Will the end of reading be the end of democracy too?

The New Dark Ages, by James Marriott

The Death of Print and the End of Democracy?

No-one can doubt that books have lost their special place in our culture. It is simply not possible for an author to matter any more in the way that someone like Charles Dickens once mattered. Those were the days when Carlyle became a celebrity for giving a series of lectures and writing a history of the French Revolution and George Eliot’s novels made her the guiding star for a generation of young women. Those days are dead and gone. Radio killed them. Then the movies. Then telephones. Then pop music. Then television. Then video games. Then the internet. Then smartphones. Then social media. Then AI.

To those people who find all this to be a threat to the future of civilization, James Marriott has become the leading writer. His Substack essay “The dawn of the post-literate society” is one of the most widely read, liked, shared, re-stacked, referenced, and commented on pieces of writing of the last few years. His basic thesis is simple. Smartphones are destroying print culture in a way that television never quite managed, and without print culture we are living through a “disenlightenment” which threatens liberal democracy. Print and democracy have always gone together and by killing one we might be about to kill the other. James even worries we are going to live in a new “techno feudalism”.

James now has a book called The New Dark Ages which makes this argument in more detail. It is splendidly written for its audience and gives them everything they want. It is well-structured, well-researched, and nicely composed—no less than we would expect. Some reviews are praising The New Dark Ages in exactly those terms. For writers like Ian Leslie and Ed West and Matthew D’Ancona this is an important and timely book. (Leslie and West were early readers and Leslie is quoted in the book.) And James is always fresh. There are familiar arguments taken from Neil Postman and Walter Ong, but James has done the reading. There are anecdotes about Samuel Johnson which suggest James did in fact read Boswell, rather than quote the same old stories we are so used to seeing in most writing of this nature. He has read a lot more history since he first developed this thesis and it is all the stronger for it. This is a passion project and care is evident on every page. He is telling the story many people believe and wish to hear. I expect this book to sell a lot of copies and for a certain group of people to be galvanized by it.

I like James. He is a splendidly literary fellow. I share his worries about the decline of reading and print culture. After all, I spent my life writing about books and encouraging other people to read the best that has been thought and said. What I most like about James is his willingness for a discussion. We’ve done events and podcasts together and he really lives up to the values he espouses. He likes nothing better than to debate the issues, not just recite the worries. So I’m going to try and give a counter-argument: not one that says “there is no problem”, but rather one that says the exact nature of the problem isn’t quite clear, and that the best way to think about the reading crisis might be in less pessimistic terms.

Nostalgia and Monocausal Explanations

One reason The New Dark Ages will be persuasive is because of what it leaves out. Various questions haunt the book.

For instance: Why is there no reading crisis in Spain? Jeffrey Lawrence reported recently:

A study conducted by the Federación de Gremios de Editores de España earlier this year, however, paints a starkly different picture of readership in Spain. According to the study, the percentage of the overall Spanish population that reads for pleasure has increased every year since 2017, reaching 66% in 2025, the highest level ever recorded.

It cannot surely be the case that smartphones simply haven’t reached Spain yet? Are they somehow more immune to TikTok than Anglophone countries? This is from the report Jeffrey quotes:

The data shatters the myth that young people don’t read. 75.3% of the population between 14 and 24 years old reads books in their free time.

You will not find this, or anything like it, discussed in The New Dark Ages. But understanding why this difference exists would surely be essential to any persuasive theory of the reading decline and its implications?

Another question that matters a great deal is why the GDP growth rate is so persistently high in the USA, a country that constantly frets about the decline of reading? Surely, if the effects of smartphones and declining literacy are so bad, that ought to show up somehow in the economic data? A major economy like the USA simply would not be self-sustaining over the medium term if the “disenlightenment” was real. We cannot explain this with the various cynical theories like “bullshit jobs” and the like. At some point, all the productivity of lawyers, financiers, accountants, management consultants, economists, and so on would start to suffer from the effects of the smartphone.

Most significant to me is the question of why the educational picture is so varied. The latest PISA results show a general decline globally, as James notes. James would surely quote this finding from the latest results as supporting his thesis: “The instances of “hasty reading” — in which students read quickly but inaccurately — nearly doubled to 9% between 2018 and 2025.” But the overall picture is more complicated. For instance, it is true that students who do not use AI score much better than those who do, when the AI is used to summarise texts or conduct research. But this is not an inevitable problem. The OECD reports that:

Students who regularly use AI for general purposes, and have learning opportunities at school to develop AI literacy skills, tend to have slightly higher scores in science.

