The Reading Recession: Are We Making Ourselves Less Intelligent? (James Marriott)

24:09Old people lose some of their function because you just have it all on a bit of papyrus or a bit of pot shard next to you. And the emphasis of society, the argument goes, moves towards young people, moves towards like cognitive speed, criticism, new ways of thinking, and the whole kind of like social emphasis of society subtly shifts.

24:28Amol Rajan:What are the other kind of key moments then that go from the kind of mid 18th century, the spread of reading, the use of reading, particularly by an elite who kind of need it for bureaucracy and legal verification and so forth to kind of what happened in the late 19th, early 20th century, which is what we'd call mass literacy. Yeah, I think, I mean, the key points there are the Education Act at the end of the 19th century, which really move us from a world in which only some people can read, and that's been growing throughout the 19th century, to a world in which literally everyone can read. And this is like a major social transformation.

25:01Like mass literacy is such a recent phenomenon. You know, if you go back through the whole of history, literacy rate in ancient Rome, like 10%, less than that in the early Middle Ages, inching up by then. It really is so recent that everybody has been able to read. There's a great H.G. Wells quote where he talks about how the great divide between the reading and the non-reading population, like one of the fundamental divides in history, suddenly has become a minor difference in education levels. and ordinary people who, without reading, had no access to information about politics, no access to information about their governments, no access to, like, how do you find out about science or culture or anything?

25:39Suddenly, they're as well-informed about this stuff or have the potential to be as well-informed about this stuff as their social betters. And I think that is just such a... We're so used to literacy now and we're so used to data that everyone can read and we forget to find it remarkable. There's like a major social transformation. People suddenly have access to the same amounts of information plus, importantly, the same kinds of skills of criticism, analysis, abstraction that we know are totally vital.

26:03Amol Rajan:And literacy then becomes a kind of form of mass enfranchisement. Suddenly people who are kind of not really involved in the public conversation can get involved and sort of be equipped with the same knowledge. And it's also quite clearly a major kind of social mobility device. You know, one of my biggest influences is a book called The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart. And he talks about growing up in the interwar years in Leeds. and he basically talks about literacy as a kind of form of escape from the poverty and the grimness of those years but also a way of kind of talking on equal terms with all the posh people that run the country it's an amazing it's kind of i mean the word meritocracy is very very complicated but in terms of social mobility literacy did more for millions of people in this country and elsewhere than many other policies i completely agree there's another great book the intellectual Lives of the British Working Class by Jonathan Rose, which is a lot about literacy among working class people in the 19th and 20th centuries.

26:58And it's exactly the phenomenon you're talking about, this whole generation of working class Labour MPs who are like basically the first generation of working class legislators almost in the history of the world. That working class legislator had not been a category of person that existed in any society. And what these people all talk about in their memoirs and Jonathan Rose has like tons of amazing quotations from them is the importance of the library I was born in this desperate poverty among people who didn't read and I was going to read Charles Dickens John Milton history all kinds of stuff and as you say this was the thing that gave them the ability to go toe-to-toe with their social bettors social bettors inverted commas and you know argue their economic case argue the case of their class and I think that really only happens with literacy, if you don't have the information or the kind of critical thinking skills, that is a huge class advantage to the people at the top of society, which is why literacy has remained an elite thing for most of history and why the spread of literacy has often provoked a lot of unease among social elites because they know that literacy equals power.

28:10Amol Rajan:I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with James Marriott, Times columnist, sub-stacker and chronicler of the decline in reading. If you are, please do subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds. That way you won't miss future episodes. And if you do subscribe, make sure you've got your push notifications turned on. That way you'll get a little ping, a little alert whenever we publish a new episode. And by the way, go on, do us a favour. When you get to the end of this and you decide that more people should have the joy of radical in their lives, give us a five star review, would you? Because it helps other people discover our work.

28:43Amol Rajan:Thank you so much. And now back to James.

