The Death of Reading? Christians, Smartphones, and the Rise of Post-Literacy
Cameron (00:00)
Hello and welcome to Thinking Out Loud. I'm your co-host, Cameron McAllister.
Nathan (00:05)
And I'm your cohost, Nathan Rittenhouse.
In this episode, Cameron and I talk about an article talking about living in a post-literate society. So we talk about the declining rate of literacy in American and Western culture. Some of the parts of that that are new, some that aren't have a broader discussion on being people of the book and what it looks like to pay attention to the right things in life. If you're a reader, you're going to like this. If you're not a reader, maybe this will challenge and encourage you in the right direction. If you like what we do, continue to like, share, and subscribe.
And if you want to donate and support the work that we're doing, you can do so by visiting www.toltogether.com.
Cameron (00:07)
Glad you got the flannel memo, Nathan.
Nathan (00:09)
Yeah, I was just getting ready to make a joke.
Welcome to wear a flannel shirt day. So, okay. Now down to business.
Cameron (00:13)
That's right. One of
us, yeah right, one of us is better at actually chopping wood and cutting down trees and I'll let you, I'll let you, ⁓ dear audience guess which one.
Nathan (00:23)
Cameron can do it with his mind.
Cameron (00:25)
There you go. So I'm thinking about being in a post-literate culture. Once again, this argument comes up from time to time and actually it's sort of a tradition these days. have been, yeah, books have been decrying the death of the novel and the death of literacy for quite a while. There was a kind of a cottage industry of it in the 1980s. have
Nathan (00:39)
Yeah, I was gonna say.
Cameron (00:53)
I have a book on my shelves called The Gutenberg Elegies. Get it? That came out I think in either early 90s or the 1980s. That was by Sven Birkertz. But many books like that. This is a piece by James Marriott who writes for the Times, also a frequent contributor to UnHerd. And this is from his sub stack. yeah, his title kind of says it all, The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society.
So he makes an argument that we are basically moving into a great age of unreason of sorts, or that we're maybe returning to feudalism in a sense. And the culprit is of course, you guessed it, it's the smartphone. And what's happened?
Nathan (01:44)
I thought you were going to say it was the declining
sales of pianos. But okay, I'll save that thesis for another day.
Cameron (01:49)
Yeah, yeah,
was, interestingly enough, that was a close second. Right, so of course, the black mirror in your hand and the all-pervasive screen. He makes the argument and he also, does bring in some sobering stats about not just declining book sales, but declining rates of literacy. You and I have read, I think, our fair share of
meditations and reflections from professors also and teachers who have noted the dwindling capabilities of their students. One really sobering piece came out in the Atlantic about some of the kids at Ivy League schools who are functionally illiterate. One story basically says that they couldn't understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Now, Bleak House is a big sprawling novel, but it used to be read
Nathan (02:21)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (02:47)
not only by droves and droves of adults, but by children when it came out. I have, yeah, so I have to basically be honest here. I have a tendency to, you and I are both natural born skeptics, Nathan, which might come as a surprise to some of you because we're both Christians and we're believers and believers, yeah, are, know, it's the cultural wisdom says if you're a believer, you're
Nathan (02:54)
in here.
It's true.
Cameron (03:15)
gullible and you're credible. that is, Nathan and I tend to often, we'll hear something apocalyptic like this about a post-literate age and we'll say, okay, yeah, but is it really that bad? But in this case, Nathan, I have to be honest. I think, let me just say a few things about where I stand here then I'll say a little bit more about his argument and kick it over to you. I think we will always have a cadre.
of literate people who are committed to the written word, who care about, as in the phrase of Matthew Arnold, the best of what's been written and said, and want to preserve that and transmit that down to the next generation. There will always be a group of people committed to that. Sometimes the group is larger and sometimes they have more cultural influence than in other times. So having said that, I will readily concede
that we are in an interesting time where the cultural influence of people who care about the written word is smaller, a lot smaller. The humanities are not valued.
Nathan (04:25)
Mm-hmm, sure. I don't know anybody who would
argue with you on this. Nobody.
