Reading and Democracy

Most contemporary journalism about social developments starts with a series of assertions. This is a form of argument that can be described as "Imagine if this were true". A recent example is John Harris in The Guardian suggesting that we're all so distracted by TikTok that the death of reading is imminent, and that in turn spells an end to democracy. The mechanism that Harris offers for the first assertion is contextual ignorance: the youth of today - subject to "a distracting and seemingly infinite jumble of random moving images" - cannot see the Fascist overtones of masked men blocking a port. As he puts it (with a smidgen of self-awareness): "But a background in the pre-digital world helps people not just follow national and global events, but clarify and contextualise them. In this case, at the risk of sounding hopelessly pompous, the fear many of us felt as we watched what happened in both ports was surely full of the perspectives gleaned from years of soaking up books and newspapers – and the sense that history often either repeats itself, or rhymes." In support of his claim, Harris cites a new book by the Times columnist James Marriott. I've not read the book (and am not about to), but have read the Substack essay (The dawn of the post-literate society) that was the germ of it and which provides the gist of the argument that we are undergoing an epochal transformation.

According to Marriott, "The tradition of learning is like a precious golden thread of knowledge running through human history linking reader to reader through time. It last snapped during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as the barbarian tides beat against the frontier, cities shrank and libraries burned or decayed. As the world of Rome’s educated elite fell apart, many writers and works of literature passed out of human memory — either to be lost forever or to be rediscovered hundreds of years later in the Renaissance." Marriott's conservative register - the Burkean "linking" of the generations, the dissolution of the educated elite, the immigrant "tides" - means his prose sounds like something that could have been written in the Edwardian era (and probably was). This tone is front and centre in the expanded and scary title of the book: "The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society". As the more libertarian conservative Henry Oliver puts it in a review, "it feels as if James is part of a cohort that wishes to be in a different part of history".

That use of the discredited term "Dark Ages" should set alarm bells ringing. Historians prefer Late Antiquity, a period that runs from the late 3rd to the early 8th century in Western Europe. There was no "collapse" of the Western Roman Empire in 476AD, no "snapping of the thread", but a gradual evolution of the socioeconomic structure away from slave production and commodity trade towards stationary subsistence and a more attenuated trade in elite goods. The social order this gave rise to was more rural and less urban, but this was not an end to civilisation - i.e. the culture of the city - even in areas where towns were largely abandoned, such as Britain. Rome's educated elite didn't disappear, they simply became Church prelates. It's also worth noting that many of the barbarians had already been employed and even educated by the Romans, a longstanding practice. Perhaps the most famous of these was Arminius (Hermann the German), who was taken as a child to Rome, eventually becoming an equestrian rank military officer before leading a revolt in 9AD in defiance of Rome's plans to extend its territory from the Rhine to the Elbe. 

Taking high-ranking hostages like this was routine policy throughout the history of both the Republic and the Empire, which emphasises both the porous nature of the Roman/barbarian boundary at the personal and social level as well as the fact that many barbarian tribes were formal clients or allies of Rome. A similar policy was adopted by many subsequent empires, most notably the British, particularly in respect of the Indian princely states (think of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh becoming an excellent young gentleman at Greyfriars School). The Dark Ages was a popular trope with conservatives a century ago both because of an anglocentrism that assumed the atypical end of Roman rule in Britain was typical of Western Europe and because of long-held fears, from Gibbon onwards, that the British Empire would end in a similar manner: weakened from within and assaulted from without. Or to put it in terms that remain resonant for conservatives today, betrayed by its elites and over-run by foreign invaders.

The historical reality is that the successor states were as literate at an elite level as the same areas were during the late Empire. In other words, literacy was always confined to a small minority of the population. We can be confident about this because of those states' adoption of Christianity, a religion of the Book that drew a clear distinction between the need for a literate elite stratum and for the restriction of literacy among the wider population. By the time of Charlemagne and Alfred the Great, the state was taking a lead in encouraging the spread of literacy, at least among the nobility and the auxiliary classes required to support the state, such as the clergy and merchants. This gradual expansion highlighted a tension in the competing needs of secular society (as commerce and civil law became more prevalent) and the superstructure of the state. This would eventually lead to the Reformation, the explosion of printed matter and popular literacy.