28:49Amol Rajan:How did reading make us democratic? the exact relationship is there's not like a direct thing about you know people you know people read some book that tells them that democracy should exist and then bingo democracy comes into being i mean i think if you rewind the story back to the middle of the 18th century the spread of literacy is an important factor in the downfall of the absolute absolute monarchies that are controlling europe before before them you know universally before the middle of the 18th century. The old European feudal absolutist system depends on the fact that you're the king of France, you're the king of Prussia, nobody knows what you're doing, nobody has any access to the way that you're running the state, nobody has access to any of the information about the state's finances.

29:31What you get with the rise of newspapers and journals in the 18th century is that suddenly people are able to look behind the scenes and see what's going on with their rulers. I mean, this causes total chaos. In France, you have people publishing memoirs of the fact that they've been imprisoned by the state without any kind of legal mechanism to do so. They've just been taken off the streets and put in the Bastille. Suddenly, when you can read about this, this is like a major kind of social thing because kings were just doing this stuff and no one could really know before. There'd be rumours.

30:03Amol Rajan:But also the excitement. I've never thought about it in this context. It's so interesting talking to you about it, that Thomas Paine's revolutionary writings, the Rights of Man or Common Sense and Other Writings, it would have been so exhilarating for those who were minded to throw off monarchies and to campaign for revolution that this book would have been a kind of new technology would have been like the smartphone of today here's this thing you can hold and it's got words and they convey information and by the way that person around the corner has read it and that person down the road's read it and people would be saying have you read this book and i know that sounds you can still say that today if you go into you know good bookshops or even online retailers and get a book that someone else has read but it would have been it would have been so exciting that you could hold a book Thomas Paine is a great example he crops up in the Neil Postman book and Neil Postman calculates that you know hundreds of thousands of people read this Thomas Paine book and I think he has this he says you know relative to the size of the population in colonial America versus the population of America in 1985 this was a media event that was like the equivalent of the Super Bowl like that's how that's the proportion of the population this book was reaching and the really important point is that like a hundred years earlier, Thomas Paine, whose father was a farm labourer, there is no way anybody from that social background is reaching hundreds of thousands of people with their political ideas at all.

31:22The monopoly on political ideas was entirely possessed by social elites, by the aristocracy, who often were, you know, imposing their kind of ideology, not through like writing an argument, but through like parades, palaces, this highly visual culture. Suddenly, with mass literacy, someone like Thomas Paine, who comes from a social background, nobody from that kind of background has had any political influence before mass literacy. Suddenly, not only can someone from that background write his political ideas down, which, by the way, unsurprisingly happen to be quite anti-monarchical, they can be read by hundreds of thousands of people.

31:55And that is just a huge shift in power that just can't be put back in the bottle.

31:59Amol Rajan:This is the great promise of technology is that it would democratise, lower the barriers to entry, democratise access to information, and make it easier for lots of people to reach, you know, millions of people, billions of people perhaps, as you can now with this weird device on the phone in front of me, on the table in front of me, which we call a smartphone. And isn't it a supreme irony of our time that we have this technology which fits in our pocket, which can connect us to anyone, anywhere, pretty much, half the global population is still not online, we should point out as an important caveat.

32:30Amol Rajan:And yet we feel more sort of disconnected and atomised and lonely than ever before. I mean, why is it that despite this extraordinary technology, we're living or heading towards these new dark ages? I mean, I think you're totally right. The story begins with TV. That Robert Putnam book, which I quote in my book, is fascinating how much everything he says about television is an earlier version of everything he says about smartphones. People aren't reading. Newspapers are declining. People are at home all the time. They're not socializing. They're having friends less. And it's not hard. It's not particularly hard to understand why.

