Literacy is good or bad, perhaps
Once upon a time, a woman read an extremely convincing book called The Literacy Delusion. This book used the most up-to-date neurological and cognitive research to demonstrate that reading books was bad for you on every level. That the more books you read, the more unhappy you feel and the less effective you are at functioning in society.
The genius of this book was that its authors (a behavioral scientist and a journalist who met through a fellowship at MIT's Design Lab) used all the methodologies developed to test whether or not social media is bad, and they applied those methodologies to the act of reading books, resulting in the paradoxical finding that reading books was not just equally bad but that it was, in fact, quite a bit worse than TikTok and Instagram, precisely because books aren’t mere entertainment. Books are worse because they're more effective at changing people.
The Literacy Delusion demonstrated, using a large body of research, that book-reading tends to rob people of the ability to appreciate fine nuances.
For instance, the control group of college-educated non-readers was able to easily understand the difference between an act being illegal and an act being immoral, and to understand that in certain cases an act could be against the law without being morally wrong.
Participants who reported reading books for pleasure, on the other hand, slowly lost the ability to make this distinction between human and moral law. They thought that human laws ought to perfectly reflect the moral law. For instance, the human law is that a child can't be removed from their parent unless the latter has been demonstrated to be unfit through some legal process. But the moral law is that if you know a child to be in danger, then you have to do something about it. This is something non-readers intuitively understand. It's why people love stories about Batman or about other vigilantes. It's not that the law is at fault, necessarily, it's that sometimes you cannot prove something is wrong in a court of law, but nonetheless you personally know it to be wrong.
Readers tended not to understand this distinction, and their ability to understand these distinctions actually degraded with the number of books they read, both in the course of a year and in the course of their lifetimes. The more books they read, the more their ability to handle these nuances was slowly eroded, so that over time they stopped believing in the possibility of justified vigilante action.
This is just one of a number of natural beliefs that were dissipated through reading books, by the way.
The interesting thing was that most readers claimed to highly value precisely this ability to see nuance!
But what the study found was that, actually, high-brow literature (literary fiction) was more effective at robbing people of the ability to appreciate nuance, even though this was a quality that readers of high-brow literature claimed most to value. To the extent that it mattered which books you read, or even which genre of books (fiction, non-fiction, etc) you read, it was actually high-brow fiction that had the worst and most pernicious effects.
The woman found this fascinating! After all, she loved nuance. All she talked about was nuance and how great it was. And many of the books she picked up were marketed to her as having precisely this quality of nuance.
At the same time, the woman could not deny that she herself did not really believe in vigilante action. She believed in it conceptually, of course. But even if she was certain that a child was in danger, she would probably just report it to the proper authorities (or perhaps not even do that, because the authorities were known to be racist). She wouldn't know what else to do! She certainly wouldn't kidnap the child or threaten their parents. She thought it was kind of unrealistic to expect that. Like, maybe if the child was her grand-child, then she'd have some legal standing to take it away from the bad parents. But...there you go…it was all about legal standing, wasn't it?
The woman felt herself to be nuanced, because she understood that, in practice, you couldn't let people do whatever they thought was right (an idea elucidated at great length by a book, The Leviathan).
But actually, most people simultaneously believed that vigilante action should be punished and that they themselves would be fully justified in undertaking it to correct a perceived wrong. They held two contradictory beliefs. What could be more nuanced and complex than that?
This difference between readers and non-readers was something that'd been empirically demonstrated, using brain scans and behavioral studies. Reading simplified the brain, increasing cross-connections while decreasing the number of connections overall. It improved neural communication, at the cost of complexity.
Which, again, is something everybody knows—people who read too much are unworldly and can't handle real life. This is a folk belief that everyone has. Even readers believe this to some extent, but they also think that reading books perhaps better equips you to navigate systems and to make the kind of judgments needed to operate a complex society. So you're less able to navigate, say, your romantic life, but more able to navigate a complex organization.
However, the authors of The Literacy Delusion claimed that readers were actually less-productive and less successful than non-readers. And this also made a kind of intuitive sense. Most scientists, engineers, policy-makers, generals, business-leaders, etc, weren't big readers! Clearly reading a lot of books didn't necessarily equip you to climb to the top of these ladders. Nor, the authors claimed, did it enable you to make better decisions once you were there.
By every verifiable metric, readers didn't just fail to outperform non-readers—they actually performed quite a bit worse.
