Is the decline of reading poisoning our politics?

Addressing himself to the inventor of writing, the Greek philosopher declared, “You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have co... See more

distinctions between oral and literate consciousness

And this is why, in Garfinkle’s account, so many voters “cared more about inflation than Trump’s authoritarianism: the latter is an abstraction that occupies “a foggy zone between the eggs and the conspiracy theories. One has to actually think about them, even maybe read something about them, to understand them.”

The historian Adam Garfinkle gives more pointed expression to Mir and Wolf’s concerns. He contends that abstract reasoning is “integral to liberal-democratic politics.” After all, “the concept of a depersonalized constitutional order” and “the virtues of doubt, dissent, and humility” are “very abstract ideas.” As deep literacy declines, the public ... See more

Oral cultures’ reliance on memory also limited their capacity to generate complex, logical arguments. The complicated sentences typically found in a philosophical treatise, legal brief, or Vox article — with their prepositional phrases sandwiched between em-dashes — could not plausibly perpetuate themselves in the absence of written text.

literacy facilitated modes of thought that were more independent, rational, individualistic, and universalistic than those of oral societies.