33:05When screens arrive, talking about the idea that reading is actually quite hard to do, like concentrating on a page is quite difficult, interpreting text is quite difficult. These are cognitively taxing processes. Whenever you have the choice between a page and a screen, people choose the screen. It's easier. It's more passive. It's more exciting. It's more visual. It's just less cognitively demanding for us. and that sort of seems like a minor point, but we can just see it's playing out on a vast social scale now and I think has been since really the 1950s, the 1960s. This is why the Neil Postman book is so important.

33:39And when I was writing my book, thinking about where to begin the story, when you look at the first people talking about the decline of reading, I was able to naively go into it thinking this is a recent phenomenon. Actually, it begins in the 60s. Some of the best data for the decline of reading comes from the Netherlands and the really dramatic declines are happening in the 50s and 60s and 70s as television comes into people's homes and people start reading less. And again, this whole thing has just vindicated this idea that ultimately comes from Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. The way we consume information determines the kinds of information we get.

34:14And we are just discovering that there are all kinds of ways of talking and thinking about the world that depend on literacy and reading. And if you lose literacy and reading, we end up in a totally different way of thinking about the world, which is more fragmented, more shallow, more visual, more personality-based. And I'm not sure that's a way of thinking that is particularly compatible with democracy.

34:36Amol Rajan:Isn't there a kind of danger that your romantic attachment to the 18th century spread of mass literacy blinds you to the glory of modern technology? Yeah, definitely. I mean, there certainly is. And I am a bit of a fusty old romantic, but sometimes the fusty old romantics are correct. Sometimes it's a radical thing to be a romantic. And I think this just seems kind of obviously true to me. I mean, again, the fact, you know, people accused all these cultural critics like Neil Persimmon who are complaining about television of exactly the same thing. But everything they said about television and everything they said about screens and the way it makes our thinking shallower, more fragmented, more biased towards like exciting, charismatic personalities.

35:18That's kind of all been true. And so there was a moral panic about television in the 80s and 90s. A lot of the things that people are worrying about, I think, have basically been vindicated. If you think of the rise of populist leaders around the world, have often got their start on television. And that has proved to be a genuine threat to democracy. My other point is that the other thing that people sometimes say to me is, oh, this is ridiculous that you're worrying about smartphones, because didn't you know that in the 18th century, there was a moral panic about novel reading? and everyone was panicked about everyone reading novels and how ridiculous.

35:49People always just worry about new technologies. To which my answer is the moral panic around reading the 18th century, I believe, was kind of justified. If you were a conservative traditionalist and you believed in the hierarchical, monarchical order of mid-18th century Europe, of course you're worried about reading. Of course you're worried about the spread of information because those people entirely correctly understood that the way we communicate shapes our societies. And they were right to worry about novels because the spread of novel reading and the spread of reading in general was one of the things that undermined those European monarchies.

36:19And I think the spread of smartphones is undermining liberal democracy in the same way. And we're undergoing a kind of mirror image political change. And I think certain political systems are based on certain ways of communicating and democracy was based on print. And I think phones probably can't sustain that in the same way. And it seems like what we're heading towards is this much more personalist, much more undemocratic, much less liberal way of doing politics.

36:46Amol Rajan:And on your point about sort of the way in which to marry what you said about Marshall McLuhan with kind of modern politics, it's been the case, I mean, just to come to some sort of quite obvious examples, it's been the case for say the last hundred years that the most successful politicians master the medium of the day. So Churchill on the wireless, we should fight them on the beaches. There's this kind of romantic story about JFK versus Richard Nixon. They had a very famous televised debate with the birth of televised debates in America. There's a slight misunderstanding of this moment where Nixon seems to be sweating and look at his watch, whereas the very good looking and telegenic JFK masters television.

37:25Amol Rajan:I think people would often say about Boris Johnson, whatever one thinks about his merits or demerits, that he was a creature of late 20th century television. Have I got news for you? And today, if you look at Trump, he's pretty effective at communicating on social media, whether or not you think that leads to good conduct or not being a separate question. One of the things that sort of kind of begs is where this goes next. And I wonder whether or not the moral panic about novels, which you say might well have been justified, and then the moral panic about TV and your moral panic, again, which may well be justified about smartphones, leads to a moral panic some years from now about AI.

