What Does a Post-Literate Culture Look Like?

I guess we'll find out

Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash

It’s a bit discouraging to spend your time honing your craft as a writer at a time when fewer and fewer people are reading books or articles for pleasure:

Researchers from University College London and the University of Florida examined national data from 2003 to 2023 and found that the share of people who reported reading for pleasure on a given day fell to 16 percent in 2023 from a peak of 28 percent in 2004 — a drop of about 40 percent. It declined around 3 percent each year over those two decades.

It’s even more discouraging to think about the implications for democracy and the church. When Tocqueville visited America in the early 1830s, he commented that “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.” Now it’s odd to find a house where books are even regularly read. We’re even offloading the duty of reading to children to AI! Colleges are reducing their required reading to next to nothing because students just ask AI to summarize it anyway. What kind of future are we walking into where citizens and believers no longer read regularly? What effect will this have on our communities and ways of life?

The first thing to note is that the most likely culprit behind this is the phones. As they say on the internet, it’s the phones, stupid. Screens are just attractive to us. They are like dementors, sucking our faces and our attention away from other people and other things. And while sometimes we get reading done on these devices (like maybe you are doing right now), often times we’re skimming, reading messages, doomscrolling, watching videos, watching short-form videos, and getting other forms of dopamine hits. Because of these devices, our attention spans and our dopamine addictions are such that we struggle to sit still and read books with focus. And that is a real loss. In my twenty years of teaching, I’ve watched the decline. It’s real.

But it’s more than the phones; our lives are busy and not set up for contemplation and reflection, for leisure. We’re constantly pressured to be Doing Something, to be efficient, to be accomplishing something, working, achieving, hustling. I see this in students who are burdened with a million different extracurricular activities plus a job or two or three. Or parents (me) with kids in a million different extracurricular activities. The idleness that digital entertainment provides is perfectly suited for our busy life schedules because it is intense, pausable, short, simple, trivial, and unnecessary to contemplate. So whether we’re watching a sitcom on a streaming service or scrolling on your phone or playing a game on your console, it’s trivial and controllable. But good books demand something of you; they take up space in your mind, they challenge who you are and who you ought to be, they force you to consider the life of your neighbor, they make you reconsider your understanding of the world. In short, the unsettle you. Good books unsettle you while bringing you toward wisdom.

So we have an entire ecosystem set up to distract us from the kind of contemplation and slow thought that is necessary for good reading, the kind of wrestling with words and meaning that we need in democracy and in our faith.

Because in our democracy, we are inundated with contrary claims about issues that matter, and our task is to sift through those claims and come to the truth as best we can and vote or otherwise advocate for justice and truth and goodness. This is only going to get harder. It’s a tragedy that in the midst of an epistemological crisis, where no one seems to be able to agree on what happened and when, let alone if what happened was moral or not (think about Trump’s framing of January 6th as a “hoax”)—at the very moment of this crisis of truth, we have the rise of the most powerful tool of deception humans have ever created, AI. Now realistic video can be created of anyone doing or saying anything. The need for discernment and wisdom and prudence will only grow. The need for slow, careful, contemplative, prudent judgements will only increase. But the ecology of a post-literate culture will push us away from these things and toward emotive, intuitive, passionate, mob responses. We’ve already seen this so much. And I think it’s a significant aspect of our society’s lack of solidarity. A few days ago I wrote about this in regard to young conservatives and the distinct decline in reading among teenagers.

In the church, sadly, we have similar divisions driven by similar forces of technology. On the whole, I suspect (but do not have the data to back this up) that Christians tend to read books more than the average American. I feel safe making that claim. And yet plenty of us lack the virtues that come from careful reading: the discipline to contemplate the other side, the patience to not rush to judgement, the ability to consider ideas, the refusal to join mob behavior, the humility to be changed by the text, and so on.

I have a few thoughts on this. My first thought is that there is a way to read that is appetitive, that is a quest for reassurance of your own fundamental rightness. It is a hunger for more of the self. We’re all tempted to it. I know I’ve fallen into it. A good, wise reader will discipline his or herself from this vice and humble themselves enough to learn from a variety of sources—never abandoning Truth or discernment, but also remaining humbly open to God’s wisdom wherever it may be found.

Another thought is that while some Christians are reading books, they still may be reading with the digital world in mind. In other words, they may be primarily formed by social media and the vices of social media. The discourse of the internet may be malforming their imagination. The discourses of social media can be of some value, but they are fleeting and often come down to memetic rivalries. We must be discerning and cautious about how much space they take up in our imaginations.

Finally, while Christians may read more than the average American, even these numbers are probably in decline. And this troubles me because we are a people who are called to read the Word and meditate on it day and night. Christians should be excellent readers. We should know how to interpret different genres (poetry, history, epistles, prophecy). We should know how to interpret parables and to interpret stories in their historical context. We should know how to sit with Scripture and contemplate it. And we should be applying those same skills outside the Word to other texts to expand our wisdom and knowledge of God’s creation. How can reading works of theology help us understand God and his creation better? How can reading philosophy help us? How can reading great poetry and novels teach us about human nature, the Fall, creation, and the human experience? The world is filled with wonderful books that guide us towards wisdom if we will only have the humility to read and contemplate.

But a democracy and a church that will not read will be swept away by its passions and its emotions, by short-form video clips made by AI to manipulate us into mob action for someone else’s agenda. God will, of course, preserve his church. He always has. America, on the other hand, is not guaranteed to be preserved.

Books can’t save us. But the act of reading is vital to the health of nations and the modern church. Reading done well guides us toward wisdom, slows us down and teaches us to contemplate, it disciplines us in discernment and attention, and helps us understand the complexity of God’s world. (For some ideas on how to get people to read, see this post from last year)