Cameron (04:31)
Who would argue with me on that? On the other hand, this is also, we talk a lot about dwindling attention spans, and this may not be a fair comparison, but so he pulls a story from Neil Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, where you had presidential debates in, say, with President Lincoln before he was president.
And these debates would go for hours and hours and hours. mean, we're talking an hour opening statement and then an hour and a half rebuttal. And then in other cases, the speech would be three hours long and then Lincoln is expected to respond to that. And meanwhile, there's a large audience who are sitting watching all of this with rapt attention. So he'll talk about that in a kind of wistful tone. You can't imagine that today. Really?
Or can you though? mean, people will listen to Jean Paget or Jordan Peterson drone on about archetypes for three hours sometimes, right? So now you could talk about a difference in the quality of what's being said and all of that. I totally, I just want to set all of that aside and say that on the one end you have, it's an interesting moment where literary minded people are still around and they're passionate and they are
They care and they're committed to the cause. have less cultural influence than ever. But on the other hand, people really want rich reflections and stuff. I don't want to use the word content. I'm getting so tired of the word content. They want to hear people talking for a long, long time and they gobble it up voraciously. So that's also happening as well in the midst of all of this. So I just want to, I want to
honor the complexity of the situation there.
Nathan (06:26)
So let's throw in some other factors here and make it as Christians speaking on this. So people of the book, people of the word. So the written word, our Bibles are very important to us and the way in which we think about how we process reality and the revelation of God's will, descriptions of Jesus, and then obviously as being the word. ⁓ there's a deep literary kind of ethos baked into the Christian faith. That being said,
You said, you know, in the future there will be a smaller proportion of people probably who are ⁓ very interested in the written word and in big ideas and books. And well, for like 1500 years of Christianity, that group was called monks or, you know, or, or different kinds of clergy who were a very small percentage of the history of the church could actually read. If you think up and up through, you know,
Cameron (07:10)
Monks. Yep.
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (07:22)
⁓
Cameron (07:22)
Yep.
Nathan (07:23)
Gutenberg, ⁓ basically the Reformation, by and large, so as a pre-literate society. ⁓ So what we're talking about here, sometimes I think some of the conversations like, this is what we're descending into in the future, as if it's unknown and uncharted territory. ⁓ Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's a return to the past. However, in this case, Cameron, I think it is different because it's not like, there are
People who can't read and they're going to be getting their stories from looking at the icons engraved on the outside of the local church That's not how this goes It's it's all of that empty space of the not reading is then filled with a whole lot of other visual and audio content that so it's ⁓ That seems to me to be the difference here It's it's it's not that we're so we have had functional cultures in which the vast majority of people were not deeply literate and still formed
Cameron (07:59)
Mm-hmm, yeah.
It's replaced.
Nathan (08:18)
rich communities and had common stories and ethos and festivals and ⁓ actual deep local culture. The future that we're going into in a post-literate context is not like that at all. And so let's, I just want to point that out as we go by that this is new.
Cameron (08:28)
Mm-hmm.
Well, James Marriott actually begins the article talking about the quiet revolution, the reading revolution, where you all of a sudden, you know, had this explosion in reading on the part of the general public. And he also talks about some of the moral concerns that were raised at the time, which will strike us as very quaint and funny. But some conservatives and clergymen at the time were worried about reading that it would
you know, that it would basically make people really restless, that it would make them unhappy with the current circumstances of their lives. And he points out, this might all sound very quaint, but actually these fears were not completely misplaced because as it turned out, when people read, they started asking harder questions. They started asking questions about organized religion. They started asking questions about how the government was spending money.
and how society was organized, and they began to reason more carefully. But so there were some risks and it brought about some actually fairly sweeping changes. this but
Nathan (09:46)
this was a this was a liberal
progressive idea. Let's couch it a little bit. Yeah.
Cameron (09:50)
That's the way he's, that's the way he's, mm-hmm, yes.
And that's the way he's saying it. But you had, you had these great works coming out. You had, you know, Kant's critique of, pure reason, which in its full, I mean, it's, it amounts to about 900 pages if you, if you read the whole thing. But part of what he points out there, and it's worth saying this out loud. We, we know this, but part of the power of the written word is that it.