And against the global trend, in England there has been an improvement in science and stability in reading and maths. England has all the problems of phones and lack of proper reading and so on that other countries have. Yet, somehow reading scores, maths, and science attainment are all just as good as they were or better. It seems that an educational system can survive these external pressures. Overall results declined in Scotland and Wales. England has been resilient. But why? It is true, as James says, that schools are restricting the use of phones. That would not be able to explain the most recent PISA data. And where phones are banned, educational attainment only rises minimally. England clearly has a better educational system than Scotland and Wales. I do not say education is as good as it ought to be, merely that these results do not fit with James’s general claims.

There is also a sense in which the old education system simply has to change to meet the new demands of the new world. What we are seeing might be partly explained by the first serious wave of disruption to education for a very long time. PISA measured “computational problem-solving skills” this year, which examines students’ “capacity to use modelling and programming tools, conduct experiments and build, design and develop digital products.” Scores in these skills were generally high, especially in Asia. James may be right that technology is replacing print, but wrong that it is an inevitable problem.

Another example of this change is with different types of reading. A high school teacher recently wrote to Tyler Cowen and observed that while his students are worse at linear reading (i.e. students don’t read books front-to-back anymore) they are much better at other sorts of reading.

…the ability of students to find patterns or links between texts has increased substantially. Just this past semester I taught a theology class to 9th-10th graders and wanted to introduce them to typological and patterned thinking. I was shocked how fast they picked this up, and many very quickly found plenty of connections in the text that I did not see.

Didn’t Montaigne, on James’s own account by the way, write quite like this? Johnson was certainly this sort of reader at times, though by no means exclusively. I think this sort of reading was more prevalent before smartphones than the current debate will allow for, not that we could ever know. But again, while this sort of reading looks alien to some people, it may be perfectly adequate for the job of keeping liberal democracy alive, in whatever form that takes in the future.

I am not denying that education needs higher standards, or that there are risks to the way young people are growing up today, but the picture seems to me more complicated than James’s thesis allows for. Of course, people love simple, monocausal explanations. We love a bad guy, someone else to blame for our problems. And it seems to me that The New Dark Ages is largely written for people who struggle with smartphone addiction and wish to read more. That is the personal story James tells, very convincingly and absorbingly. There is a general tendency to admire the Wendell Berry, Against the Machine, dumb-phone view of life, which is a new pastoral image, a utopia in which the problems of being a human are attached to the idols of progress. If only it were so simple!

It is my suspicion that what a lot of people who agree with The New Dark Ages’ description of modern culture really regret is not the death of print but the winnowing of upper-middlebrow culture: BBC documentaries, intellectuals on talk shows, Kenneth Clark, Melvyn Bragg, that sort of thing. In the terms of James’s argument, this stuff is all a replacement for the real benefit of reading and just as insidious as smartphones. The virtues of print no more inhere in Civilisation than they do on Instagram; however much better than Instagram the BBC might be, it displaced print and yet the virtues of print inhered in twentieth century society.

What that old TV culture did do was to make it easier to be a passive high-brow. The internet still provides all of that content in podcasts, on YouTube, and frequently on Twitter feeds. It may stick in the craw of some people to admit this, but a lot of what they want is widely available and widely consumed. Whether it is less consumed than it used to be is harder to say. When most people turned off Clark and Bragg they went straight into The Generation Game rather than picking up Don Quixote. That they now flick over to Facebook or watch TikTok videos doesn’t, to me, seem to be a very significant difference. James sometimes relies on self-reported evidence. It is true that people love television and often claim to hate social media. But hating social media doesn’t make it a democracy killer.

Print and Oral Integration

James says print and television could have reached an equilibrium, because TV left print some niches, but in my view that possibility existed because print and oral culture were integrated—and print and visual-digital culture can likely be integrated too.

