Literacy Once Democratised Europe; Now It Is Retreating
Writing cooled human communication from an emotional, face-to-face oral culture into a textual culture of evidence and logic; rising literacy once drove democratic revolutions, and screens are pulling public discourse back toward a pre-literate age.
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The argument · timestamps estimated from transcript position
Literacy is historically extremely recent and fragile
Marriott stresses that we are so used to literacy that we forget how anomalous it is. By one estimate, in a certain ancient Mesopotamian city-state there may have been only 20 living people who could read and write; literacy in ancient Rome was around 10%. For thousands of years, reading and writing was not a cultural phenomenon but an esoteric code circulating within a wealthy scribal elite — some rulers were literate, some were not. The real turning point was printing: books could be reproduced in quantity, more people could read, and books became more practical; Protestantism then placed enormous emphasis on the written word, pushing more people to become literate in order to read the Bible. These factors fed each other until the "Reading Revolution" historians identify in the mid-to-late 18th century.
— James MarriottThe Reading Revolution really did change the shape of politics
Roberts pushes back: if literacy exploded, why doesn't the world look turned upside down? Marriott's answer is that the spread of literacy has a democratising effect — the more people who can access information and ideas, the more people participate in politics and criticise power. Early 18th-century Europe was ruled by absolute monarchs, and political affairs were essentially court secrets discussed among a small elite; by the late 18th and early 19th centuries, newspapers appeared, the standing of absolute monarchs declined sharply, France became a republic, the authority of the British monarch was far weaker than at the start of the century, parliamentary debates were reported, and public affairs were no longer discussed only in court. He calls this the great age of democratic revolution and democratic reform, and ties it directly to the spread of literacy.
— James MarriottWriting forces bad ideas into logical form
Marriott concedes books are imperfect, but argues that the way a book organises information is more rational and more coherent than conversation, video or TikTok. Writing forces you to polish an idea repeatedly, externalising part of your mind onto the page and then testing it; a reader faces a fixed text and can reread and critically analyse it. More crucially, the book limits the means of non-logical persuasion — you cannot bypass argument with charisma, shouting or tears. He uses the Nazis as a counterexample: Hitler's Mein Kampf was unreadable even to senior Nazis, because Nazism simply does not hold together once it is required to be presented coherently as a written text; Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, meanwhile, is treated as an artistic masterpiece, screened in film classes, and regarded as an extremely powerful argument for fascism. Bad ideas are easier to whitewash on a screen than in a book.
— James MarriottThe Republic of Letters filtered out trolls through writing
The 17th- and 18th-century European "Republic of Letters" was a community of thinkers, philosophers and scientists who wrote to each other and ran journals. The economic historian Joel Mokyr rates it extraordinarily highly, saying it is the single cultural fact that explains the Industrial Revolution. Marriott's mechanism is this: if a clever person sits alone in a village, his ideas can only be told to his neighbours, and scientific innovation struggles to accumulate; the spread of literacy let ideas travel further, more and more people joined the conversation, ideas flowed into one central pool, and thought grew more complex. Roberts adds that the key difference is not public versus private but who the participants are — in conversation with Adam Smith, David Hume and Newton, the standard is naturally high; it is a kind of "submission to that which cannot be enforced". Marriott concedes that the literacy barrier itself carries a benign elitism: you cannot burst in and shout like a troll on X, because nobody will pay attention to you.
— James MarriottThe novel gives us a passage into other minds
Marriott believes there is a truth about life reachable only through prose fiction: it lets us see the inside of another person's mind. Reading is an active rather than passive process — you build images in your head out of the words on the page, which is why it feels immersive, why it feels like having lived another life. Film cannot do this, because it gives you the external world and cannot enter another mind directly; and writing is precisely the medium we use to express what is in our minds, a communication of mind to mind. He also notes that oral poetry takes little interest in the subtle differences between human consciousnesses, and that this capacity to "inhabit another mind" appears only in prose fiction. Roberts does not fully agree, arguing that great films can get close through dialogue, but concedes that film almost never captures the inner activity that is conveyed by more than dialogue.