38:00Amol Rajan:And AI is qualitatively and quantitatively and fundamentally different to those previous technologies. but do you in the new dark ages worry also about what ai is going to do to our democracy yes i do and i think it's kind of interesting in a way that all these things seem to be part of the same journey um you know one of the points that's always made about like video and television and images is that they can often show us this quite unreal biased view of the world there's a great book by an american historian daniel boston called the image about the way that seeing the world through television and through photographs and magazines.

38:37He was writing in the 1960s, so this was like another moral panic ago. Gives us this very fragmented view of the world. We see it from particular angles. It's very biased. Writing gives us this quite comprehensive, connected view of the world. Images show us distorting little bits of the world. They show you one bit of the world at a time. And I think AI is kind of showing us a version of the world that's even more distorted, even less connected to reality. The thing that really strikes about AI video that when I watch it, I try and watch it a little bit because I need to know what's going on, is that this is a kind of version of reality, a lot of AI video, that is basically shaped by the algorithm.

39:13This is the version of reality that algorithms want us to have. So AI video is often like gooey sentimental, like preposterously cute animals. There are often these kind of like little dramas of like revenge and comeuppance. There's a lot of very tribal political content, stuff that never happened in reality, but you can create with an AI video and people are creating this separate version of reality, which is entirely shaped by algorithms. And it just seems like that's the next step leading almost logically on away from the real world where we all live and see reality and all its complexity to an alternative version of reality, which is completely determined by machines, which are harvesting our attention.

39:52Amol Rajan:What we're talking about here is reality itself becoming kind of subsidiary to screen time. Yeah, exactly. That's the phenomenon. I mean, in America, probably on your sub stat, I discovered that in America, there are parts of America, I think, where what people are now doing is they're spending more than eight hours a day on a screen. If you broadly divide the day into three, if you have eight hours of sleep and you've got 16 hours left, if you have eight hours on screen and if you just inch up to eight hours and one minute, you're kind of spending more time on a screen than you are in the real, real world.

40:20Amol Rajan:And I know screens are kind of part of reality, but they're kind of not. And what you're talking about with screen time there is kind of a mass voluntary exit from participation in tangible connected reality. Yeah, I know. It's so dystopian. It feels like we're living inside someone's bad sci-fi novel. Yeah. And you see everyone in our politics. I just think so much of our politics can be explained by the fact that reality is simply less important in most people's lives. Like what's actually going on in the world is just less important. What do you mean? Because, you know, we know we live in this politics where there's a lot of misinformation and there's a lot of fake news.

40:59And I think a lot of people sense of the world is much more rooted in what they're seeing on like TikTok or on social media than what they're experiencing factually in the world. And reality is just becoming less significant because we're just spending less time there. And we're entering a world where reality is this kind of marginal phenomenon. But what really matters and what really shapes our politics is what is taking place in the unreality of the screen. And I think that explains so much about what's happening in politics.

41:23Amol Rajan:Yeah, the weird thing is that in the unreality of the screen, there are infinite different realities. Because my Instagram and TikTok and LinkedIn feeds give me a reality which is different to yours. Whereas if you and I are sat in the same room or praise be in the same bookshop or indeed in the same pub, we're forced to share the same air. whereas online you can split reality off into a million, literally an infinite number of different parallel universes which you don't actually cohabit. I think that's completely true and I think it's another important point about the spread of literacy which is there's an argument, a great book called Imagined Communities by Ben Nick Danderson about the rise of nationalism and his whole case in that book is that the rise of the modern nation state is a creation of newspapers.

