an important force for the abolitionist movement, because it allows people to see the human similarity between themselves and people who are different to them. And it's why reading the Rudetsky March is a more powerful experience to both of us than to watching the film, because a book shows us human similarity and allows us into a world through that similarity in a way that the visual world is just always confronting us with difference, I think. So I'm going to give another example from that book, from the Rudetsky March, because, you know, I don't know if this is true, but

43:54there's a lot of birds in that book. The characters are listening to birds a lot, at dawn, at dusk, at night. And if you had, there'll be a scene where a character's walking along a dusty road. And that kind of page, and it could go on for a page or more, instead of saying so-and-so walk to, from here to there, which is a, which is, you can do, and sometimes that's what you do. But to give you all the things that are happening in the world around the characters,

44:27they're walking, the birds and the sky and the rain and the mud and the dust, gives you a chance as a reader to immerse yourself in that. And we talked about this when we talked about Tolstoy's Master and Man. You get cold reading that story. It's, you have to inhabit the characters. And of course, there are modern films that do that. You know, there'll be a minute long, two minutes, it's eternal in a film where nothing happens. And a character's walking along and you hear the different birds. And in the case of the book, you can mention what's on the character's mind. You know

45:01what happened before, you know what they're thinking about, you're forced to think about what they're thinking about. And that's that process you're talking about of getting into the other person's head. Very hard to do that in a movie. Maybe it's just our different expectations. I tend not to like movies that where nothing happens and I can tolerate a book where nothing happens. And I think it's partly due to the difference between the media. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's actually, I think that's a, I think that's a brilliant point and put very well that in a way there's almost something slightly less truthful about the way that a film depicts the world for us

45:32because our entire experience of the world is not, we don't experience the world over there on a screen happening to other people. Our entire experience of the world is colored by our internal states and our internal emotions, our internal feelings. And, you know, my experience, my experience of the world at the moment is a sort of vibrating haze of anxiety as I, as I wait for my book to come out and everything that happens to me is colored by this, by this, by this nervousness. And this is a way of depicting the world that comes very, I, you know, that comes very easily to an author who can depict our attention and,

46:02you know, you're describing my state of mind as an author now. I could imagine how you describe the world colored by this sort of slightly, everything is slightly shimmering at the edges with this sort of nervousness. It's very hard to show us that in a film in the same way because a film director can't direct our attention. How do you color Birdsong with anxiety or emotion or rage when you're filming it? You're, you're in this sort of, in a way, a position that's in some ways more objective, but in some ways less truthful. As you say, if you're, you know, if you have a character in the Rudetsky March walking down the road in the film and they hear Birdsong,

46:35you can't explain the meaning of the internal meaning of that Birdsong to a film audience. I mean, and you're so right. And that's even, that's only just a fraction of the richness of the, and truthfulness of a novel's depiction of the world, I think. Yeah. Um, maybe we'll do a, um, a book club on the Rudetsky March. I, I'm not sure it'll be very popular. Uh, but, uh, it's, it's quite an unusual novel. The writing is quite extraordinary. Uh, so I encourage people to take a look at it. It, it starts very slowly. It doesn't get much faster, by the

47:07way, because I'll just say one other thing about it, then we'll, we'll move on. It's trying to capture something that's even harder to capture on screen than what we've been talking about so far, which is the slow, steady sense that the world is unmoored, that all the things that you believed in and thought were true are fading away. And in this case, it has to do with the norms and authority of the emperor

47:38and, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. And you can't show that in a film directly or even indirectly as, as Roth does in this book. It's, um, the last thing I'll say is that, you know, in a way, the main character is the Austro-Hungarian empire, not, uh, Carl Joseph Trotta. I think that's his name. Anyway, uh, I want to go to a different insight of yours that I really thought was interesting.