It can't manipulate you in the way an image can. It can't scream at you. It can't flash a bunch of images, you know, other images at you to try to sway you. can't appeal to your emotions in the same way. It can make an appeal to your emotions, but it's going to be more slow and careful. It's also more refined. It's also frozen in place right there. And so it's open to scrutiny. And a big part of the philosophical, it has an editor.
Nathan (10:44)
It has an editor and a publisher. There's
a community behind the idea.
Cameron (10:48)
Yes. Well, part that's,
that's huge for me because then that means the ideas have been refined in, you know, many times over. You've had many eyes on it before it saw the light of print. So all. You that's huge. You often say that about books that you can process it at your own speed. That is manifestly not the case when, when it comes to scrolling. When you are assaulted by multiple multitudes of images, some of them extremely
Nathan (10:58)
And you can process it at your own speed.
Cameron (11:17)
Some of them amusing, some of them very, very harmful. mean, we think about, you know, the Charlie Kirk assassination. How many people saw that and, who didn't want to see that because it just popped up and the video, you don't have to click play anymore. It just, it just begins. It just happens. It starts to play automatically and it goes on a loop. So all of that is, is drastically undermined by the smartphone.
and the era of the smartphone. he calls that a counter revolution where images are now winning out, appeals to the emotion are now winning out and mysticism is winning out over careful reasoning and careful argumentation. Because careful reasoning and careful argumentation requires you to slow down. It takes time. You have to work through it. And there is
So I don't know about dwindling attention spans, Nathan. People will pay tons and tons of attention to stuff these days. The problem is what they're paying attention to. Sometimes we're willing to pay tons of attention to very trivial stuff. And I think that might be more of a factor. And I think there is a greater sense of impatience when it comes to careful argumentation. Maybe that's me just splitting hairs, but.
Nathan (12:35)
So, mean, yeah, but
is the whole thing that we're really processing, what does it mean to know and understand what's real? Now, there's a whole section of reading that has no bearing on anything helpful. I could take, you know, pick my list of genres that if they didn't exist, I think the world would go on. Amish romance. You know, whatever. you know, it's not there in any sort of meaningful, like, it is purely entertainment.
Cameron (12:58)
How did I know you were going to say that? Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan (13:05)
And so in the same way that you could look at TikTok or any other social media thing, people have been using reading as escapism from process. I do. mean, as a kid, those tons of fun, come home from a busy day at school, grab a book, flop on the couch and jump into a world of animals and what like, ⁓ or about stories of different parts of the world or different areas in time that. Yeah. So.
Cameron (13:24)
Okay.
Can I interject there for just a second?
Just
one quick qualification there, and I don't think you're saying this, but so I think reading as a form of escapism can be great I think it's fine It's another thing if you're indulging in what we could call fantasy in the negative sense, so somebody could lose themselves in You know Isaac Osamoff or the Chronicles of Narnia or Ray Bradbury, and I think that'd be a good thing particularly for a young child somebody losing themselves in a harlequin romance is
something else entirely. But I take your point too, that there are, so somebody could read, could read voracious amounts of Danielle Steele novels, sorry, Danielle Steele fans, or Amish romance novels and their attentions, there you go. And you can have, mean, you have a very powerful attention span. You're, you're gobbling up all of these words, but we would say, yeah, but you're gobbling up stuff that's of a low quality or even degrading material.
Nathan (14:04)
Yeah.
Nora Roberts, here we go.
Cameron (14:33)
So the issue, I think the issue isn't so much, I like that you're underscoring that with books themselves, because I don't think the issue is always attention span. It's where the attention goes. If people are spending nine hours on average on the Gen Z apparently spends nine hours on average on screens and people who are a little bit older, seven hours, that's a lot of attention. It's just directed somewhere that is less helpful.
Nathan (14:57)
no, hang on. Wait
a second. So here's the trick though, is that it is hard for a book to just show up in my kitchen. I have to make a conscientious decision to order it, to go to a store, or somebody that really knows me gifts it to me or suggests it to me. There's a choice for a book to get into my house. When you're spending nine hours a day looking at a screen, you're not directing your attention to that content. You're not...
