The Retreat From Reading Weakens the Public Culture of Argument

James Marriott does not argue that a society with smartphones, self-driving cars, and research universities is literally returning to Europe in the fifth or sixth century. His “new Dark Ages” is a narrower claim about media and social habits. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, Marriott argues that a culture moving away from reading as its dominant medium may recover some features of cultures that preceded widespread literacy: communication becomes more emotional, more personal, more dependent on performance, and less governed by fixed written language.

The historical backdrop matters because mass reading is both recent and, in Marriott’s telling, fragile. For thousands of years, literacy was an elite competence rather than a general condition of life. In some ancient Mesopotamian city-states, he says, perhaps only 20 people alive could read and write. Ancient Roman literacy may have reached roughly 10 percent, but reading still remained far from universal.

The printing press altered the material conditions. Books could be reproduced in far greater numbers; reading became useful to more people; Protestantism gave many people a religious reason to read scripture. Marriott locates a more decisive inflection point in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, when contemporaries began to describe what some historians call the Reading Revolution. Their reports may have been exaggerated, but they registered a change: pedestrians reading novels while walking, peasants consulting almanacs in pubs, servants reading newspapers in kitchens. Books, magazines, and newspapers had become visible parts of ordinary life.

Marriott’s larger argument is that this expansion helped transform politics. Literacy did not cause democratic reform by itself, and he rejects simple accounts in which Rousseau’s The Social Contract or other philosophical books straightforwardly produced revolution. But he sees a meaningful correspondence between the spread of reading and the shift from a Europe of absolutist monarchies, palace secrecy, and narrow political elites toward one with newspapers, parliamentary reporting, republics, and a more active public sphere.

For Marriott, the relevant change was not merely that more people received information. Public affairs could increasingly be circulated, contested, criticized, and judged outside the court. Reading gave more people access to ideas and information, he says, and made more people politically involved and more willing to think critically about power.

Russ Roberts presses the complication that runs through the entire argument. More access to information is not the same thing as better political judgment. The internet has democratized information beyond what the printing press could have achieved, Roberts observes, but it has also created a vast problem of reliability. Readers and viewers have access to more claims than ever without an easy way to determine which ones deserve trust.

Marriott agrees that books can lie, inflame, and support terrible causes. His case rests instead on the form writing gives to thought. A writer can return to an idea and refine it; a reader has the author’s words fixed before them, available for rereading and more sustained critical analysis. In Marriott’s view, those conditions make books more likely than conversation, video, or TikTok to present a coherent and rational picture of the world.

The concern is that a retreat from reading weakens several habits together: making an argument, expecting it to cohere, and remaining with it long enough to test it.

The historical case becomes stronger, in Marriott’s account, when literacy is understood not simply as an individual skill but as an infrastructure for intellectual exchange. The Republic of Letters was the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century community of writers, thinkers, philosophers, and scientists who exchanged letters, published journals and magazines, and responded to work produced elsewhere in Europe.

Marriott points to the economist Joel Mokyr, who has argued that this written community was a major driver of scientific innovation, economic growth, and ultimately the Industrial Revolution. Mokyr’s claim that it was the single cultural fact explaining the Industrial Revolution may be extravagant, Marriott says, but it identifies the relevant mechanism: ideas can accumulate only when they can travel beyond immediate neighbors, remain available for response, and be combined with other ideas.

An intelligent person in an isolated village might once have had little opportunity to communicate an insight beyond a small local circle. Written correspondence and print allowed ideas to move across distance, persist through time, and draw more people into the exchange. The result, Marriott says, was a crescendo: more participants, more available knowledge, more opportunities to join separate insights together, and increasingly complex thought in science, philosophy, and literature.

This was not simply an eighteenth-century version of social media. Roberts notes that the Republic of Letters was elite, heavily male, and not free of vanity, status competition, or personal attacks. Its participants often knew that their ostensibly private letters might endure and be read by others. He argues that its distinguishing feature was less privacy than norms. A correspondence among Adam Smith, David Hume, Newton, Franklin, and their peers imposed standards that pushed exchange toward knowledge rather than rage or amusement. Roberts invokes Lord Moulton’s phrase “obedience to the unenforceable”: voluntarily observed norms that were not formally imposed.

Marriott sees literacy as both democratizing and selective. A written argument can reduce the immediate importance of a speaker’s accent, clothes, rank, or manner. A scientist presenting an idea in a court or elite institution might be dismissed because he looked shabby or came from the wrong social background. In a letter or journal, Marriott argues, the question can move closer to whether the idea is good.