Oral storytelling online

48:04Um, I'm sure you and I are alarmed at the state of discourse on, on social media in many ways. And you say the following, uh, it's not that Tucker Carlson is the next Homer, God forbid, but sometimes it seems that post-literate commentators like him behave less like print era public intellectuals explaining and analyzing the world and more like oral storytellers weaving extraordinary memorable stories for their enraptured audiences, close quote. And I think

48:37that's an incredibly deep insight because we don't have to go into the names. I just mentioned Tucker Carlson because you have to use that as an example, but there's so many people on the internet who say so many things that are inane, indefensible, not true, uh, absurd. And you, and there's a tendency to treat them as if they were authors and say, well, that doesn't make any sense or that's not logical or what's the evidence for that. And your point, which I think is, uh, frighteningly

49:07appropriate is that I don't think they see them. You're saying, you don't, they don't see themselves in that role. Their role is to entertain their audience. Truth is not what's so important. What's important is memorable stories for enraptured audiences. And, um, I think that's a really brilliant way of describing, uh, what's wrong with our current level of, of discourse on, on social media. And, you know, people say these ridiculous things. And of course, people on the other side

49:39raise, rear up and, oh, it's not true. What is the evidence for that? And, and, and they don't say, oh my gosh, I guess I made a lot of that up. I shouldn't have said that. They never say that because that's not the business they're in. They don't care. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's, we're so easily at risk of forgetting that things like presenting an argument logically, supplying evidence for it, and working it out to its rational conclusions, these things I think are

50:10not actually natural to human communication. A lot of the points that I made about, um, communication in, in preliterate societies by Marshall, people like Marshall and Walter Ong is that things that we value in the exchange of information are created, are created, are created, are created by literacy. So, um, you know, in this, in this, in this, in this preliterate, in this preliterate world, if you're trying to, if you're trying to talk to somebody and persuade somebody of something, it makes much more sense to entertain them, to move them, to charm them,

50:42to get really angry and to bring someone along with your, with your rage, these things all make complete sense in person-to-person communication. And if I were to just dryly talk to you like a book, you would find that a weird and inhuman way for me to, an inhuman way for me to speak to you. Books impose these impersonal and, you know, not completely rational, but I think more rational forms of communication. And I just think we completely miss how our entire public discourse

51:12and the things that we value in it are the product of literacy. They're not at all inevitable to human communication. And, you know, one of the fascinating things about these books, this great Walter Ong book, O'Reality and Literacy, is the similarities that he, that jump out at you as a, as a modern reader between oral discourse and, and, and, and, and internet discourse. So, so for instance, Walter Ong would say that some of the characteristics of discourse and society about writing are, um, it's more emotional. You live in a much more emotionally heightened world because everything is face to face. You, you have people's voices, you have their personalities. It's this emotionally heightened

51:47world in which logic takes a back seat. And to come from an oral culture to a, to a literate culture is in some ways, Marshall McLuhan says this kind of uncanny experience. If you come from the, the warmth and emotional dynamism and the anger and the squabbling and the, and the face-to-face nature of communication in a, in a traditional village, the world of literacy in which we're not communicating face-to-face or, you know, we weren't before TV and the internet and every piece of information arrived to you in the form of a, you know, a completely impersonal humans reduced to,

52:21to just pages of text that can in some ways seem quite a chilly and impersonal environment. And it's unnatural. It's a natural to communicate through text, but the chilly impersonality of text, I think to me, this is perhaps the crucial point about what print does for our public discourse is that it just cools it. It's very fun to hear someone becoming angry in person. It's very, you know, we love watching, you know, we love watching arguments and we love watching debates and we love watching rhetorical showmanship and people flinging insults at one another. That's really boring to read. That's really boring to read in a book eventually. You know,

52:52as I say, with an opinion column, 900 words of, what 900 words of invective might be interesting. If I just ranted at you for the length of a book, it would be really, it'd be really tedious and therefore we tend not to do it. And yeah, as I say, we just mustn't forget how much of what we value in our public discourse and have valued is almost unnatural to human communication. And what we valued is this strange, impersonal thing that writing gave us and that we're now losing. So I want to digress for a second, or what seems like a digression, it's not, but there's an extraordinary podcast called The History of Rock and Roll and 500 Songs.