The Literacy Delusion had a number of explanations for why reading books seemed to be so much worse for human beings (in terms of emotional wellness and productivity) than other forms of narrative entertainment, but its main theory was the integration hypothesis. That the stream of words in a book trained the human brain into a habit of self-consciousness, that reading books forced human beings to think of themselves as a stream of text, processed through time, making a coherent argument of some sort. And that this overall flattening effect forced readers to ignore aspects of their personality or their situation that were not otherwise in line with the overarching story they'd created about themselves. Basically, reading books causes repression and neurosis.
The Literacy Delusion argued that, yes, human beings are storytelling machines, but that a stream of written text is a particular kind of story—a story that is particularly flat, particularly devoid of conflicting or harmonizing information—and that this flatness creates a peculiar effect on the human brain.
The woman wasn’t totally convinced.
The Literacy Delusion was an entertaining and well-researched book. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't. The woman had no idea! She'd really enjoyed reading it, and she would certainly recommend it to other people. But...she probably wasn't gonna stop reading books.
Nor, if she was honest, did she really buy the argument. It seems like you can prove a lot of things with data. How many of these pop-science books have we read in the past twenty or thirty years? And don’t all of them purport to have some startling and counter-intuitive insight into human behavior? At one point there were two books on the New York Times bestseller list with opposite premises: Blink had argued that human beings' instinctive first impressions are often accurate; Thinking, Fast and Slow, had argued the opposite, that the fast-thinking system had certain biases that made it naturally inaccurate. Both books had seemed pretty convincing! The woman was sure if she mentioned both books to someone else, they'd say, oh, that's not what they said, or, actually, this is how those books really agreed with each other. But wasn't that exactly the point? We couldn't even agree on what the books themselves said, much less on whether it was true or not.
The woman was certainly willing to believe that reading books was bad; she was willing to believe it was good; she was willing to believe it was good, but that it was a skill that was in decline, and that this was bad; or that reading was bad, and the skill was in decline, which was actually good! Every one of these arguments seemed equally convincing to her. She genuinely had no idea.
She’d even be willing to believe it wasn’t in decline at all! To be honest, the woman wasn’t totally convinced that phones weren't basically books. Like...everyone today had a phone, and using those phones involved a lot of reading. This was a much more intimate communion with the written word than was typical (she thought) of fifty or sixty years ago. Nowadays, people were reading text all the time! How could this be bad for literacy? Or was it good for literacy, and that was bad? Or was their reading the bad kind of reading, and that was good, because the good kind of reading was actually bad!
The woman ultimately decided to practice the kind of nuance that apparently reading books discouraged. She would accept The Literacy Delusion’s argument that reading books was bad, and at the same time, she would continue to extol the reading of books as a very pleasurable and life-affirming activity.
Afterword
I am a human being, so obviously I love death-of-literacy takes. I know I ought to be like “kids are always the same, and old people have always complained about them,” but I actually do believe that literacy is declining. I dunno, it does seem both intuitively and demonstrably true that the amount of reading-for-pleasure has gone down considerably, and I imagine the difference, in terms of reading comprehension and writing ability, between a college freshman who reads books and one who doesn't read books is probably pretty big! And that, moreover, the absence in college classrooms of the lay reader (the engineer, for instance, who just happens to read twenty books a year) probably has a coarsening effect on the whole college experience.
At the same time, it is comical that I read so many takes decrying Sally Rooney for being shallow or criticizing the YA-fication of literature. Like...girl, what do you think people are reading? All these kids who in 1975 used to read six books a year and now don't read any books, what do you think they're not reading? They used to read Flowers in the Attic and Valley of the Dolls and James Michener and stuff that most death-of-literature types think is...well...the death of literature.1
You've got the same people (sometimes in the same articles!) critiquing college students who don't read for pleasure, and then critiquing the books that people actually do read for pleasure. Which is it? Which do you want? Which is important? Are the books bad or are they good? If you want to say that reading bad books is bad and reading good books is good, then you can't simultaneously say it's bad that people are reading less overall!
Because that would also mean they're doing less of the bad kind of reading!
Which would be good!
I mean we all know the truth, which is that...reading bad books isn’t actually bad. We want popular literature to be widespread and healthy. When ten million people read Colleen Hoover, that is good, because it trains them to read books, which is an acquired skill.2 It prepares a space in them for real literature. We all know this.
At the same time, we don't want to read that stuff ourselves! And we don’t really think other people should read it. But…it’s kind of hard to explain why. It’s just…it’s bad. Don’t read it. The work is aesthetically distasteful—reading it won’t hurt you or anything, because usually what’s bad in it is just reflective of whatever’s bad in society as a whole! But…it’s still bad. It’s not doing the work that literature can do, of elevating you, making you see more nuance—whatever it is you think great literature does, bad literature doesn’t do it. That’s sort of the point of the good / bad distinction, right?