Prior to printing, works of literature frequently "passed out of human memory" due to their fragility and the paucity of copies. Much of Greek literature was lost during the heyday of the Roman Empire, notably with the shift in medium from papyrus scrolls to bound parchment codexes. The latter were more expensive to produce, but longer-lasting, which resulted in many lesser works being dropped. This was exacerbated by a tendency to value Christian texts over pagan at a time when most manuscripts were predominantly produced by the Church (and which explains why many works of Greek philosophy come down to us via Arab copies). Marriott ironically reveals his own ignorance by assuming that these elisions were calculated rather than banally selective: "Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments." This would explain the total absence of any peasants' revolts during said era. John Ball, one of the leaders of the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was a priest, which meant he was literate ("When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?")

Harris doesn't back up his second assertion, that a decline in reading will lead to a decline in democracy, but Marriott does. Unfortunately, he simply cites Neil Postman whose rather silly 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death claimed that television was making us passive and incapable of rational argument. For Marriott, "Just as the advent of print dealt the final death blow to the decaying world of feudalism, so the screen is destroying the world of liberal democracy." This is wrong on three counts. The period of expanding print literature (the post-incunabula era) runs for 300 years from 1500 to 1800. The final death blow to feudalism did not happen till 1806 with the formal end of the Holy Roman Empire. Likewise, we have been entranced by screens for over a century now, both in the cinema and the corner of the living room, yet that period saw the apotheosis of liberal democracy during les trentes glorieuses. Cause and effect is hardly proved in either case. 

Lastly, despite the focus on TikTok, most of what we see on phone screens is print. The Internet is a literary medium that incorporates images. It's like a book with illustrations, but dynamic and with added interactivity (so not passive). It's still the case that print > image online. The idea that we're going to lose the ability to read is obviously ridiculous, but there is no shortage of evidence that particular reading skills or habits are changing. But this isn't novel or even necessarily worrying, and the evidence for this evolution has been around for a very long time. For example, the claim that new university students are functionally illiterate is one that academics have been making since the curriculum was exclusively in Latin. This is self-serving both in the sense that it emphasises that students are empty vessels who must first accept their inferiority, and in the sense that it suggests academics have an ever harder job to do and should be paid accordingly. Likewise, the idea that the young (or the lower orders) are acquiring a novel argot that debases manners and promotes vice has prompted moral panics ever since the earliest days of newspapers.

The reality is that reading techniques change over time to suit the medium and the social context. When you owned only one book, you didn't skim read. When you bought a disposable daily newspaper, you did. The contemporary concern about the loss of literacy is about the how and why of reading, as much as the what. Rose Horowitch, in an influential essay in The Atlantic, claimed that "people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis". That "higher-order" is a tell, like the assumption in 1984 that the proles could be kept quiet with pornography. The challenges of comprehension and synthesis are better explained by the superabundance of text (a fact) rather than the degradation of our abilities (an assumption about the weakness of others, rather than our literate selves). We are inundated with the written word - adverts, labels, tags - in a way that a Medieval scholastic would have found terrifying. This is capitalism, not a loss of virtue.

Just as the remnants of feudalism were cleared away by geopolitics rather than The Rights of Man (let alone the spread of the vernacular Bible in the 16th century), so democracy is now under threat from the power of money in politics and a general disillusion among voters as choice has been restricted to the options acceptable to the rich. Blaming our current situation on TikTok is akin to European reactionaries blaming Napoleon on the Freemasons or twentieth century liberals claiming that Hitler came to power solely because of the Volksempfänger (the people's radio receiver). This kind of hyperbolic history and naive technological determinism, repurposed to justify contemporary pessimism, is what you would expect from a conservative writer like Marriott. What remains less clear is why Harris should echo him so willingly. Is this simply The Guardian's hatred of social media finding common cause with Eeyorish reaction? Or does it reflect the nonconformist traditions of the paper and its belief that the lower orders should devote themselves to self-improvement? Answers on a postcard, if you still know how to write.

