I hadn’t seen this post but I think these criticisms of my essay on the post-literate society are frustratingly naive.

• “The most telling moment in his argument comes when he describes pre-literate societies as "mystical, emotional, and antagonistic" in their thinking, as though these qualities were inherently inferior to the cool rationality of print.”

  - I don’t think oral cultures are inferior. The argument is not that literacy is inherently superior just that it underpins the complex civilisation we live in. It’s not that oral cultures are worse. But I think things would be worse for us in our particular culture if we became less literate.

• “ I also watch teenagers conduct sophisticated research across multiple platforms, synthesising video essays, academic papers, podcasts, and primary sources with a fluency that would have seemed impossible a generation ago.”

  - This is a nice anecdote but it ignores the evidence for declining concentration, declining reasoning, and declining intelligence among young people. In America reading and maths skills just hit an all time low. I have no doubt some people do use screens to learn but my argument is about overall effects. It’s obviously not the case that every YouTube video is bad, it’s that the general bias of a screen culture is towards poorer quality thought and information. The most popular podcasters in America Candace Owens, Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. No philosophy podcast is near them.

• “Marriott's piece commits the cardinal sin of conflating correlation with causation when he links literacy rates to democratic revolutions and scientific progress. These transformations emerged from a complex web of economic, social, and technological changes”

  - As I say in the essay, I don’t think literacy was the sole cause of the enlightenment and democracy. I don’t know of anyone who has such a naively monocausal view of history. But I would be interested to speak to a historian who thinks literacy is unrelated to democracy and enlightenment. That it played a role in these developments is as close to a consensus as you’ll find in history.

• “What particularly troubles me about Marriott's argument is how it reinforces a kind of intellectual gatekeeping that libraries have been working to dismantle for decades. When we insist that serious thought can only happen through traditional academic texts, we exclude enormous numbers of people who process information differently.”

  - I think this is a depressing instance of the soft bigotry of low expectations. Some people are not up to complex texts so they can have TikTok videos instead. Everyone should have access to the most rewarding and complex forms of knowledge.