Cameron (15:21)
That's passive. Yeah.
Nathan (15:26)
You don't have nine hours worth of questions that you need YouTube to solve for you. So it's not directed attention. It's what's the opposite? I mean, some of it is.
Cameron (15:32)
Mm-hmm.
Some of it is, and some of it isn't. Some of it is, some
of it isn't. Yeah, that's the thing. Because I think this is why I think this is complex because you're right. A lot of it, if you're just standing, sitting, scrolling, that is passive. Yes. And it's all finding you. You're not finding it to use your phraseology, Nathan. But some of it is also people choosing podcasts or people, so people tuning into Joe Rogan for X amount of hours or watching Jordan Peterson or Jubilee. I don't know.
I mean, plenty of that could be educational in nature. So there are varying degrees of edutainment. There's a great phrase. Nathan and I are both big fans, as you can tell. So it's a mixed bag there. But the qualitative difference though that we're talking about when it comes to actually, let's say you're reading a quality book of some kind. Maybe it's a fictional work by Wendell Berry, maybe it's Shakespeare, maybe it's Jane Austen.
Nathan (16:08)
Edutainment.
Yeah.
Cameron (16:34)
What the difference is there is you are going to be forced to slow down, be more careful, be more reflective. But the more you do that, the stronger your, basically it's going to strengthen all sorts of amazing capacities in you. It's going to strengthen your ability to form coherent arguments, to keep a lot of different thoughts in your mind at once.
to see many different points of view, many of which are mutually exclusive and recognize that they're each views that have their own internal consistency perhaps. This is something that by the way is exceedingly rare I'm finding in people. They're not able to do this. Yeah, let's hear it. Yes.
Nathan (17:18)
you want an example of this? You want an example of this? So, I was thinking
about this the other day. You'll have some YouTube pundit. ⁓ if this happens, we can pick something. If the US bombs Iran, it'll start World War III. Okay, so you pick 15 people who have said that with millions of followers, and then the US bombs Iran and World War III doesn't start. And the next day, do you know how many ⁓ followers they lost for being wrong? Zero.
They probably even picked up a few. that format, if you had a book where the characters changed names and plot every chapter, would be an incoherent, you're like, this doesn't even like, why am I spending my time? Look at this. Doesn't even make sense. Like the internal coherence here. This is a dumb book. However, when it comes to you through a video, you're like, okay, off to the next crazy thing. This person says we don't expect coherence.
Cameron (17:48)
Yeah.
Insistency and coherence. That's a really good example, actually. Yes. well, because when you're in that zone where it's all sensationalism and images, and frankly, just entertainment, when something is made to be as seductive and entertaining as possible, it's bypassing your critical faculties. So you're not engaging with it in the same way. You would think, well,
Nathan (18:16)
or consistency, yeah.
But where does it get stored?
So, this is the other thing that I was given an anti-multitasking talk one time. ⁓ And part of it is that if you're doing two things at the same time, your brain very often doesn't know how to categorize the information that you're taking in. So if you're trying to read a book and listen to a podcast at the same time,
Cameron (18:46)
Hmm.
Nathan (19:08)
the chances of your brain properly contextualizing and categorizing the details of the story that you will need to be able to recall later is far lower than if you were just doing one thing. And so I'm wondering like, where does, so it has to be shaping and forming our character and to Marriott's argument, might categorically be making us dumber, which I want to ask you about. But the thing of it is, that the information is not,
So it's not usefully stored in our minds in a way that we can recall it to do anything with it. So it's shaping and forming our character in the way that our minds work, but I'm... Yeah, it's a different... ⁓ So, I mean, but to the point there, what do you make of his kind of argument that there's a correlation here with the lowering of the average IQ of Americans?
Cameron (19:47)
Yeah.
So I think he's right in the sense that now, I mean, you can set aside the issue of IQ testing. That's highly controversial. But if we're just talking about basic cognitive capabilities, it's demonstrably true. If you have students these days who are basically practically incapable of reading a complex book and understanding it.
