John Livesey reviews James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages — a book its author describes as “an impassioned attack on the trivial and meaningless culture of the screen and a defence of the written word.” The evidence he marshals is real. The politics he leaves out is the point of the review.

What the book gets right, and where it stops:

  • Pleasure reading in the US fell from nearly 30 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. Books are getting shorter, comprehension of long words is declining, and many young people now source their politics from TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.
  • Reading is not instinct. It took thousands of years of retraining the brain and remained an elite preserve for most of that time — perhaps 10 to 15 percent literacy at Rome’s peak, stagnant through the Middle Ages, only mass-conceivable after Gutenberg in 1440 and the cultural argument Protestantism gave it.
  • Marriott has little patience for Adorno and Horkheimer, who saw in rationalistic measurement a new form of domination. He’d rather cheer Voltaire and the “democratic energy” of 1789 — minus the economic and social forces.
  • Livesey’s central objection is class. Ofcom data shows low-income families watch twice as much TV and spend significantly longer on social media than wealthier ones. Screen time is often a begrudged substitute for childcare. The screen-free childhood movement skews wealthy, and childhood is becoming two-tiered.
  • Marriott, a journalist at the right-wing Times, never names the business model. Attention capture is the revenue model — Tristan Harris’s line about “a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen” — and declining literacy is good for it.
  • The book defends the elite canon — Shakespeare, Milton, Austen — as the thing at risk. Livesey argues elite culture was never in danger. What’s at risk is mass culture: the historically new thing that working-class people, women, and non-Westerners built, from Tagore’s Nobel-winning poetry to the revolutions that humiliated European empire in Algeria and China.
  • One nice bit of inadvertence: Marriott’s own clipped, anecdote-forward journalistic prose is itself a specimen of the postliterate style he’s mourning.

The argument worth keeping is the last move in the review. Mass literacy was never a gift of the printing press alone; it was a by-product of mass democracy — of ordinary people winning enough power to require a culture of their own. Which means the crisis of reading can’t be fixed by taste-making or by banning phones for teenagers.

Without a renewal of the fight for democracy, Livesey writes, “we are unlikely to see a return to the culture of informed engagement with the world. If this happens, the end of literacy may be the least of our worries.”