James makes a fairly hard distinction between reading and listening. He writes: “You could get the gist of Being and Nothingness through hearing Jean-Paul Sartre explaining it in a TED talk or discussing it on a podcast…but it would be impossible to get a genuine and deep understanding of his ideas without his books.” True enough, but it must be important that Existentialism is a Humanism was first a lecture, delivered in a room so crowded Sartre himself could barely get in to talk. Written culture co-existed with oral culture. In the days of Lord Salisbury, political speeches could last for hours. Gladstone’s budgets were often three-hours or longer. It was standard to give hours-long speeches on campaigns. Whatever the necessity and merits of print for nineteenth century democracy, it relied on a widespread oral culture. Although Protestantism thought reading the Bible was important, many ordinary people would have known the Bible orally. Shakespeare himself is only possible because of the oral culture of the time: young elites engaged in Law Court debates, long sermons by people like John Donne attended by crowds so large the sermon was reported to the back by listeners, church services and sermons. All of this contributed to a culture where people were able to listen to a play for two or three hours. Even Dickens, one of the novelists James cites as being formerly read but now abandoned, had a large audience of illiterates, who knew his work—and presumably followed it with due attention—by listening. This is how Jane Austen’s family knew her novels, and many other novels too. An awful lot of the literary culture drew on and was spread within oral culture.

James discusses this idea. He writes about JFK’s obsession with reading and the influence it had upon his speaking style. Quoting a section of one of JFK’s speeches, James writes:

This short passage bears all the characteristic hallmarks of what Neil Postman called ‘printed orality’, the tendency of men and women in highly literate cultures to speak like books. It has a complex syntactic structure, it makes a logical argument, it refers to the world of ideas and abstractions, and it draws on history for context.

But the point about former times is that the literacy and orality were integrated. Part of Shakespeare’s genius was to write down the oral culture around him, from the tavern to the court; that culture then received his work and spread it and discussed it; those discussions were part of the way in which further work was produced. Lots of the poems written in manuscript at that time were written from memory as they had been heard. This integration of the literate and oral goes right up to the working class nineteenth century: Jonathan Rose has accounts of working men reading aloud to one another, for instance.

It is hard to know how many people could read in the nineteenth century. By 1840 67% of men in England could sign their name to a marriage register, though in Preston it was as low as 55%. For women, it was 25%. By 1870, before the introduction of universal education, national literacy is estimated to be about 80%. But it is not a smooth story. While the reading craze James describes was afoot, literacy declined in Lancashire between the 1750s and 1830s. The cotton industry had no need of literate workers and there were too many people moving into the towns for the schools to cope. These numbers are from Andrew Hobbs’ A Fleet Street in Every Town, and he says there are too many contradictions to work out. Preston needed literacy for its legal and administrative functions, attracted immigrants from literate towns, but also had a bad reputation for education and was the largest town in the UK without a school board. Children were allowed to attend school half-time so they could work. The picture is just messy.

What people actually read is also complicated. Hobbs quotes Simon Eliot, who founded the Reading Experience Database, a repository of evidence about reading habits from 1450 to 1945. Eliot says,

The most common reading experience, by the mid-nineteenth century at latest, would most likely be the advertising poster, all the tickets, handbills and forms generated by an industrial society, and the daily or weekly paper. Most of this reading was, of course, never recorded or commented upon for it was too much a part of the fabric of everyday life to be noticed.

This is a somewhat less persuasive story about the salutary effects of reading. (And you might think this is the sort of reading that still goes on today.) Most people’s reading, most of the time, was ephemeral, designed to persuade and sell in short bursts, not the sort of prolonged experiences James focuses on like Immanuel Kant and George Eliot. I have no doubt that authors of that ilk were hugely important and influential, but that only reinforces my suspicion that literacy’s importance for liberal democracy can be satisfied by a minority of the population reading in that way, or with that sort of reading being only a small part of most people’s lives. Contrary to the impression that the story of the kitchen maid reading the newspaper gives, Hobbs reports that wives had much less time for reading than husbands, often none. None of this very mixed picture of reading, literacy, and orality prevented England from becoming a great nation of liberal Enlightenment values. That is not to say that James is wrong, but his argument cannot really succeed without looking more closely at this question. Perhaps rates of reading, and even rates of literacy can decline without the terrible effects he foresees. Of course, that would be tragic in and of itself, but that is not really the claim at stake in The New Dark Ages.

Is a New Integration Possible?

James gives a qualitative account of the rise of reading in the eighteenth century, with accounts of aristocrats being shocked to find the maid reading newspapers. But some more attention to the numbers is required. The question he never quite answers is what percentage of the population needs to be reading a lot in order for liberal democracy to survive. He hedges and says of literacy and democracy that “we simply don’t know whether one can survive without the other”, but the real question might be how much of one is required to keep the other alive?