Nathan (20:30)
Okay, hang on. We're making this, I think we're going too deep, too fast here. Let's not pick on students. Let's just talk about like life in general in the world in which we live. More and more people are having stories of, I'll give you one. So my brother has this golf cart that his kids drive around on the farm doing chores. The engine blows up in the golf cart. He posted on Facebook marketplace for $250, know, scrap parts golf cart with a blown engine. Does not run. And here's the name of the town that it's located in.
Cameron (20:31)
and
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (21:01)
boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, He's telling me, like, look at my phone. Can you please send me a 30 second video of this engine running? Can you show me, how do I know that it runs? What town is this in? Like the first 25 messages were answered by the title of the post.
Cameron (21:11)
Yeah. Yep. Yep.
Nathan (21:19)
And he's like, what?
Cameron (21:20)
I could give you tons of examples
along the same lines. Yes. So again, I agree with him. think, no, I think, I think you are seeing a dumbing down that's happening, but here's, here's how I want to qualify that. That's not necessarily an apocalyptic forecast. I think it will take real effort to counter, to, to counteract the effects of all of this. So you asked earlier, where does, where's all this stuff stored? Well,
If you're watching a video where some guy makes some wacky political prediction, it proves to be untrue or talks about the rapture. And then the rapture, amazing. Right. yes. And, and, know, when, when, when the said event does not occur, the person likely doesn't lose that many followers, but you're, you've got them, whether wittingly or unwittingly, probably more in an entertainment category in the mind where you're looking, you know, just for
Nathan (21:57)
yeah, the world has ended like twice in the last month and we missed it both times.
Cameron (22:17)
the quick reward of a dopamine rush or something along those lines. it's, it's that kind now that we're being, if, you are very online or very on your phone all the time, that you are absolutely being conditioned in that direction. And I'm not speaking in terms of some grand conspiracy theory, although there is a concerted effort to keep you glued to your phone because it represents massive amounts of money for people. But
It can be, but it can be reversed. See, human beings, I don't like the phrase neuroplasticity because it sounds so, well, it just sounds so darn secular. Now it's fine so far as it goes. I mean, I don't like the language of clinical psychology kind of co-opting everything. I prefer to just, this might sound a bit more cumbersome, but I prefer to say human beings are transformable. that's, but neuroplasticity means the same thing. Look, you can reshape your brain through habits, basically.
Nathan (22:52)
I'll do tell.
Cameron (23:16)
So you can change this. It's not hard. Well, it's simple, but it's not necessarily easy because we're often addicted to our phones, but it is simple. What you have to do is prioritize real life. And we all know this. So the amazing thing here is Nathan, we will, if you're talking about this kind of the issue of, you know, a post-literate culture, you're in the position of saying things that are so obvious.
Nathan (23:22)
Yeah.
Cameron (23:46)
You need to spend less time in front of a screen. You need to spend less time on your phone. Yeah.
Nathan (23:49)
Hang on a second, hang on a second.
Hang on. Let's, ah, what if you really don't like real life?
Cameron (23:58)
Well, many people don't. That's right. Yeah.
Nathan (23:59)
And many people don't. And I think we
need to take that seriously because
Cameron (24:03)
Yes.
Nathan (24:07)
When Netflix says that its main competitor is sleep.
You're like, well, that's a shocking statement, but why does it have that draw is because we do live in a world where people are fundamentally disillusioned with the, the, the react with the world around them. ⁓ and so distraction as a coping mechanism is, is a thing.
Cameron (24:15)
Mm-hmm.
Reality.
Yes.
And we should absolutely, so that is deeply sad. That shows the level of just sadness in our culture and despair. But that actually.
doesn't take too long for those walls to come down. This is, and come down is an important phrase. You think about this in terms of addiction. When you're sobering up, it's a painful experience initially, and you go through withdrawals. If you're heavily addicted to your phone or the online world, you will experience withdrawal symptoms because you want constant stimulation.
You're content, you're, you're, are conditioned for that and you want constant amusement. It's also by the way.
Nathan (25:25)
But what makes you
think anybody ever needs to come down from this? I guess is my question.