53:31It's produced by Andrew Hickey. If you don't know it or haven't heard it and you care about music from popular music anytime from the fifties on, you will find it extraordinary. And he says something in there that blew me away that you also say, which is, uh, he's, there's a four part series that goes for seven or eight hours, I think on sympathy for the devil, the Rolling Stones song. And he says, well, you know, Mick Jagger was reading this book called The Master Margarita by Bulgakov. And if you've

54:02read The Master Margarita, it opens with, uh, two Russian intellectuals poo-pooing the existence of God and making fun of belief and faith. And suddenly this suave gentleman shows up and, um,

54:16we come to realize, they think he's crazy at first, but we come to realize it's Satan. It's, it's the devil. And, uh, he knows some things they don't know and it, they have a comeuppance. It's, it's a brilliant opening of the book, but that's the opening of Sympathy for the Devil, where Jagger sings, please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of wealth and taste. And he took that right out of The Master Margarita, which is a pretty obscure novel. Um, and you argue that

54:46Paul McCartney and many other great songwriters were great readers. They were influenced by, and Andrew Hickey in his podcast has many, many examples. And some of the great lyrics of a very different medium, popular music, uh, we're influenced by reading books. And if we lose

Reading and popular music

55:05that, it's going to, our songs will be less interesting. That's, that's, that's an annoyingly good example that I wish I'd managed to, um, to put in my book. Maybe, maybe this later edition, we can include it. Um, yeah, I, yeah, I mean, I guess this is another point that I make of what literacy gives us as, as, as, as a culture, which is, I think all the things that we've spoken about, the richness of books, the detail of books, the complexity of books, I think informs the whole society. And it's not all, you know, it's not always immediately apparent that it's

55:37doing that, but it's often there providing, I think, a level of richness and nuance to all other kinds of cultural media that we might not think of. I mean, I gave the example of pop music specifically because it's so unlikely, you know, and I mean, it can be taken too far. As I say in the book, I'm not suggesting that every, if you want to be in a boy band, take your pile of penguin classics down to the British library and get, and get reading. But I think it is very striking that so many great popular musicians and so many great popular songs are informed by, are informed by books and informed by reading. Bob Dylan, the obvious example of a great reader,

56:10Paul McCartney, the obvious example of a great reader. And I just think any art that is rooted in the richness and complexity of reading will tend to get, will tend to give you a richer, deeper, deeper, more complex understanding of the world. And I use the example of pop music, as I say, because no one really thinks of pop music as a, as a particularly literate genre. And those musicians are probably also singing for a more literate population that was more accustomed to thinking, you know, more accustomed to enduring complex thoughts and complex ideas and complex

56:40feelings. And, you know, this is amazing research. I'm not going to be able to remember the, the, the figure off the top of my head that finds that, uh, in the last 20 years, pop songs have become less lyrically complex and less melodically complex. And that's not, you know, that's not entirely just because everybody has stopped reading books. It's also because the environment that we are entering is one that favors simplicity, immediacy, isn't very good at following along and unfailing idea. You know, nowadays, if you want a pop song to go viral on, uh, on TikTok, it has to grab you

57:13within three or four seconds. And that's how a lot of music spreads nowadays. And I think with the death of literacy and the move into this more visual smartphone based culture, we're moving from a culture that was much more able to handle nuance and complexity because it was rooted in, in, in literacy to one that is increasingly hostile to those things. And I, you know, as you use that point about the human experience of the world, if you're listening, you know, there's a kind of a Bob, a long Bob Dylan song can paint you a picture of reality and its complexity and the complexity of

57:46human beings that it's very hard to do. If you, you know, you have a sort of two minute long, much less complex, much less risk, rich song. There's room for both, but I just fear that we're losing, we're losing more complex cultural forms. Yeah. Early one Sunday morning, I was laying in bed, wondering if she changed all of her hair was still red, um, to pick one of the long. And then you, on Tik Tok, you swipe past the, you're like, what's going on about? On the next thing, I didn't catch a tune. You know, harmonica solos. I don't think they would last on, um, on Tik Tok.

58:17Um, so one of the other parts of the book we didn't talk about, which I very much appreciated,

Television and scrolling

58:23was the realization that this is an, not such a new phenomenon that we're focused on the smartphone, but television really was the beginning of the screen, the visual, um, attractiveness of, of time sync for us. And that the remote control is, was the original scrolling. And I think that's very true. Anybody who's been in a hotel room late at night, as I have in the old days when there were, you didn't have a cell phone and there were 200 channels on the TV, you just found yourself

58:53sometimes, I was going to say often, mindlessly scrolling across channels. I remember when I would complain about television and I have a scene in one of my books where I really take it, uh, go off against TV, which is funny now because it's so unimportant relative to the cell phone. I remember telling my dad I was worried about the attractiveness of television. He said, well, let's see how it holds up. You know, books have been around for centuries and TV is 20 years old as a mass medium, maybe,

