In the English-speaking world, is there a decline in our literacy and in how people live with literature? For the past while there has been a debate on whether we are losing our literary culture – James Marriott thinks we are at the “dawn of the post-literate society” and has a forthcoming book that extends the argument. I’ll write up a review when I get my copy, but Henry Oliver has already obtained it, and gives some thoughtful pushback on Marriott’s analysis. Who’s right?
I’m not sure. My intuition leans towards Marriott, but it is not due to any of the statistical analysis he provides (nor am I comforted by the statistical analyses cited by people who think Marriott has it wrong). And this is because we are in the realm of the unquantifiable.
There is no data that will tell us whether people are reading, understanding, enjoying, discussing with their friends, good books. Because there is no such statistical category. I can look up that in 2025 there were over six hundred thousand books published through traditional means (rather than self-published) in the United States, which seems to me an astoundingly big number, but that doesn’t tell me anything about the number of new works of well-wrought fiction, or poetry, or non-fiction. I can tell you that as of the last survey on public “participation” in the arts, 46.6% of adults in Indiana read at least some novels, short stories, poetry or plays, but I can’t tell you how much of it was forgettable trash. Yes, it’s true that virtually everybody reads something, if only on their phones, but that’s not the same, is it? And even if I read good, thoughtful short pieces on the very platform where I first wrote this post, the Substackers worth reading are those who have a deep personal history, and continuing practice, of reading intelligent books.
We can’t quantify the state of film by looking at annual box office numbers, or counting the number of people who watched a movie last month, or looking at the number of films released. We can’t quantify the state of visual art by the number of new galleries, or auction prices at Christie’s, or what proportion of Michiganders went to a gallery last year. We can’t quantify the cultural life of a city (sorry, I mean “vibrancy”) by adding up how many people who call themselves artists live there, or how much money is spent on entertainment there.
Whether there is a decline in meaningful engagement with good books is subjective, and cannot be calculated. It doesn’t mean we cannot say anything – the function of criticism is to bring an experienced, closely observant, unbiased eye to new (and old) works of art and music and literature, even if that eye is necessarily subjective (I am Humean on this subject). And I think the important question to ask about the current state of literacy is whether there continues to be a wide enough selection of new books that are worthwhile (and I’ll confess I find the evidence from the New York Times Book Review rather depressing on that front), and whether there continues to be a healthy critical mass of people who read them. (We could do the same thing for any genre of art). Whether people are increasingly relying on audiobooks, whether new bookstores are opening, with entire shelves devoted to gay hockey player fiction, whether there’s been a recent uptick in sales of The Odyssey, are side issues.
I think the question is important – intelligent debate about things that matter (and I don’t just mean political issues) depends on a culture of books, even if not everyone takes part (and clearly not everyone does, or ever did). “Takes” that are found on blogs, or magazines, or op-ed pages of what’s left of newspapers, will only decline in quality as people start thinking they are a sufficient substitute for the depth that can only be found in books – all we will be left with is takes about takes (writes someone composing a take, yes I know!).
Cross-posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/
What we have lost these past twenty years–though I would push the beginning of the loss back to 1980–isn’t the idea of a literate culture; it’s the idea of an autonomous culture. We no longer accept the idea of a cultural realm separate from politics or economics. Rather we assume that culture is simply an outgrowth of political and/or economic power, and that its activities are to be judged solely in political or economic terms. We no longer read literature as literature; we read it solely to establish our ideological position on hot-button cultural issues of the day. And that’s a lot harder to quantify.
I try to make a point of not being a part of the “we” you describe.