But I think we all understand that, in reality, the good stuff isn't that much better than the bad stuff! Yes, Proust is better than Sally Rooney and Sally Rooney is better than Colleen Hoover, but all three, fundamentally, are more similar than they are different. Fundamentally, all reading is quite similar. And it's very different from reading something that isn't a book, or from watching video or from listening to music. Even listening to an audiobook is much more like reading a book than it is like, say, watching a TV show.
Whatever good thing reading does, Colleen Hoover probably does it too!
Which is something we all know—it's just boring to talk about. Like...this is the most, basic, banal mainstream talking point. Kids should read. Whatever they read is good.
Obviously, yeah, I don't know if you need to teach popular novels in school! I don't think the erosion of all norms is good. I think generally speaking, you want popular fiction to feel...illicit. I don't think it particularly helps the cause of literacy to, say, teach YA fiction in school. Maybe literacy is better helped by forcing kids to read books they hate, so that later they can discover a literature on their own that feels more valuable. It’s a bit sad how English teachers kind of commoditize and repackage the idea of rebellion—by creating a safe space for rebellion, you rob students of the ability to actually rebel (this is a theme in my first YA novel, by the way, where the villain is an English teacher).
It's also sad when institutions try to encourage popular culture. Like, if something's popular, it should be able to survive institutional disdain. If it can't survive critique by people above it, then...what's the fun? I'm not gonna stop talking trash on popular things. I enjoy doing it.
Reading bad books is good; reading better books is better. I think that’s basically the opinion everyone has, although we try to disguise it in various ways.
I think pleasure-reading will endure. Like, TikTok and video games are unbelievably stimulating, and yet people still read for pleasure. Similarly, cocaine and meth and LSD are very stimulating, but they didn't replace reading for pleasure! I personally have quit both playing video games and drinking alcohol, and I’ve done so in part because I prefer to read books.3 Nobody forced me to make these changes. There was little material benefit in it. I just experience reading as being a superior and more life-affirming activity. It is more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding.
We live in a world where record-breaking numbers of people are running marathons—a race that literally killed the first guy who ran it—and yet we think reading has somehow become so hard that nobody’s gonna do it.
People want to do hard things, if they are things that are worth doing.
There's something about reading books that's just...very much able to compete with other forms of pleasure. Even if reading books had no institutional support at all (i.e. no novels or book-length creative works were taught in high school or college), lots of people would still read for pleasure!
Compulsory schooling is itself a fairly recent phenomenon—this is a theme of another Substack I read,
. Forcing people to send their kids to school is a pretty new thing—it’s a lot newer than, say, railroads.People were reading books for pleasure long before the government started forcing kids to do it in school. So long as there is literacy, people will read for pleasure, and modern technology requires literacy on a level that is unprecedented in human history. The assertion, I think, is that smartphones have created some new form of casual literacy, where people can read, say, a text message, but are incapable of reading a whole book. But to me that’s called…just not liking to or wanting to read books! The disinclination creates the inability, and then the inability feeds the disinclination. This simply describes the condition of being a non-reader. That condition might have increased in prevalence, but there’s no reason to believe it will become total and will result in the destruction of the entire practice of reading books.
Now—right now, in America, in 2024, half the population has read a book in the last year. In fifty years, will this number be a quarter? Or a fifth? It’s very possible! But then we’d still be talking about tens of millions of people! That contraction has immense ramifications for the economic model that underpins writing and publishing books, but I don’t know if the effect on literature itself will be particularly dire. Tens of millions of people is still more than enough people. Reading won’t become as rarefied as going to the opera. It’s always gonna be something that’s done by many tens of millions of Americans.
P.S. As I noted a few days ago, I’ve written a novella called “Money Matters” that I’m going to post in this spot in exactly four weeks. I’ve been pitching it as House of Mirth meets American Psycho. I probably won’t give you the full synopsis in every post, but I’ll likely describe the story at least a few more times before Nov. 1.
Further Reading
It should go without saying that I have no idea whether reading is good or bad for the human brain. I haven't looked into it at all. This is an empirical question that can be studied and certainly has been studied. I'm sure people have spent their lives studying it.
I've been exposed over the years to a number of articles claiming that reading books is good for our brains and well-being. But I'm sure that if I looked into the research underpinning these articles, I'd find that it has many of the same holes that a lot of behavioral research does. We don't even really know what an effective or happy or productive person looks like, so...how can it really be measured?