42:05When you get mass circulation newspapers they mean that everybody has to read and speak a version of the same language so instead of a load of italian dialects suddenly everyone is reading the same version of italian in the same newspapers and they belong to the same imagined community the nation well his big thing as well was that

42:21Amol Rajan:but through newspapers you could imagine a community beyond your neighborhood exactly because the natural community is or the tribe or the neighborhood's 150 people but with newspapers and mass literacy you could say there is an england exactly exactly and a And I think it's kind of, again, it's a crazy thought and it seems so counterintuitive that this phenomenon of Germany or this phenomenon of Italy is kind of a creation, again, of the spread of literacy. And I think it so validates that thesis and vindicates that thesis that as literacy declines, you know, people's sense of, I think, national identity and community is declining with it.

42:56And I think often what that sort of sense of national communal identity is being replaced with is a kind of people going into their individual bubbles, which are often across nations. So I think this is happening on both sides of the political spectrum. Something I wrote about a lot kind of 10, 7 years ago when it was happening was the way that left-wing politics was increasingly influenced by American left-wing politics. And British progressive left-wingers were often talking about politics in terms that were dictated by what was happening on American campuses. And the same thing is now happening on the right.

43:27You get Nigel Farage and people of that ilk putting much more salience on things like Christianity, which is basically an American phenomenon. But I think it's because they now live in an imagined community that is the sort of international imagined community of right-wingers that is sort of more important to them than like the communal identity being British. And I think what we're kind of seeing is this sort of breaking down in these imagined communities in the sense we all belong to one nation together, people entering these slightly different imagined communities that are created by smartphones.

43:58Amol Rajan:People also talk about it as a sort of echo chambers of filter bubbles. But in other words, the sort of the vast imagined slash digital community that Nigel Farage may inhabit, along with, for instance, people who are minded to vote reform or watch GB News or be persuaded to attend MAGA rallies. That community kind of might share likeness and there might be a kind of cross-pollination of ideas. and at some point Nigel Farage has got to turn that energy into winning votes in a different imagined community which is modern Britain that's not easy to do what do we do about all this because you've um you've made a very persuasive case for reading and you've made a very persuasive case for reality there's one thing which is kind of what you do about in terms of making an argument that books are great and reality is great aren't you kind of up against some very powerful forces which make it quite hard to actually achieve the ends which you would like to achieve.

44:52Amol Rajan:More people reading books and more people talking to each other rather than being on screens. Yeah, and I think we have to be realistic about this. And when you, you know, spend the last sort of, what, couple of years immersed in the history of all this, and if you think that the advent of television and smartphones is a revolution equivalent to the advent of the printing press, that's a pretty big historical force. Plenty of people probably after the invention of the printing press who were thinking, oh God, why can't we put all this back in the box? This is disrupting society so enormously. It's very hard to uninvent the printing press.

45:23It's very hard to uninvent the consequences of the printing press, no matter how much people at the time might've wanted to do it. I am skeptical that we can uninvent the smartphone. I just don't think that's going away. And I think we have to be realistic about the idea that it's not going away. The points of optimism, a point Naomi Alderman has made to me is that this is all happening very quick and it's not like we're living through this kind of enormous social change that we can't quite see like I think we understand and are getting heads around the idea the smartphone is changing our society we're kind of joining all these dots together and I think perhaps that understanding will help us get a grip on it I mean I do also think as a point of optimism I think there are plenty of people who are really worried about how much time they're spending on their phones and are trying to think about how to read more and are trying to think about how to get rid of their smartphones I got rid of my smartphone yeah what did you do i got a kind of highly i mean i can't mention brand names in the bbc but there are a lot of good dumb phones out there what is it this one is basically like

