Is Another ‘Dark Age’ Upon Us?

A person’s depth is nurtured by their experiences, work, education, and reading. Each creates growth; each develops character; each broadens our understanding of the world.

Our grandfather had an eighth-grade education, which was common for people growing up in the rural communities in the early 1900s. Yet, he was one of the most well-read people we’ve ever known. He loved poetry and western novels, Native American history, and biography.  He gave our father the middle name “Shelley” after the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

His passion for reading opened a world far broader than the small town of Benson, Minnesota, to him. It educated him long after he had left his schooling behind. It gave him the power to participate in debates, politics, and his community.

But we have it so much better today, you say. We have a world of information at our fingertips. We can access any topic and quickly have a summary that highlights its most important points. 

Yet, despite the internet’s incredible reach and its no-limits access to information, we are losing something important. We are becoming less literate, and that has deep and troubling consequences for us all.

More than 2,000 years ago, the Library of Alexandria was founded and grew into what is considered the greatest library of the ancient world. It had more than 700,000 scrolls accessible to scholars and citizens who could read. Great works of literature, philosophy, history, and math were in its archives.

But through wars, repression, and neglect, the Library of Alexandria and all its great works were gone by 400 A.D.

“Many scholars regard its destruction as the greatest loss of knowledge in history and the beginning of the Dark Ages,” Rose Horowitch of The Atlantic magazine writes in a story titled “The End of Reading is Here.”

The New Dark Ages will come with the loss of literacy – the ability to read, understand and learn from what we read, she warns.

“The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived. Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again,” Horowitch writes.

Knowledge is power. It is the power to hold those who wield the power of government, finance, and industry accountable. Our capacity to gather knowledge and to understand its importance is fading, she says.

A National Endowment for the Arts study found that fewer than half of all American adults read a book these days. Another look at our reading habits, or lack of them, comes from the American Time Use Survey. It found that on any given day, just 16% of us read for pleasure, whether by picking up a book, magazine, or newspaper. Twenty years earlier, that study showed 28% of Americans were reading for pleasure.

Endless scrolling on a smartphone or tablet consumes our time. Binge-watching streaming channels eats up hours a day with entertainment that quickly passes from memory.

People aren’t just reading less for pleasure; they are reading less to stay informed.

“Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did,” Horowitch writes. “In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today, less than 10% do. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and 40 percent say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it.”

This statement is patently misleading. What most people are getting online is not the same quality of news as they got from a newspaper. For the most part, it is entertainment. It is snippets of news taken from professional journalism sources or someone’s personal take on events. It is national or international news, not the local news they found in their newspaper. It is “news” that polarizes and misleads.

As we read less, we understand less.

Books now have shorter sentences; their words are “dumbed down,” and they have fewer pages. College English courses can’t assign long books to students because they can’t finish them. Reading skills among elementary kids are declining, setting up a future of a less literate society.

Why does this decline in reading matter?

Constant and rapid scrolling and scanning, reading bits and pieces, have weakened our reading ability. It has shortened our attention spans. It has eroded our ability to make sense of the message and implications of what we read. We are becoming a more simplistic people at a time when the world is getting more complex.

Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social sciences support, told Horowitch that her students at this elite college had to be told that summaries of the subjects they were to study lacked the depth and analysis required for their work. They wanted the quick, easy, and shallow answer.

The decline of reading will have a profound impact on us, Horowitch writes.

The decline of literacy “will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun,” she writes.

“More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness,” Horowitch quotes from Walter J. Ong’s 1982 book, Orality and Literacy. A historian and Jesuit priest, he argued that “literacy created the conditions for inner concentration, extended focus, and logical deduction.”

Our reading and understanding skills are atrophying. Our understanding of subjects is shallower. 

When knowledge is forsaken, conspiracy theories parade themselves as truth, and the vast majority of citizens are easily deceived online. A darker age comes when science, health research, and discovery are demonized.

“If we fill our time with short-form videos instead of books, our reading skills atrophy. We have less background knowledge to aid comprehension. There’s no danger of spontaneous mass illiteracy, but the complex cognitive skills that reading fosters start to degrade. The library of the mind falls into disrepair,” Horowitch warns.