No doubt, as James says, paraphrasing Walter Ong, the disciplines of history, philosophy, and science depend upon literacy, but they may not depend upon mass literacy. He describes the Republic of Letters that was so integral to the Scientific Revolution—and that is a perfect example of elite literacy changing the world, not mass literacy. Likewise, just as the former achievements of the literate society were in fact dependent on literacy integrated with orality, so it may be that the future will be a new integration. This integration is not with orality but technology. Social media and digital technology are not taking us into an oral society, but something else entirely.

These two arguments are discussed by James, who sees AI as one of the threats to the future of literacy. He also thinks that the divisions between elites and ordinary people are going to lead to severe outcomes.

The very rich have the financial resources to keep their children away from addictive screens. Poorer parents who have to work multiple jobs and who lack the money for childcare do not have such luxuries. Rich children spend significantly less time on screens than their poorer peers. California’s Waldorf School of the Peninsula, popular with Silicon Valley tech executives, forbids its students to use any technology until eighth grade. Steve Jobs famously limited his children’s use of technology and, as his biographer Walter Isaacson writes, ‘made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things’. At dinner ‘no one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.’

Meanwhile, many of the ordinary citizens of modern democracies risk finding themselves as helpless, credulous and poorly informed as the subjects of a medieval king. It may be that we are facing an unenlightened future that looks like our unenlightened past – one in which power, wealth and knowledge concentrate at the top of society, and an angry, divided and uninformed public lacks the means to understand, analyse, criticise or change what is going on.

This is fairly persuasive. Don’t sell my kids something you know is bad for your kids! But it leaves out the key point: the AIs are quite reliably “liberal Enlightenment” in their orientation. James argues that the practice of reading is what transmits and encourages those values, which, on his account, using AI probably can’t achieve. But it seems possible that if more and more people become reliant on AIs the way illiterate or semi-literate people used to hear newspapers and magazines, they will be reliant on a technology that reliably hews to the beliefs and values James is worried we might lose or diminish, and this could mitigate some of the loss of the value of reading. James accounts for the spread of these values through “social prestige” rather than reading per se, in the first place, and AI might have similarly diffuse effects. (He places a lot of explanatory value on prestige in general. I think he takes it too far though: I cannot believe he was inert the first time he heard Beethoven; such a thing is not possible.) The guardrails put on AIs are what matter here, which again speaks to the importance of an elite, rather than a mass culture.

There is no doubt that the Gutenberg Parenthesis is closing: it is the results of that closure that are in doubt. If a reading elite survives and AI provides a liberal Enlightenment worldview we may get a society with something like the values James wants, even while we regret the lack of literary culture. I am not advocating for this outcome, but I wonder if James ought to be more open to the possibility that democracy can survive the “end of reading”.

And while he hedges his conclusions, I think he is simply too sanguine about the past. James identifies the 1880-1920 period as the height of mass readership, but that is exactly the time when George Gissing wrote New Grub Street, a harsh indictment of literary culture in which the serious readers led distorted lives, Arnold Bennett had his characters in The Old Wives’ Tale disdain reading as a distraction from the real work of life (running the shop), and Conan Doyle himself, the great popular writer of the age, pleaded with his own readers to put down fictional stories and read something improving, like a serious history. Bennett also lamented that more people didn’t read serious poetry and philosophy rather than novels. Such a long life did the anti-novel bias of the eighteenth century have that Nancy Mitford’s parents had a no-novels-before-lunch rule.

What Actually Is The Reading Crisis?

Another numbers question I wish James had investigated a little more: How can there be so much data about the decline of reading and yet so many gaps in our knowledge about that decline? What actually is the decline? Gore Vidal quoted Gallup in 1965 that half of American adults never read a book after leaving school—so how much worse have things really got?

This matters a great deal. If you accept that integration of oral and literary culture was always essential, and that some new integration is being formed now, then what Sunil Iyengar told me about audiobooks ought to be reassuring.

…we did a report a few years ago which was precisely about that, called How Do We Read? It was all about audiobooks versus print books. From the limited data we have so far, it does seem that adding audiobooks to reading, if you include that in your definition of reading as a whole, then, in fact, it’s still a decline from the share who did that five years ago, but it’s a much smaller share. It does suggest, in the out years, it may very well be that audiobooks mitigates the decline much more, and maybe it even puts us on par with the trend line for the past or traditional reading.