46:21Amol Rajan:okay james marriott is holding a weird small okay that's basically a tiny smartphone two inches by five inches it's got a smash screen by the way mate you need to show it to the camera show it to the camera okay um you'd be a nightmare to be for instance married to because you'd be forever spending money on your smashed smartphone screens and sorry mate you need a new phone i know i really do another one another one of these another one of these whose brand name we're not going to mention okay can you roam the internet on that thing you can but it's like extremely inconvenient and so you need to inject friction into your relationship exactly and i think that's exactly the point i think there are more options to do this and i also think we need to get our head around the fact that with smartphone and not completely anti-smartphone they're obviously extremely useful but i think we need to have smartphones that work for us as tools i think there would be demand for alternatives even for ways of you know apps or things that would keep you off your phone yeah you're very kind of um impressively realistic about and pragmatic about whether or not this is actually gonna be possible but do you think that more people ought to kind of at least experiment with injecting friction into their relationship with technology for instance by using dumb phones like that.

47:32Yeah, I think so. And I mean, the way it gets you is because it's so incredibly convenient having like Google Maps, having the internet. There are good halfway houses and it's possible to do and it's worth trying. I mean, I'm lucky that my job, you know, if I don't reply to emails, I mean, famous last words, like instantly, that's usually not a problem for me. So I'm aware that I'm lucky in my job, but maybe making your life a little more difficult to make it better in other ways is a trade-off that we're going to have to learn to make. Are you on social media? Yes. on one laptop that I try and check only like a couple of times a week.

48:04Amol Rajan:Is there a kind of social cost to not being on social media? Yeah, there is. And especially in our profession, like you have to have a bit of a public profile. That's what I mean. There were people at the time saying, James, you really must be promoting your work on Twitter X. You really ought to be on LinkedIn. You really, really, you are on LinkedIn. You really ought to be on Instagram promoting your work. And also socially, don't your friend, how does it go down with your friends? I mean, it's easier than it used to be. And I think this is maybe another point for Hope, which is, I think, especially in journalism, there was a time when it felt like there was a huge town square that the entire world was watching, and it was called Twitter.

48:37And if you weren't on Twitter, what on earth were you doing? That doesn't really exist anymore. The internet's much more fragmented. There are probably marginal benefits to tweeting out your columns on what's now called X or blooting them out, whatever you do on Blue Sky, posting on Blue Sky. But you're just not reaching the same kinds of numbers of people anymore. And I think it's quite useful if you're anti-tech and anti-social media. Those platforms feel much less compulsory than they did. And I think if you're not on Twitter, you're not missing out on the whole world. You're missing out on, you know, like a fragment of the world.

49:07So I think because it's fragmented and because it's increasingly fragmented, it's easier to miss out on because missing any individual fragment is just less of a cost.

49:16Amol Rajan:How do you actually get and inculcate the habit of reading? That's a really difficult thing. And I mean, the problem is that... is it that difficult kids love them kids love books we are the storytelling until they get smartphones we know you know we know that when kids get smartphones they just stop reading there are kind of surveys that have been done on this and i mean the fundamental problem is that depressing that is that's actually that's like a dagger to the heart with four kids at home who don't have smartphones because they're too young that's a painful thought yeah uh and i mean the danger is that reading can seem worthy it can seem pious it can seem that something like an adult's trying to force on you when like it's clearly way more fun to be playing like grand theft auto or scrolling tiktok like that is just more diverting and more fun than reading i think part i mean the kind of the note that my book finishes on is like this this whole idea that we've got to read for pleasure and reading's fun and i kind of wonder if unfortunately that is argument has kind of been a little bit lost like i just don't know if we can any longer say reading for fun is as fun as playing on your PlayStation.

50:22And I think the analogy, and this is another thing that maybe slightly gives me hope, is with the rise of exercise, which has accompanied the rise of junk food and sedentary lifestyle since the 1970s. Does anybody really like going running? I mean, they do eventually, but it's a difficult thing that you do because you know it's good for you and you live in an environment that is going to make you fat unless you go for a run and unless you are careful about what you're eating. And I think we'll have to learn that we need to do something similar for our cognitive capacities.

