Been haunted lately by something C. S. Lewis said—“If one were looking for a man who could not read Vergil but his father could, he might be found more easily in the twentieth century than in the fifth”—and I don’t think we realize how rapidly we’ve slid into a new dark age.

The tragic thing is that we didn't lose mass education and mass literacy through war or invasion; very powerful companies have spent billions designing ways to keep us uninformed and distracted. We were the best-educated people in history and we surrendered it voluntarily.