I happen to be sceptical about audiobooks, but if a lot of the lost reading time has become audiobook time, then the problem starts to look very much smaller. Naomi Kanakia listens to audiobooks and we can hardly worry about her ability to absorb long complicated narratives. In the New York Times recently, David Wallace-Wells broke down some reading data and concluded the most recent decline has been among the old, not the young. It is the “Dad books” that are dying, not young adult fiction. He quotes the Gallup numbers too:

Gallup has been asking Americans how many books they read in the previous year since 1990, when the answer was 15.3 — a number skewed by voracious readers, as surveys like this always are. In 2001 the average was 14.5. In 2025 it appears to have been 14.6.

In his review of the data, Jared Henderson found many discrepancies and inadequacies. A lot of the data we see on this topic is shaky. But one thing that does look clear is that this is a widening gap: “American literacy is getting worse, but it is getting worse primarily because the gap between highly skilled readers and struggling readers is growing.” Again, this situation ought to be improved, but it might not spell the crisis James worries about.

To my mind, Wallace-Wells’s most important statistic, though, was this:

In 1968 Nielsen reported that children under 6 were watching, on average, 54 hours of television each week.

God knows if that number is true. I doubt it. But it was normal for young people in the 1980s and 1990s to watch several hours of television every day. I was there. I remember all the grown-ups watching television all the time—at breakfast! And yet, James points out that according to a study done in Norway, where cable television arrived in a staggered manner, allowing its effects to be measured, “10 years of exposure to cable television lowered I.Q. scores by 1.8 points.” Surely that is too small a difference to sustain James’s worries. 1.8 I.Q. points is significant, but is it a threat to democracy? At what point do we have to accept that life can carry on fairly normally while reading declines?

A Few Other Dubious Points…

Some of James’s other evidence is shaky. He quotes the now-famous study about university students who could not understand the opening of Bleak House. This was conducted among a small group of students at two colleges in Kansas over a decade ago. That is not sufficient to justify a summary which worries about “students at American universities.” He writes that the stream of headlines on TV news is terrifying—lots of scary (or inane) stories in block capitals one after another—but newspaper front pages used to be disjointed like that too. The fact that students are finding it harder to study is evidenced by references to magazine articles and not enough discussion is given to the fact that they are learning for a new world, just as we all did with computers. I don’t disagree with his claims, but I think their valence is often not quite as significant as he does.

And his anecdotes are easily countered. I have spoken to academics at Oxford who see no decline in the standard of English Literature students. When I was a recent graduate I met someone in their forties who had been at my college who told me he had preferred studying poets as that involved the fewest number of pages of reading. A lot of my friends at other universities just didn’t read that much. As I wrote recently: “I’m not denying the problem, I just don’t think it is currently well described. And I think a lot of the “good news” is being ignored. Who even knows what’s going on? It’s a very mingled, high-variation picture.”

James frequently recognizes that variation, but he makes too many sweeping claims. However you read his evidence, claims like this are under-argued: “As knowledge divides re-emerge and tech companies wipe out both literacy and middle-class jobs, we may find ourselves drifting back into a second feudal age.” He is surely on safer ground when he writes: “even in the worst-case scenario, reading and a cultural reverence for reading will be around for a while yet.”

Likewise, the word “disenlightenment” claims too much. Yes, there are more idiots in public discourse, more people who believe in demonic attacks, shorter and lower-quality speeches from MPs and so on. Some ludicrous and dangerous ideas are circulating very freely. But a lot of space is given to the decline of general culture to prove the “disenlightenment” claim. As if the Enlightenment has not always co-existed with the counter-enlightenment and the vestiges of the old order of suspicion and superstition!

The fact that television used to be better doesn’t signify much to my mind. People watched a lot of soap-operas, sit-coms, dating shows, and quizzes back in the days of Kenneth Clark. That they now watch Netflix slop where the plot has to be repeated multiple times because they’re on their phones might suggest brain rot, or it might suggest that television is a background phenomenon while people are doing other, potentially more useful things. A lot of phone time is spent on Facebook where people organize meet-ups, sell old furniture, find music teachers for their kids, and so on. So what? There simply are no good numbers for how much phone time is spent in this useful, harmless way and how much is spent in “toxic” ways.

James says “most people are not reading books and Wikipedia articles on their phones.” How does he know? No data is given. The funny thing about Wikipedia is that everyone does read it, even if intermittently or sparingly. It is perhaps the most well-known website, hence why James can quote it in this way. The claim is almost self-defeating! Perhaps this is not most people’s main phone-based activity, but nor did they use to spend that much time reading the physical Encyclopedia.