But writing also sets a demanding threshold. The ability to express an idea coherently in sustained prose is not universal, Marriott says, and the Republic of Letters could not be entered merely by arriving loudly and demanding attention. He accepts that this is a form of elitism, but calls it potentially benign: the standard is not inherited status but intelligible, reasoned participation.

The value of the Republic of Letters, on this view, was not that it dissolved hierarchy. It was that it created a broader intellectual public whose medium and norms made ideas more portable, more inspectable, and more cumulative.

Marriott’s case for books is not that prose contains more truth than speech or images by definition. It is that writing changes the conditions under which both authors and readers think.

A writer can externalize an idea, return to it, refine it, and test whether its parts fit together. The reader receives the resulting argument in a stable form. The words remain available for rereading, comparison, hesitation, and disagreement. In Marriott’s account, that simple fact gives written thought a different intellectual character from a conversation, video, or rapid feed.

The length of a book also imposes a practical constraint on simplification. Marriott, who writes newspaper columns, notes that a one-sided argument can sustain perhaps 900 words before it becomes tiresome. A 400-page rant is harder to make readable. Detail, in his view, pushes writers toward complexity because the world resists remaining simple once it is described at length.

Roberts illustrates the point through biography. A hagiography turns its subject into a saint; an anti-hagiography offers only defects. Neither produces much understanding. He recalls John le Carré’s reaction to a biography that had promised to be “warts and all”: “there was no all. It was just the warts.” A serious long biography can leave the reader with something less reducible than a list of facts—a sense of a person’s contradictions, motives, virtues, failures, and circumstances.

Marriott sees that as a formal achievement of the book. A sufficiently detailed account tends to complicate its own thesis. A 500-page life of someone who is wholly admirable or wholly despicable will usually become implausible, or simply dull.

His comparison between Mein Kampf and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will is intended as an extreme example of how medium changes persuasion. Marriott describes Hitler’s book as rambling, illogical, and widely found unreadable, including by senior Nazis. Nazism, he argues, has difficulty surviving the sustained demand for coherent written reasoning. Riefenstahl’s film, by contrast, can make fascism feel powerful through imagery, music, spectacle, and collective emotion.

The contrast does not make films politically corrupting or books safe. Marriott and Roberts both value visual art. Marriott’s narrower point is that film can make an idea persuasive without making its logic explicit, while a book more often requires the idea to take a sustained written form. That requirement does not guarantee sound conclusions; it makes the author’s reasoning more available to scrutiny and makes a purely one-note case harder to sustain.

The strongest challenge to Marriott’s argument is that books are neither the only source of complexity nor the only medium capable of revealing human life. Roberts repeatedly presses that point.

A well-made podcast series could teach listeners a great deal about Prussia, Roberts says, even if it required 20 or 30 episodes. Great films can reveal character through dialogue. Long television series can create sustained, subtle portraits of human beings. Roberts names Shtisel, The Americans, and Crash Landing on You as works that, over many hours, can approach some of the understanding associated with serious fiction.

Marriott agrees that film and television can be masterpieces. He maintains that novels offer a distinctive form of access because reading requires the reader’s imagination to construct the world of the text. That work can produce what he calls an “empathetic hallucination”: the sense of knowing what it might be like to be Elizabeth Bennet or David Copperfield.

Roberts accepts the distinction while resisting Marriott’s strongest version of it. Film can lead an audience to infer that a character is deceiving himself, even if the character cannot state that directly without clumsiness. A great dialogue writer can get close to the novelist’s territory. The limitation, Roberts suggests, is one of access and expanse rather than an absolute incapacity.

Their discussion of Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March makes the disagreement more precise. Roberts describes a novel in which little conventional action occurs, but whose accumulated force is to make the reader inhabit the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War. The birds, weather, mud, roads, social rituals, and gradual loss of imperial authority matter because they become part of the reader’s felt world. In Roberts’s formulation, the empire itself becomes the novel’s central character.

A film could show the costumes, buildings, roads, and landscapes. But Marriott argues that those visuals may also make the historical world feel alien. Film continually presents the external difference between viewer and subject: these are people with unfamiliar clothes, bodies, homes, and manners. Prose can bring a different fact to the foreground—the continuity of inner life.

That is why Marriott connects reading with abolitionist slave memoirs. A racist white reader meeting an enslaved person face-to-face, he suggests, might have focused on visible difference. A memoir directs attention toward fear, grief, memory, aspiration, and thought. The reader is asked to encounter a mind rather than merely a body marked as socially different.