Cameron (25:31)
Well, in order to actually appreciate life itself and to restore, well, and also to get back in touch with reality, because people, ironically, some of the secular voices who understand this most deeply are tech entrepreneurs who in their own lives escape from all of this and
Nathan (25:48)
Yeah, but this is...
Cameron (25:54)
keep minimal devices in their homes and often go on digital holidays and digital fasts, do a lot to protect their children from this. And that's, so I'm just.
Nathan (25:59)
But have you read any of the articles
on this as a form of privilege? Of saying, that's nice, you have enough money that your kids can read? And there's some weird reverse stuff happening here. It's interesting, we live in a time now where obesity is correlated with poverty, not scarcity. That's kind of odd in human history. ⁓ Yeah, of some of these things that the markers of
Cameron (26:07)
Of course. You have enough money. Yeah, I have.
Correct, yeah. Wild, isn't it? Mm-hmm.
Nathan (26:29)
who cares about them and who has the luxury of...
Cameron (26:30)
wealth and status.
Nathan (26:36)
Yeah, I'm less, maybe I'm just less optimistic. think the trend is for the ultimate, so think of it this way. think, man, it's been years. I read that the per capita expenditure on marketing is like 700 and some dollars per American. So you're looking at each year, and I'm sure it's over thousand now with inflation and it's been a couple of years. So let's say it's thousand bucks.
companies are investing a thousand dollars for you to look at their stuff online, basically. Then right now, the per capita expenditure for AI is $1,800. So let's round up on some stuff and say about $3,000 a year is being spent in order to grab and keep your attention in a digital world. What are you doing to counteract $3,000 per person? I'm just saying the economy is geared toward, even if you look at the concentration of our
Economy in the technical sense the economy is geared toward us all being deeply and almost total like at the point in which we can live in an 8x8 room with a VR headset and IV drip of the right nutrients That will be considered S &P 500 success. Where people going to start rebelling?
Cameron (27:58)
Yeah, I mean, I think the cards are stacked against you in terms of the overall infrastructure that you just mentioned. But that said, I think you more and more people I'm seeing more and more of a hunger for meaning deep experiences and deep by deep, mean, rich, reflective experiences that are not instantaneous and sensationalistic and a deeper desire for human connection.
one-on-one connection, there's growing recognition that all of this is needed. so, yes, it will require some counter-cultural maneuvers. I do happen to think that sitting down quietly and reading a book is a highly counter-cultural activity. I think it's quite, I think punk rock's a good word for it. It is subversive.
Nathan (28:44)
the new punk rock Cameron. There he is.
Cameron (28:51)
It's flying in the face of so much of what all of those forces you mentioned, Nathan, that are vying for your attention or vying is too soft a term perhaps, who are trying to throttle you. And again, the human beings, we are transformable creatures. A ⁓ person can change. You can change your life. And that really can't happen. Now it requires...
You can't do it on your own. You're going to need community. You will need help and support in order to just maintain the morale to do all of this, but it can be done. It will put you in deeper touch with reality, but then you'll find also that disillusionment with reality, that sense that life is too much, that reality is too harsh, that's something I want to escape.
that will begin to dwindle as well as you begin to gain a deeper appreciation for real connections, for the real, for the actual world around you, as in going outside, seeing the sky, enjoying the created order, enjoying the people in your life, or maybe meeting new people in your life, engaging in actual acts of worship. These are the kinds of things that we need to bring our feet back onto the ground.
Nathan (30:16)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (30:17)
And
it can be done and it is being done, but you're right. There are a lot of forces arrayed against you and you do have a huge advantage if you are wealthy and can afford expensive digital retreats and can afford to use email on a minimal basis and all of that. Not everybody has that luxury, but all of us, all of us, no matter where we find ourselves in socioeconomic terms, all of us can set limits on screen time.
All of us can be more wise in how we use our technology.
Nathan (30:50)
So I think let's talk about a couple of practical things. Like where does this go from here? So we can like point our fingers, ⁓ over there, these people, this, that, and the other thing, blah, blah, blah. Let's do a little inward self analysis here ⁓ and seek a little conviction. I think a very helpful practice for myself. I know some of the folks you work with at the CS Lewis Institute only kind of doing an evaluation of starting a discipleship program is kind of a ruthless time evaluation.
