People Who Can Still Read Will Rule the World

A recent essay in The Atlantic tells us what most of us have already surmised: reading is dead, and it’s not coming back. In “The Age of Reading Is Over,” we learn that not only are fewer people reading long-form prose for pleasure, but soon they will permanently lose the ability to do so. The scroll, the digital cave, has trapped young brains and is atrophying their attention spans early so that they will not be able to get through a novel later on.

“Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to ‘translate’ the book into easier language.)”

Mass literacy is devolving into mass illiteracy, fast. This catastrophe is being helped along by an “elite” culture that has dismissed classic Western literature—the “canon,” as we used to call it—as hopelessly out of date, the work of dead white patriarchs, no longer “relevant” to “today’s modern audiences.”

But how would today’s modern book readers know, since they can’t and won’t ever encounter any of these works in print? It’s one thing to find Hamlet or Huckleberry Finn or Gatsby irrelevant. It’s quite another if you can’t comprehend prose unless it is delivered via a toddler board book or an erotic romantasy novel.

Meanwhile, woke activists in California are trying to get “Black English” (formerly known as Ebonics) taught in preschools to improve literacy skills. They also want to classify it as a separate language so black kids can be deemed “bilingual.” Teaching them how to “speak Black” is “part of a movement to challenge harmful language hierarchies and affirm Black English as a legitimate, rule-governed language rooted in Black history, culture, and community.” I would think children raised in black households would already know how to “speak Black.” “We talk about multilinguals, but we don’t include Black children who may be African-American English speakers,” the director of the Children’s Equity Project, Xigrid Soto-Boykin, said. I am old enough to remember when this was a hilarious scene in the classic 1980s comedy Airplane, when passenger Barbara Billingsley offered to translate for two men who could not understand English. “Excuse me, stewardess, I speak Jive.”

It remains to be determined if the Black English activists will allow white children to learn and speak Black English along with their classmates. Or are some languages only reserved for certain races?

But if Harvard students and preschoolers and everyone in between are not reading anymore, what’s left?

At least we have movies like this summer’s blockbuster Christopher Nolan epic, The Odyssey. But even Nolan has fallen prey to the mass illiteracy epidemic. One of the lead actresses, a Yale grad, naturally, had never heard of The Odyssey before she was cast in it. In an effort to break down the poem’s “cultural prejudices,” Nolan wrote the script in “easy-to-access,” natural English that his illiterate cast could easily memorize—but that is totally anachronistic and jarring to the audience. For example, Odysseus’s son repeatedly refers to his father as his “dad” when speaking to the suitors. When asked in a press interview why he used “dad” and not “father,” Nolan said, “I want to make it feel very fresh for modern audiences and do away with cultural prejudices that aren’t based on anything logical.”

Tom Holland, who plays Telemachus, chimes in, saying he wouldn’t have said “father” in ancient Greek, anyway.

In fact, the ancient Greek word for “father” is literally pater, meaning father. One of the most basic Latin roots we have! Even George Lucas was not this clueless and cleverly named his villain “Darth Vader,” which literally translates as Dark Father.

But nothing matters, because reading is, as author Spencer Klavan put it on X, moving from a mass activity back to the way it was centuries ago: an elite skill practiced by small groups of academics and scholars and the curious and the thoughtful. “If present trends continue, they mark not the end of reading but the end of mass literacy, turning books back into what they used to be: the special super-weapon of a minority class. That would mean the age of high tech looks like the Middle Ages in this regard. Or at least that it looks the way we picture the Middle Ages, with a priestly caste wielding superior powers of focus, prediction, observation, and manipulation over a mentally reduced general public. Once again the readers would be as gods among men.”

So be like a god. Go ahead and hoard books, and be like the medieval Irish monks who kept the flame of eternal knowledge alive for six centuries on the inhospitable remote rocks of Skellig Michael in the North Atlantic.

If the illiterate AI Dark Ages are indeed coming, at least we will have our stacks of hardcovers to comfort us.

Oh, and make sure you buy a few copies of my books for your library, too. Yes, they’re a little “culturally prejudiced,” but only in the best possible way.