I personally would read The Literacy Delusion in a heartbeat! And I've no doubt that if someone wanted to, they could write this book and fill it with studies that convincingly make the point. Then some other social scientist would start a podcast debunking it, and I probably wouldn't listen to the podcast because...I would've always kinda known that the book was just sophistry. It wasn’t truth, it wasn’t seeking after wisdom—it was merely a rhetorical performance. One can value the performance without actually needing to believe in it.
That's the cycle with these things, no? I read Blink, and I read Thinking, Fast and Slow, and I read Stumbling Upon Happiness, and probably a half-dozen of these other books, and after a certain point it's not really about science—it's just a science-themed textual performance that's very engaging to watch and listen to.
Nota Bene
You know what’s annoying though is when a Substacker writes a whole post and pretends they’re only replying to, like, actual articles in real magazines, instead of the Substackers that we all know they’ve also read, who’ve written much better takes on the subject.
In my case,
writes these very gloomy death-of-literacy takes that I love, and that I definitely think you should read. I’ve linked to some below. These are very provocative pieces—they don’t seem to demand that I take any action or that I try to somehow reform the world, and that’s precisely what I like about them. Whatever happens will happen. Personally, I think literacy (and reading for pleasure) will endure not just as elite activities but as mass activities. I also think that popular culture and high culture (at least when it comes to literature) are basically symbiotic. I’m not sure Sam agrees—but you can and should read him yourself and see (it’ll be a lot more rewarding than reading that Atlantic article, which says basically all the stuff you know anyway).
I used to have a very long aside about James Michener in this post (it was easily 1,000 words long), but I cut it for space. Will save it for another article I’m planning about Michener, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Herman Wouk, and the veritable plethora of other middlebrow novelists I’ve loved.
I did in fact read a Colleen Hoover novel, many years ago, before she became a BookTok phenomena, and I found it to be fine! Much more readable than, say, Fifty Shades of Grey, which I attempted to read a number of times and simply couldn’t get through. I found Hoover to be on par with Twilight—which, in retrospect, was pretty decent. Like, Bella Swann had quite a compelling voice! Because…she was depressed. She was so sad! But…she could be reached by the right kind of love.
I wrote a blog post that said, essentially, if you want to read more books, you should quit doing other fun stuff.
I don’t know why it feels so radical when you say “to read more, do other things less” but it’s true. I used to enjoy a beer in the evenings but I’ve cut way back because it prevents me from reading the books I’d like to read. Same with TV - binge-watching a series takes the same amount of time but is less worthwhile than reading a book (for me). Of course, I still have a YouTube problem…
Re: death of literacy - the whole debate strikes me as primarily an emotional one, similar to the “death of the liberal arts” debate. The people writing these pieces, with the perspective to report on changes, have truly had their lives changed by literature and humanities. We are the people who have experienced that power and want others to share that experience! But it’s such an emotional experience, to be formed by books, that the defenses of liberal study often come off as completely irrational and self-serving because they are. Taking the long view, more people read books (even difficult books) now than when most of the great works we extol were written, and there’s no danger of them dying out.
Personally I just want more people to read Proust so that I can gain social value with normies (many of whom haven’t heard of him) and also enthuse about why he’s so great more often than just randomly online. I do think these works can be life changing, but people who want their lives changed by books will find them. Lots of people just don’t care and that’s okay!
I do make a mostly conscious effort to mix great books with good middlebrow books with entertaining books with entertaining trash. Part of this is due to being a devoted reader of genre fiction (mostly SF, but Romance and Mystery too.) Part of this is an interest in popular fiction of a century or more ago. Lots of it is an acknowledgement that sometimes I need to read something relaxing. Reading, say, Anna Karenina (the last officially sanctioned Great Book I read) is absorbing and fascinating and truly inspiring at times -- but not relaxing), while reading, say, D. E. Stevenson (a once quite popular writer of better than average light romance novels (or lightly comic regular life novels, plus one rather poor SF novel) is indeed relaxing -- but satisfying too.
Also I read books for a book club and sometimes we pick a downright bad book because we didn't know in advance it would be bad. Though I have tried the occasional big bestseller that is really really bad and I have to give up -- they can be unreadable. (I'm thinking of Dan Brown and E. L. James here.)
Last authors read ... Ellen MacGregor. Mat Johnson. Sofia Samatar. K. J. Parker. Kaliane Bradley. Katherine Rundell. J. D. Salinger. Alex Jeffers. James Morrow. Leo Tolstoy. Cordwainer Smith. Gene Wolfe. Dorothy Strachey Bussey. Ethel M. Dell. (Better than you might think, but not good!) Fred Pohl. Winifred Watson. Edna O'Brien. Christopher Priest.
Hopefull there are enough bad books in there to overcome the problem of reading good books! :)