Fair Game

One of the values of a historical perspective is that much of the noise disappears. This principle operates over years and decades, but it can also operate over days and weeks. Jason Arday died on the 14th of August, less than 4 weeks ago. With politics and football both back, you might have expected the media circus to have moved on, and British journalists have certainly made the effort to tempt us with new outrages, from Harry and Meghan to dodgy donations. But it's also clear that anger at Arday's treatment by the media has not subsided (the fact that Caroline Flack's name has resurfaced in the discourse tells you there is a deep undertow here), hence the ongoing interest in Nathan Cofnas getting his just desserts and the persistence of columnists attempting to justify their (or their colleagues') treatment of Arday. Examples of the latter include Sarah Ditum's piece for the right-leaning Free Press, in which she attributed the prominence of the story to the summer lull ("As a country, we were desperate for something to talk about"); and Helen Lewis's article in the Nation in which she described Arday as a "fabulist". This term has proved popular with journalists, which is ironic coming from people for whom exaggeration and outright invention is less an occupational hazard than standard operating practice.

According to Lewis, "The central question in this dispute is whether the treatment of Arday—the subject of more than 200 articles in print this year, according to CNN, and hundreds more online—was proportionate." This is correct in identifying the disproportion of the media coverage, which can't be excused as a product of the "silly season", as Ditum does, but Lewis is guilty of a misdirection here. She concedes that he "was subject to extra scrutiny because of his race", and admits that "the media coverage of Arday was harsh and high-volume." But she also claims that this "volume came from competing outlets breaking fresh news, as more and more of Arday’s extraordinary claims crumbled under scrutiny." In short, it was unfair, but he was asking for it. But what exactly was Arday's offence in the eyes of the media, as opposed to in the eyes of the academic community, who remain largely sympathetic to a colleague, or in the eyes of Nathan Cofnas and other "race realists", who remain unsympathetic as a matter of principle.

The use of the word fabulist offers a clue. The classic examples of this type in literature - Walter Mitty and Billy Liar - are comic characters with whom we sympathise. But clearly the type being identified here is a more serious case: someone who has materially gained through deliberate deceit and the manipulation of others. The literary template is more a mountebank like Augustus Melmotte, in Trollope's The Way We Live Now, or even Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley. The emphasis  placed by Lewis on the quote from Arday that "To be honest with you, I thought you'd just believe me", which appeared in Lanre Bakare's Guardian takedown on the 1st of August, is telling. The real charge then is one of imposture. In this narrative, Arday didn't deserve his position, which he secured through a combination of his cheating and exaggeration, Cambridge's lack of due diligence, and a general desire to promote diversity that has had the effect of undermining academic integrity (in a sweet irony, Bakare's piece was amended multiple times due to errors of fact.) This line allows Lewis and other journalists to swerve the accusation of racial prejudice by emphasising that the affair is about academic standards and the corrosive nature of plagiarism.

The problem is that academics themselves have suggested that the general concern with plagiarism is overblown, and that's before you get to the specific examples attributed to Arday. Unsurprisingly, Lewis does not hesitate to attack them for this: "The smaller his alleged offenses, the more easily one can argue that the media hounded him to death. And so Arday has been recast as a small-time plagiarist; academics have lined up to argue that, You know, even that isn’t a very big deal." She criticises Professor Jason Stanley, who wrote a throughtful blog explaining why journalists hadn't even done decent journalism by checking Arday's citations, and Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project, who is a bete noire of the media due to his involvement in legal cases against newspapers. More generally, she dimisses Arday's supporters as "left-wing new media, activist nonprofits, and visual social networks such as Instagram and TikTok." Lewis is delegitimising them, dismissing them as people with an unhelpful agenda or simply unserious and easily-led. It is, of course, her habitual critique of the left.

Though race was obviously a major factor in the wider media's pursuit of Arday, for the liberal media the issue was class. This much became evident in the aftermath of his death. The Guardian's considered assessment sought to divide the sheep and goats in its headline: "A rightwing witch-hunt focused on Jason Arday – but so did legitimate journalism". In the article, Hugh Muir emphasised the distinction: "The right in its hostile, partisan pursuit nevertheless uncovered doubts about the professor’s academic work – accusations of plagiarism – that could not be satisfactorily dismissed. The professor himself made public claims about his life and achievements that could not be verified. Of course that was a good thing for those who, for racist and political reasons, sought to denigrate him, but wasn’t that also a legitimate concern for those who bore him no ill will – indeed cheered his ascent – but see the importance of integrity in academia and public life?" The use of "legitmate concern" appears to be wholly unironic.