James cites bestsellers of yesteryear like To Kill a Mockingbird, In Cold Blood, Herzog, and The Leopard, but although he admits trash always sold, this is cherry-picking. Two years ago, the London Times published a list of the books that have spent the longest in the bestseller charts since the 1970s. There were some good entries. But a lot of it was dispiriting. There were multiple entries for Bill Bryson. The fiction that dominated was Harry Potter, Adrian Mole, The Da Vinci Code and The Thursday Murder Club. And the top spot went to Stephen Hawking, who most people admit not having read, and Kindle data suggests most people read very little of his book. Again, I share James’s regret and worry about the loss of literature’s status in modern society, but I don’t think the case that things are so much worse now and will lead to some sort of de-enlightenment is well made.

Like James, I believe there has been a decline in the quality of politicians in my lifetime. How much this matters is another question. James notes that MPs in the 1970s used longer words and made more sophisticated speeches, but to think that is associated with better governance is a mistake. The 1970s was one of the worst decades for British government, with many quite costly mistakes that had long-term negative consequences! The famous list of the books that Labour MPs used to read that goes round the internet includes lots of very good books, but not much economics, a fairly significant omission for an MP. Robert Blake joked in his biography of Andrew Bonar Law (1955) that, then as now, even a scanty knowledge of finance in the House of Commons gave a man a colossal advantage. No doubt, political elites ought to be better educated, but whether the median MP of past times is the best yardstick—I remain sceptical.

How Else to Respond?

At the end, James seems to recant some of his earlier pessimism. His conclusion implicitly accepts that books and reading are inevitably going to be a minor part of the future, as they have been for some time. And this is presented in fairly sanguine terms.

Six hundred years after its invention, the printed book can be in the vanguard of a new and radical way of looking at the world. 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. And at a time when many feel reality is splintering into an incomprehensible chaos, books offer us a medium that is capable of comprehending and explaining the world. Books can even console us – something a smartphone very rarely does. 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.

James also hedges a little on the value of reading.

Good novels rarely contain anything as glib as an ‘insight’ or a ‘moral’, but I think they do offer a deepened understanding of life. No summary or short cut will get you there. To really feel it, you have to read the books. It’s not that fiction is a kind of higher self-help, offering ‘hints and tips for life’. I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but I do think novels teach you about life.

This is easy to agree with, though a bit damp. If books teach us about life, they must surely have insights and morals. Jane Austen does! Charles Dickens does! All this seems an implicit admission that reading isn’t going to be the thing that saves democracy. It is almost as if by the end of the book, James has talked himself out of the pessimism of the earlier sections and wishes simply to make a genteel case for reading literature.

Overall, it feels as if James is part of a cohort that wishes to be in a different part of history. It is an admirable and even noble wish. But it cannot be. We cannot go back. If we accept Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis—especially his prediction that there would be a widespread “nostalgia” for history—then what James observes is the result of an instability, not the cause of it. People have an innate desire for what is called, in Coriolanus, “a stirring world.” Smartphones are not the enemy, so much as the inherent nature of human society to avoid a prolonged period of boring equilibrium.

That also points to how those of us who value reading must react. We must make the best of the lives we are given. If we wish for reading to be part of the future, we need more than laments. As James notes, there have been plenty of those from people like Sven Birkerts already. I believe we are on the verge of a new revival of the humanities, and all the stories about the new rise of reading are a response to the strangeness of the world, not a cause of some new crisis. James’s book is further evidence for the trend. (I wrote about this trend here.)

Pessimism is the enemy of this revival. As I wrote last year, the best way to respond to the obvious problems with the humanities right now is to call people to the good, to be a shining light in a naughty world.

First, we stop the laments. Maybe it is a terrible thing. Maybe we are seeing civilization start to crumble. Will our complaints hold up the edifice? Will righteousness prevail at a certain number of clicks, likes, or howls? Will wickedness shrink away if we get loud enough?…There’s too much doom and gloom, not enough humanism…I am constantly told that we can choose what happens to us. So go ahead and choose. Choose not to be a philistine. In a darkening world, the best thing you can do is to keep the flame alive.

As I said, James makes his own peroration along these lines at the end of The New Dark Ages. I rather wish that had been his opening.