The same capacity allows fiction to depict a world as consciousness experiences it. A novelist can make birdsong, weather, or a road carry anxiety, rage, anticipation, or memory. Marriott describes his own state while awaiting publication as a nervousness that makes everything shimmer at the edges. Film can depict the setting, but he argues that it cannot as readily direct a viewer’s attention through the exact texture of a character’s inward state.

Losing long-form reading would therefore mean more than losing access to canonical books. For Marriott, it would reduce access to a mode of experience in which history, other minds, and the complexity of lived perception can be encountered at unusual depth.

Marriott’s concern about online discourse is not simply that false claims circulate quickly. It is that logic, evidence, and explicit chains of reasoning may be less natural to human communication than modern readers assume. In his account, they are cultural practices reinforced by literacy.

Russ Roberts applies the thought to commentators such as Tucker Carlson, whom Marriott discusses in his book. The mistake, Roberts suggests, is to treat every provocative online figure as though he were a print-era public intellectual offering propositions for rational adjudication: Is the claim true? Is it logical? What evidence supports it?

Some such figures may be doing something closer to oral storytelling. Their task is to produce memorable, dramatic narratives for an audience held in attention. If that is the real relationship, a factual correction can miss the point. The performer does not necessarily depend on being able to say, “I was wrong; the evidence does not support my claim.” What matters is the emotional and narrative grip of the story.

James Marriott argues that the communicative habits associated with oral cultures are recognizable in this environment. Drawing again on McLuhan and Ong, he describes discourse without a dominant written culture as more emotionally heightened, more dependent on personality and voice, and more hospitable to charm, rage, and theatrical persuasion. Speaking with the impersonal structure of a book would often seem cold or unnatural in face-to-face communication.

Print has a different institutional effect. It cools public discourse, Marriott says. That can feel sterile compared with live argument or charismatic debate, but it also constrains the appeal of performance. A brief burst of invective may be entertaining; pages and pages of it are exhausting. Written argument does not eliminate emotion or deception, but it gives the audience more opportunity to ask whether the claims hold together.

He sees related incentives shaping culture more broadly. Marriott mentions research, though he cannot recall the precise figures, finding that pop songs have become less lyrically and melodically complex over the past 20 years. He does not attribute that development solely to declining book reading. But he connects it to an information environment that favors immediacy and quick capture. A song that must seize listeners within a few seconds on TikTok has different incentives from a long Bob Dylan song that unfolds slowly through imagery, narrative, and musical development.

Marriott is not asking aspiring musicians to study Penguin Classics. His point is that reading can enrich forms not normally described as literary. He names Dylan and Paul McCartney as major popular musicians shaped by reading, and suggests that a more literate audience may be more accustomed to dwelling with complex ideas and feelings in other arts as well.

The stakes are therefore cultural and institutional, not merely personal. If reading ceases to be a common habit, Marriott fears that the norms it helped sustain—patient attention, complexity, evidence, revision, and argument that can be revisited—will have less support in the wider public sphere.

Neither Marriott nor Roberts expects a simple reversal. Roberts notes that the movement toward screens did not begin with smartphones. Television was already a powerful time sink, and the remote control was an early form of scrolling: a means of moving mindlessly across an abundance of available content.

James Marriott agrees that TikTok is not an isolated disturbance that society can solve by merely switching off an app. He says the first serious statistics of declining reading date to the 1950s and 1960s. The underlying shift may soon be a century old: a long movement from reading toward visual, screen-based forms of attention.

Roberts doubts that difficult works such as Henry James, Middlemarch, Shakespeare, or Adam Smith will remain common cultural reference points. Even if their disappearance does not directly collapse democracy or halt scientific innovation, he sees a real aesthetic loss in a culture where fewer people choose to enter them.

Marriott offers a limited consolation rather than a cure. He compares reading’s possible future to the rise of deliberate exercise in a world of abundant junk food. Once cheap, convenient food made physical fitness less likely to arise from ordinary life, some people began treating fitness as a conscious practice: going to the gym, running, lifting weights, and organizing their routines around health.

Reading, Marriott suggests, may become similarly intentional. It may no longer be the obvious default for an idle evening, an airport delay, or a quiet hour at home. People who value what books offer may need to protect time for difficult reading precisely because the ambient information environment does not provide it.

That future is not the restoration of a mass reading culture. Marriott remains sad that reading may become more artificial and less woven into ordinary life. But he thinks it may survive as a chosen discipline: sitting down each evening to read because sustained books provide an experience the surrounding culture no longer supplies automatically.