Tabloid readers are not assumed to be interested in academic plagiarism, but they are interested in the idea that someone may be nicking a living, or that someone is in the wrong social position. The ideological core of tabloidism is the preservation of hierarchies, hence the fawning over royalty, the obsession with fashionability, and the beasting of the socially marginal. Racial hierarchies are important, but they are invariably trumped by class. Arday's problem wasn't that he was a black man in a built-up area but that he didn't look the part of a pillar of the establishment. He wore dreadlocks and casual clothing. You wouldn't mistake him for Trevor Phillips or Trevor McDonald. Had he stayed at Liverpool John Moores University, it's unlikely that the affair would ever have blown up. At worst, Cofnas's allegations would have been taken as evidence that outside the Russell Group standards continue to decline due to the folly of getting more working class kids into higher education.

Though the hounding of Arday was initiated by the Daily Telegraph's attack on him as "Cambridge’s diversity poster boy", the story quickly spread among the other broadsheets, with predictable results. In the Observer, Kenan Malik insisted that Arday's supporters were fuelling the right by taking up the cudgels, a variation on his usual theme that however objectionable the right might be the left has done itself no favours. In The Times, Camilla Long symbolically reclaimed the Cambridge office of the "God-level fabulist and nonsense-monger", while blaming Arday's rise on "privileged, self-hating white people". The Guardian's sanctimonious approach - deploring the racist bigotry while elevating inconsequential plagiarism to a capital crime - was typical of the way that the story fed upon itself. As Will Self noted in a suitably acerbic attack on the media en masse, "evidence that the pursuit is hurting its object itself becomes content, such that his pain becomes another story, and objections to the coverage—no matter from whom—become another controversy."

It is significant that while the British press did what they normally do - crowbarring the story into existing frames about indulged minorities, the decline of academic standards and the corrosive nature of "woke" in universities and cultural production - it was the US press, albeit commissioning British writers like Ditum and Lewis, that emphasised that this was really a story about the media itself. The headline on Ditum's article - "The Press Didn’t Kill Jason Arday" - is a classic of the "My T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt" genre. The headline on Lewis's article - "The Jason Arday Truthers" - was an attempt to construct an opposition in unflattering terms that could be sneered at for its gullibility, in contrast to the ceaseless professional questers for truth in the press corps. Just re-read her description of it: "left-wing new media, activist nonprofits, and visual social networks such as Instagram and TikTok." Is that a coherent community with shared "truths"? Does it even make sense in its combination of organisations and platforms?

The reason for this transatlantic difference is that the class dimension of the Arday affair has less salience in the US where attacks on Black acdemics have usually targeted middle-class high-achievers whose primary offence is being Black and whose secondary offence is promoting Black Studies. Jason Arday studied race in the context of sociology, but his offence was being appointed as a professor at Cambridge, hence the deflection of blame in Ditum's piece to "The institutional failures that elevated him to Cambridge without vetting his work", which makes it sound like his appointment was almost random, which it clearly was not, as Jason Stanley pointed out at length. At the end of the day, Arday was "not one of us", while the journalists and columnists who hounded him were very much part of the gilded circle of British public life, many of whom went to Oxford or Cambridge. The regret over Arday's death is synthetic, just as it was over Caroline Flack and other victims of press bullying.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous lines from The Great Gatsby are relevant here: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Journalists are not necessarily rich, but they serve the interests of the rich and consequently tend to adopt the same attitudes, most notably condescension towards the opinions of others (recall Helen Lewis's contempt towards Jeremy Corbyn for lauding the artistic abilities of ordinary people), and a refusal to accept responsibility for their own actions. Journalists and opinion-writers tend to flit from job to job, but for this reason they have a strong professional culture, which is why working for the Guardian doesn't make you a different animal: you're still writing to order. 

The traditional cry "Nobody tells us what to write" is true only inasmuch as the profession selects for conformity. As a result, it tends to move like a herd ("competing outlets breaking fresh news", as Helen Lewis put it). Jason Arday's tragedy did not arise from his personal failings or the administrative shortcomings of Cambridge university but simply because he got caught in the path of the herd. If he was at fault, it was in his willingness to put himself in the public eye through press interviews about his appointment and back-story, and in his agreement to publish a triumph-over-the-odds memoir, which was never going to be brutally honest any more than any other celebrity memoir is. Once he realised his mistake, it was too late to get out of the way of the herd and its momentum was too great to avoid the inevitable trampling. Jason Arday wasn't fair game; he was road-kill.