Perhaps it’s the bookish element of my digital footprint, but I keep getting recommended videos and articles about the declining state of literacy in the world, even if what is usually meant by ‘the world’ is just the US. There’s a journalist called James Marriott who is banging that drum for British publications and predicting that we are entering a post-literate society and that democracy, stability and all the things we take as the bedrock of our current social and political lives will shortly wither away.
It’s often smart phones which are given the blame for this decline in literacy, along with ipad kids, streaming services and particularly tik-tok. The idea is, that human attention is a finite resource and adults and children alike are allowing theirs to frittered away on short form content and algorithmically generated slop. Then there’s all the kerfuffle about ‘AI’, that people can have articles and posts written for them without ever having to engage their brains at all.
I have to admit, I’m not thrilled about AI, and have seen a difference in the children I teach over the past (almost) twenty years. There are some children so stimulated by the online world that there seems to be absolutely nothing in the real world that interests, excites or engages them. It’s a dispiriting thing to see. Yet I don’t think we are in some terrible intellectual apocalypse and every new way of transmitting information has brought doom-spouting sandwich board men. There were outcries when televisions entered houses, when indexes were introduced to books and Socrates never used the new-fangled technology of writing because it impeded the memory.
What’s more, people always have a sense that they haven’t learned as much as they would like, that they are inhibiting their mental potential. Samuel Johnson wrote his own article about this problem in the 2nd of February 1760, where he talks about how the young and eager are “diligent in the pursuit of knowledge; but the progress of life very often produces laxity and indifference.” He goes into reasons why this might be.
First, he looks at the idea that learning is never enough, that someone who begins to learn is quickly overwhelmed by how much more could be learned and so gives up. None of us will ever know everything about even a narrowly focused area of study, that there is always more to learn and that we just burn out from it. He thinks this is a poor argument. He sees learning as similar to virtue, that we never regret the learning we have had, even if we stop learning, we will always wish we had learned more.
He says that it’s more likely that people learn less as they get older because there are so many other things to do. Life has too many responsibilities to just sit and learn and every hour we meditate on something interesting is seen as an hour robbed from a more productive occupation or the company of friends and family. He also acknowledges that “sprightly and luxurious pleasures” are simply more appealing than quiet contemplation. This is the commonly spouted ‘dopamine argument’, that a few quick scrolls on a phone are a more accessible and immediate pleasure than wrestling with some big book, and that after the stresses and toils of a day at work are far easier to slip into.
His big obstruction to learning is, a little surprisingly, books. He says there are too many of them and that too many of them are merely okay or worse. Books quote other books, tell the same stories, use the same examples and that “few writers afford any novelty, or what little they add to the general stock of learning, is so buried in the mass of general notions, that like silver mingled with the ore of lead, it is too little to pay for the labour of separation”.
I’m reading a book like that at the moment. There are elements of silver, but there is so much lead ore around it, that the book has become a chore. One I am too stubborn to quit. So instead of putting the book down and picking one up I enjoy more, I do other things instead - which means I am yoked to this dull book even longer. Last night I went to bed an hour than I usually would, because I’d read the book for half an hour and simply couldn’t be bothered to read any more. As a result, I woke up an hour earlier than usual and threw my whole day out of whack.
There’s a comfort in reading Samuel Johnson talk about all the easier pleasures that distract us from the more wholesome stuff, it’s a common human experience and no different now than it was then. I think the James Marriotts of this world can relax a little, we’ve always been a little bit lazy with out pleasures - and there’s nothing terrible in that.
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