The number of Americans who read for pleasure has fallen precipitously. In a 2022 survey, 52% of Americans hadn’t read a book in over a year, and one in 10 hadn’t read a book in more than 10 years. Those numbers have almost certainly gotten worse in the intervening years.
"On an average day in 2003, 28 percent of Americans would read; by 2023, that fell to 16 percent," writes Niall Ferguson in The Free Press.
It's a screen world now, and we're just living in it. A study found just 14% of 13-year-olds said they read for fun almost every day in 2023, compared to 30% in 2004 and 37% in 1992.
Is this just the evolution of learning, or are we losing something vital to the continuation of civilization?
Sales of audiobooks are increasing every year, but that does not help with the growing literacy problem among the population. "When people stop reading, they stop being able to read," writes Ferguson. Literacy scores are down 12.4% for adults compared with 2014. Ferguson notes that "when people stop being able to read—to make sense of the meaning of text on a page—they also lose the ability to make sense of the world."
Think about it. We're increasing our dependence on non-textual communication. The rise of the emoji, the dominance of TikTok, and the proliferation of podcasts all point to a future where the written word is far less important, perhaps even superfluous.
"In short," Ferguson concludes, "we are moving rapidly toward a future where information will be shared via spoken words and images, not text, with computer code as the language spoken by computers to one another, intelligible only to a minority of humans."
In a brilliant 1963 essay, “The Consequences of Literacy,” the anthropologist Jack Goody and literary critic Ian Watt argued that the invention of writing, most decisively in ancient Athens, was a fundamental turning point. It was “only then that the sense of the human past as an objective reality was formally developed, a process in which the distinction between ‘myth’ and ‘history’ took on decisive importance.”
There emerged for the first time “the notion that the cultural inheritance as a whole is composed of two very different kinds of material; fiction, error, and superstition on the one hand; and on the other, elements of truth which can provide the basis for some more reliable and coherent explanation of the gods, the human past, and the physical world.”
When you read this, you see that our growing susceptibility to fake news and conspiracy theories are less a consequence of changes in mass media, and more a reflection of a fundamental civilizational crisis of literacy.
It's not an affectation to be concerned about the lack of literacy in people. And it's not just the young. Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), claims that "30 percent of American adults read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child.”
Our mercantile civilization depends on the ability to read and comprehend the written word. Emojis and images just won't cut it. There are concepts too dense, too complex to be transmitted via an emoji or video. In a similar way, we can't communicate complex political and scientific ideas without the written word.
Cheap books and pamphlets were what enabled so many people to learn to read. Protestantism provided the motive to teach them to do so. This was what led to the spread of literacy. And it changed the world as profoundly as the later Industrial Revolution, which would have been impossible without workers who could read.
As literacy grew more widespread, so political participation could also become broader. In France the proportion of men able to sign their own name rose from 29 percent in the 1680s to 47 percent in the 1780s. In Paris on the eve of the French Revolution, male literacy was around 90 percent. Later, the abilities to read and write were spread beyond Europe by colonization, commerce and, especially, by Protestant missionaries.
Literacy was not intended to enable people to think for themselves. But that was its effect. And that’s not all it did.
Related: Is It Possible to 'Re-Civilize' Society?
Can we survive the approaching literacy catastrophe? Like in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, there are going to be people dedicating themselves to keeping the written word and all the masterpieces of human thought found in any decent library alive.
They will await the next "Great Awakening" when humans are ready once again to challenge themselves with new ideas and new concepts that expand human knowledge and advance human civilization.