What am I actually doing with my time? And then I like JJ Davis' little TQA total quality attention. What is the direction of my focus? What is the duration of my focus? And what is the quality of my focus? So direction, duration, and quality. ⁓ Those are helpful to think through. ⁓ If I'm driving in the car with my wife, we're together, the duration is there, but if we're both listening to separate
Cameron (31:23)
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (31:49)
audio something and staring out the window the opposite, like it's not quality. And so thinking about quality time of direction, duration and ⁓ quality is one part of that. just ruthless time analysis. You have more time in your life than you think. I actually am almost finishing up a little experiment on this, just personal confession of like, how much time would I have? Do you have time to read a big book? That's the question. So in July,
I was on vacation, picked up a copy. was like, I'm to read a big book and I'm going to read this big book instead of going to YouTube, just looking for stuff. I'll use this if I'm, you know, if I need to look something up fine, but I'm not just going to go like, Oh, let's see what's happening. Um, so I'm like, I have like 50 pages to go in war and peace. You have 50 pages left of the epilogue. Um, but you know, it was like, actually, if you just whittle away and you want to do it, you do have the time and the capacity and a couple of things happen when you're reading like good old classic stuff.
is you do find out in almost hilarious fashion that there's nothing new under the sun. Our capacity for distraction, for political misdirection, ⁓ the desires of the human heart. There's something grounding about reading something old slowly and just laughing to yourself of like, my goodness, this was true in 1860. And it's also like, there's something that's, yeah, grounding and settles you about it. The other thing that,
I see as a potential loss here is this just, when I remember when I lived in Boston, was talking to a young lady who grew up in California. were meeting for something at Harvard for some talk or something. And we got to talking about the books that we had read as elementary students. And we were clicking through similar books that we'd both read. I grew up in West Virginia. She grew up in California and we were having a conversation.
not because those books were like part of a nationalized curriculum, but because like third grade teachers thought these are good books for third graders to read and they should have an understanding of this. But the fact that we both had read them gave us a starting point for a conversation. And that's one of the things that I think we're going to see slip is this sense of like there are kind of like foundational text that everybody could make reference to. And it was a binding part of our culture. And so if you're missing some of those, ⁓
Cameron (34:00)
Mm.
Nathan (34:11)
references, it's going to be harder for you to form community, particularly in a world in which everybody's attention is hyper-individualized by a different algorithm. I mean, so you can still share videos like, hey, did you see this video? Haha. But that's different than, you read and what did you think of? And let's discuss. And this frames the way in which we all collectively think about something. tension span aside, I think there's a cultural
binding element of, you thought, that's why people love book clubs. mean, but in a reading situation, we all probably would have actually completed the same 15 classic books in our high school education. And that would give us some framework for ⁓ discussing reality.
Cameron (34:59)
lot more to be said here and this is is a continuing conversation of course as no you got another rant let's hear it
Nathan (35:04)
Wait, I have one more rant before you close this. I got another rant.
Paper Bibles. Using the Bible as a book instead of through a screen. I'm gonna add 50 years to my life here. I know I've heard all the counterarguments about finding things faster. ⁓ I just can't cross the Rubicon on that one yet, Cameron. I think it's a good discipline.
Cameron (35:16)
Now you're meddling. Yeah, I'm just kidding.
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (35:32)
to read your Bible as a book, not through an infotainment device. All right.
Cameron (35:35)
I'll second that.
No,
I'm with you on that. I'm with you on that. much more, I mean, I think this is a continuing conversation. It's interesting to me. do think, so a few just quick takeaways here. I don't think the problem is one of quantity when it comes to attention spans. I think it's one of quality. Are we paying attention to stuff that actually matters? There, I think we are measurably weaker.
in our age right now. think our, and as a consequence, we are less discerning, we are more easily manipulated, and we are much, much more shallow in our thinking as a culture. I think this can change because we are transformable. Like Nathan, I'm a little bit pessimistic in the sense that I don't see any large scale kind of literary recovery happening.