— James MarriottThe post-literate commentator is more like Homer
Marriott writes that the post-literate commentator does not explain and analyse the world like the print-era public intellectual, but is more like an oral storyteller, weaving strange and unforgettable tales for a spellbound audience. Roberts calls this the deepest insight in the whole piece: faced with the mass of absurd, untenable claims online, people habitually interrogate them by the author's standard — "that isn't logical", "where's the evidence?" — but these people are not in that business at all. Their job is to entertain the audience; truth does not matter, what matters is a story that keeps the audience spellbound. Marriott goes further: presenting an argument logically, supplying evidence, driving to a rational conclusion — these are not in fact natural to human communication; in an oral culture, the more effective way to persuade someone is to entertain him, move him, get angry at him. Writing imposes an impersonal, more rational form of communication, and it is not a necessary product of human communication.
— James MarriottThe richness of pop music also feeds off reading
Roberts gives an example from The History of Rock and Roll in 500 Songs: the opening of Jagger's "Sympathy for the Devil" is taken directly from Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita — the novel opens with two Russian intellectuals mocking God and faith, after which a suave gentleman appears, they take him for mad, and finally realise he is Satan. Marriott calls this an "annoyingly good" example and regrets not having put it in the book. He concedes it cannot be pushed too far — it is not that you have to move Penguin Classics into the British Library to join a boy band — but Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney are both obviously heavy readers. He cites research showing that over the past 20 years pop songs have become less complex in both lyrics and melody, partly because the environment favours the simple and the immediate: to go viral on TikTok, a song has to grab you within three or four seconds.
— James MarriottThe future of reading will be deliberate, like fitness
Marriott stresses this is not a new phenomenon: statistics on the decline of serious reading go back to the 1950s and 1960s, television was the beginning of the screen age, and the remote control was the first scroll. Roberts quotes what his father said at the time — books have existed for centuries, television has been a mass medium for only 20 years, let's see if it lasts — and concedes his father should have worried more. Marriott's consolation comes from the analogy with junk food and fitness: McDonald's arrived, many people got fat, but some people realised that health could no longer be absorbed naturally from the environment and required deliberate effort, so they started running and going to the gym. He guesses cognitive health will follow the same path: if reading has a future, it will become more deliberate, less "I'm bored at the airport, I'll pick up a book" and more "I value this experience, so I sit down for half an hour to an hour every night". He admits this makes him a little sad, because reading will become more artificial, no longer the unavoidable part of life it once was.
— James MarriottIn their own words · checked verbatim
By some estimates, in ancient Mesopotamia, I think in the Mesopotamian city-state, you might have had 20 people alive who could read and write.
James Marriott8:13
a bad idea translates much better into a film than it does into a book. A book requires you to fit the idea into a logical form, and if you can't explain it logically, it all begins to fall apart.
James Marriott18:20
you couldn't turn up into the Republic of Letters like a sort of a troll on Elon Musk's X and just start screaming at everybody incoherently, because no one would take you seriously.
James Marriott30:17
The strange empathetic hallucination induced by the novel, the feeling we have that we might know what it is to be Elizabeth Bennet or David Copperfield is perhaps the closest we can ever come the experience of being a person other than ourselves.
James Marriott34:49
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.
James Marriott47:59
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.
James Marriott53:16
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 at us from every angle.
James Marriott58:17
Figures
| Estimated number of living people who could read and write in an ancient Mesopotamian city-state | about 20 | 8:13 |
| Literacy rate in ancient Rome | about 10% | 8:13 |
| Length of The New Dark Age in Kindle terms | about 170 pages | 8:13 |
| Word count beyond which Marriott finds one-sided argument in a column tedious | 900 words | 23:01 |
| Time span over which the complexity of pop lyrics and melody has declined | the past 20 years | 53:59 |
| Earliest era for which statistics show a decline in serious reading | the 1950s and 1960s | 58:17 |
Glossary
- post-literate society
- A society in which literacy and reading are no longer the mainstream cognitive mode, held to resemble in some respects a pre-literate society.
- Republic of Letters
- The 17th- and 18th-century transnational knowledge community of European thinkers and scientists who corresponded by letter and journal.
- Reading Revolution
- The name historians give to the sudden spread of reading and the ubiquity of books and periodicals in the mid-to-late 18th century.
- sitzfleisch
- A German word for the capacity to sit still for a long time and patiently work through difficult texts.
How to listen
People concerned with media change, the quality of public discourse and education; product, content and policy practitioners who want to understand the mechanism of how screens change the way we argue.
The section from 53:16 on pop music and reading, where the argument is looser — the conclusion alone is enough.