50:50Amol Rajan:So you could have junk food or good food, junk food or excise. Instead of having junk information or playing a video game, you could read Ulysses. Exactly. And I think people are thinking about that. And I think you see the beginnings of this online. Like I see a lot of people starting a book club to read War and Peace or something. And I'm sure this will spread out. And it's the same principle. It's like we live in a society that is increasingly as bad for our cognitive health as it is bad for our physical health. And if we want to resist that, it's going to take a bit of effort and it's going to take a bit of application.

51:23In a way, there's like a bit of a sad loss there because I just don't think that in the future people are going to pick up a novel as the most fun possible option in a way that they automatically would have done 50 years ago. the point of hope is that people realise this is something difficult that it's worth doing because it's difficult and it's worth applying you know energy and application to this demanding but worthwhile thing to do and I think I think that could happen a little bit I don't know how

51:49Amol Rajan:widespread it could be but I think it could happen when I was 18 at the start of my gap year I sat down in a bookshop in central London which I'm going to name called foils and I looked at the fiction area for all the longest books I could find. And I bought Lord of the Rings. And I read that book in what felt like about five minutes. And I would say to all the kids, we've got a lot of young listeners. Listen to this. The pleasure I got from reading the Lord of the Rings was so infinitely greater than from watching the films. And the films are one of the great achievements of post-war culture.

52:21Amol Rajan:I mean, they're incredible, but the pleasure of reading that book was so, the three books was so overwhelming. It was so intoxicating. and what I would say is that you could lose yourself in a literary world in a way that you can't with a computer game you can't with a phone with TikTok it's actually there whereas with literature you've got to imagine it to be there and that's kind of a solitary thing but it's a powerful thing it's a mesmerising thing in a way it's an enchanting thing in a way that no computer game ever will be I'm a bit depressed James chatting to you I had a couple of points I think we're right to be depressed because we're pressed as a sign of taking it seriously.

53:01It's a real problem.

53:02Amol Rajan:This is urgent. And just on a kind of, I know you're sort of writing brilliant books rather than sort of necessarily advising the government. I'm sure if they asked you in, you'd be willing to do it. On specific things that can be done, on libraries, on book time, on making books accessible, I mean, this is a cultural battle rather than a policy one, isn't it? This isn't saying, oh, can we tweak some fiscal arrangement around whatever or can we kind of create that tax incentive? This is a cultural rebellion. This is a kind of resistance movement that you're kind of part of, isn't it? This is not something for government.

53:32Amol Rajan:This is something for the people listening to this program. Yeah, I think so. And I think the cultural battle is going to be the one that we're going to have to win. And books are going to have to seem, I don't know, cooler, more prestigious. I think we're going to have to get into a mindset where we're kind of like slightly like, oh, you're spending your whole life scrolling on your phone. We might have to become a little bit judgmental about that. I mean, there are policy things as well. I had a really interesting trip to a friend who's a teacher invited me into his school. And there were just, I think there are ways of creating like an atmosphere where books are in the air.

54:05Yes. And one of the things that we risk losing is that books just become just like a minority eccentric thing. I was talking to an academic recently who was like, for a lot of my students, they just don't really figure. It's kind of like reading books is kind of a bit like, you know, some eccentric old hobby, like, you know, playing whist or something. It's kind of like, oh yeah, fine, people do that. But why would we?

54:23Amol Rajan:But you know, one of my arguments used to be for young people I try and help get on in the world, that if you read certain books, it'd be a huge source of joy for you. And you should do it because it's an intrinsically good thing to do. But also, if you read Dickens and you sort of know the story of David Copperfield or you read Pride and Prejudice, when you sort of go into the professional world and you join elite circles, you'll be able to have that point of connection with someone. You'll be able to say, oh, yeah, I too have read Pride and Prejudice and not just watch the film. The trouble is, the world is now run by Silicon Valley technologists who play so many computer games.