But I do think there will be, I do see a growing number of younger people in particular who are hungry for deeper connection, deeper levels of articulacy, who want to speak better and who want to communicate better, who want more meaningful, real relationships and who do want to be in touch with reality in a deeper way and who are, who's a, yeah, that's right. God's people have,
Nathan (36:59)
Do know who's been good at this historically? It's called the church.
Cameron (37:07)
A tremendous advantage here. Nathan said it earlier, the initially pejorative phrase, as it was intended initially, people of the book, is true and does characterize us. But again, I'll say something I've been saying over and over again on this podcast. We all need to slow down. Nathan, I'm going to say something here that also might meddle a little bit because this touches on the world of ministry that both Nathan and I are in and public speaking. My guard goes up. My heckles go up.
when I hear a speaker who is very, very loud and immediately very, very frantic and very urgent and speaks a million miles an hour and uses that kind of pleading pastor's voice as I call it, because it's the trademark spirit of frantic, anxious urgency in our age. And it bespeaks a level of manipulation. Even if the person's not trying to do it, it's, it's,
Nathan (37:59)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (38:06)
comes across as disingenuous because they are trying to throttle my attention. But it's also artificial. What I'm really impressed by these days are people and presentations, I'm beginning, I'm talking about the ministry world, that are calming in the best sense, that help me to slow down and to think more carefully. And people who have that kind of calming presence. I think ministers,
seasoned ministers in particular are wonderful examples of this, people will tell my dad sometimes, he's off, he serves in quite a pastoral role these days, he's kind of a sort of a sage, but a lot of people will say, I feel more calm just talking to you. And that's a mark of the inward peace that comes from Christ. And I think that is very needed today.
Nathan (39:02)
Well, as our old
friend Tom has often pointed out to us and to me, he's like, Nathan, do you do remember that you worship a three mile an hour God? And it's such a great line. like, you remember that time in scripture when God was in a hurry and all frantic and bent out of shape? No, no, you do not. And so I take it with a grain of salt, but it's a phrase that sticks in my mind that we worship a three mile an hour God. Big, deep, rich.
Cameron (39:14)
Mm.
And it's gotten quite popular. mean, Dallas Willard's phrase, the ruthless elimination of hurry also became the title of John Mark Comer's bestselling book. And John Mark Comer very much embodies this kind of spirit in his speaking and in his writing. But also if you want to think more carefully and more deeply, and if you want to read something like the critique of pure reason or Twilight of the Idols or Moby Dick or War and Peace or Mrs. Dalloway, you know,
Nathan (39:31)
⁓ not frantic.
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (40:00)
Pick your classic. You're going to have to ruthlessly eliminate hurry because you know what's going to happen if you sit down with a book like war and peace in your hands and
Nathan (40:09)
Well, that's why I don't like poetry.
You can't speed read it.
Cameron (40:12)
You cannot, absolutely not speed read. And I've been reading, the older I get, the more poetry I read. Right now I'm on a real Philip Larkin phase. He's kind of dark, but I like him. But the more you sit down, if you sit down with a book of poetry in your hands or war and peace for goodness sakes, if you're in the spirit of your age, everything in you is going to be screaming, there are so many things you should be doing right now. Why on earth are you rotting, reading this book? You should be answering emails. You should be doing this this this this and this and this.
and have to ruthlessly eliminate hurry because it is actually a very worthwhile endeavor. And you won't come out of reading a book like that unchanged.
Nathan (40:51)
I think Cameron,
we're telling an audience who reads books to go read another book. We are fueling an addiction. We're throwing, we're throwing, we're throwing wood on the fire.
Cameron (40:55)
We are. We enjoy preaching to the choir here. I mean,
TOL listeners, you guys are avid readers. We know that. But go and spread your addiction like wildfire. Like what Lewis calls the good, and he called Christianity the good infection. know, being a reader is also, that's also a good infection. Spread it far and wide.
Cameron (41:32)
You've been listening to Thinking Out Loud, a podcast where we think out loud about current events, reading, and Christian hope.