59:24maybe, but I think he should have been more worried. And I think, I think there's an inevitability about this trend that you're, um, you're Sisyphus here. You're, you're, you're, you're doing something that is unlikely to succeed. We're, we're seeing a, a much longer trend that it's going to be reading is either going to be something, you know, the, the people who can read say Henry James or, or

59:56middle March by George Eliot, or who choose to forget whether they can or they can't people choose to is going to be probably a pretty small number. Um, I don't know what that means for the future of the world. There is something incredibly sad about it to me, but I think that's a reality that's going to be unlikely to change. You can make all the arguments you want. Oh, this is, you know, going to be bad for democracy or, or reading's really fun. You should try it. It's a tough sell in our world. And I worry that that sell is just going to get even more and more

1:00:27difficult. So I hate to be pessimistic and I hate to end on such a pessimistic note. So, um, you got anything positive for me?

Cognitive fitness

1:00:35No, well, you've just, you've just, I, I am by, by profession, something of a pessimist and by, unfortunately by inclination and temperament. I think the point about TV is important because it reminds us that this is a long, it's not just, you know, I, I'm sure it is perhaps slightly this, but I hope it's, it's more than just newspaper columnist comes along and yells about this very recent thing that's appeared in the world that's unsettling everybody. And actually, you know, we'll look back and think, oh, that was just a flash in the pan. TikTok existed for 15 years and never moved, moved on to something else. We're living perhaps towards the end of a very long

1:01:07revolution in our culture that, as you say, begins with television, begins in the fifties and sixties. The first statistics for serious declines in reading come from the, come from the fifties and sixties. And we are moving into a world in which these things are much less important. And that's a very long story. And I think the length of the story should remind us of its seriousness. It's been happening for, it's been happening for such a long time that this is not just something that, oh, we can all switch TikTok, you know, we'll just switch TikTok off. Oh, we'll just get a handle on smartphones and then it'll be all right. This is a very long-term

1:01:39trend in our culture. And I think that perhaps should make us a bit less hopeful. This is not a recent thing. This is like a long direction that, you know, very soon it'll be a hundred years old. I guess the argument I try and make at the end of my book, and you know, your publisher always says, what about your solutions? What's your solution to this problem? And you kind of think, oh my God, I'm a horrible pessimist. What on earth have I got to say that's positive? The analogy that's often made, and I'm far from the first person to make that analogy, is between the rise of junk food and the culture of exercise in the sixties and seventies. So McDonald's comes along, the world is flooded with

1:02:14burgers and chicken nuggets and chips. And, you know, a lot of people get much fatter. A smaller proportion, a smaller proportion of the population decide that they want to, they've understood that, you know, being healthy and skinny is no longer something that you can just do by absorbing the ambient nutritional environment around you. It's going to require effort. And these people begin to concentrate on working hard at their fitness. They start running marathons. They start going to the gym. They start lifting weights. And there was, people realized that physical fitness will require,

1:02:50will require a conscious effort. And I kind of wonder, and I think probably this is already happening, is that in our, in our current sort of information environment, people will begin to decide that cognitive fitness will require a conscious effort. And that if we want to be cognitively fit, we can't just sit around absorbing the kind of informational junk food that's flying in, flying in at us from, from every angle. We'll have to sit down and really concentrate on reading difficult books, exercising our brains. And I think if there is for a future, if there is a

1:03:23future for reading, it will be something that feels a lot more to use a kind of horrible phrase intentional and a lot less just like, I'm sitting at home or in the airport, I'm bored. What will I do? Oh, I'll read a book because that's the most obvious entertainment available to me. I think be much more, I need, I want to read a book because I think this is a sort of experience that I value and that the world is not giving to me naturally. Therefore, I'm going to make sure that every evening I sit down for half an hour and an hour to really try to really make sure, make sure that I read. I mean, in some ways that's the kind of future, you know, I think that probably is the

1:03:55future of reading. In some ways it's good that I think probably if it has a, that is, it does have some kind of future. I guess it does still make me sad that it, you know, has to be, I think it's slightly more artificial and it will be less part of our inevitable lives in the way that it once was. I guess today has been James Marriott. His book is The New Dark Ages. James, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Thanks very much for having me. This is EconTalk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more EconTalk, go to

1:04:29econtalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for EconTalk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.

1:04:48EconTalk.