54:55Amol Rajan:I almost feel like actually these days you've got to play computer games. Yeah, exactly. Because Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk are kind of computer game nerds. And they also read a huge amount of books. In fact, Elon Musk was inspired to become an engineer by the nonfiction that he read growing up. Okay, look, there are points of hope. And I'll tell you what else is a massive point of hope. It's podcasts. and podcasts and long form conversations, I think, obviously never replace books, but I think they are an antidote to short form video and that endless scrolling. And you are the Times' podcast critic and you're very kindly going to stick around and answer some of our listeners' questions.

55:29Amol Rajan:But before we end this episode, I've got to ask you, what makes a good podcast? Such a difficult question. I mean, if I was able to answer this question quickly, I'd be earning lots of money as a podcast consultant. I mean, the main thing is talking is very hard. Talking coherently. Get someone who can talk coherently. Is it? When you listen to as many different podcasts as I have, that's not a universally held skill. I mean, often the main thing is like an amazing relationship between the two hosts. I always say to people, much better to have two, if you're going to have two people hosting a podcast, much better to have two people who are less famous with a great relationship than two incredibly famous people who just don't have that kind of spark.

56:07Amol Rajan:Well, I feel like we've had a great relationship, which is a nice thing. Thank you so much. When is the new Dark Ages out, by the way? Beginning of June. Beginning of June. Yeah, coming soon. Coming soon. And the new Dark Ages is going to spread enlightenment, as you have done. James Merritt, thank you so much for being a guest on Radical. Thanks so much for having me.

56:30Amol Rajan:Well, the numbers that James laid out at the start of that, they are just completely shocking. There has been this total collapse, not just decline, but total collapse in reading, particularly reading for pleasure in the past 10, 15, 20 years, A, and B, it's happening across all ages. I think when we've spoken about this subject in the past on this podcast, whether it's to Catherine Rundle or Jonathan Haidt, and those were fantastic episodes, really proud of them, but we focus mostly on young people. Actually, what's happening with reading is a kind of more societal, cultural, maybe even civilisational thing.

57:03Amol Rajan:And I thought what was so interesting is how James, with his long understanding of history, which is all there in his Radio 4 series, How Reading Made Us, he understood how kind of there are these parallels between the moral panic over novels, the moral panic over TV, the moral panic that there is now over smartphones, and perhaps a future moral panic about AI. But as he says, those moral panics might have been justified. And as the technology gets more powerful, perhaps there's a stronger case for panicking, because what's happening right now is profound. And I thought the connections, the kind of interweaving that he made between the growth in literacy and the growth in reading and the birth of modern democracy was very, very interesting.

57:42Amol Rajan:And I thought if there's one point above all others that I would pick up from what he said, it was the fact that what we're seeing today is not illiteracy, it's a decline in comprehension. It's not that people can't read, actually people can read, it's the thing that reading is meant to encourage, which is comprehension, thought, cogitation. It's that which is in decline. And if thinking itself is in decline, well we are in big trouble

58:10Amol Rajan:and that is it for this episode my huge thanks to James Marriott that was well that was riveting a call to arms or call to books perhaps to make sure you don't miss future conversations please do subscribe to Radical with a Mol Rajan on BBC Sounds and just make sure you've got your push notifications turned on and that way every new episode will pop into your life with a lovely little alert thanks so much for your time we'll speak to you next week

58:37I'm James Marriott, and from Understand from BBC Radio 4, this is How Reading Made Us. Have you ever wondered why books are getting harder to read? It's not them, it's you. Fewer and fewer of us are reading, and not only that, we're finding it more difficult too. What would a future without reading look like? To answer that, I'll be taking a fresh look at what reading has done to us as humans. You're going to hear about disembowelment, dragons, book burnings and moral panics. And maybe even the surprising reason you can't recognise people at parties. Reading changed our world and reading changed you from the moment you learnt your ABC.

59:16Understand how reading made us. Listen first on BBC Sounds.

59:50Transcription by CastingWords bbc.com and the BBC app. Find out more at bbc.com slash unlimited.