On January 18, 1927, the Frankfurter Zeitung daily newspaper featured one of the celebrated feuilletons Joseph Roth had lately been dispatching from the frozen expanses of the Soviet Union, this time addressing the subject of “Die Schule und die Jugend,” “The School and the Youth.” On assignment in the city of Leningrad, the Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist had chanced to attend a lecture on recent university candidate test results delivered by a prominent Soviet social scientist. Despite an ongoing “elimination of illiteracy” campaign, some 80 percent of university aspirants, after being given a prompt, had proven unable to construct a simple sentence in a coherent or even grammatical fashion. (These were the days before autocorrect and AI-powered writing assistants, you see.) Roth did not take this as evidence of the inherent “hopeless stupidity (rettungslose Dummheit)” of Soviet students, but rather of the “one-sidedness (Einseitigkeit)” of the indoctrination to which they had been subjected.
The young man who could not form a simple sentence could probably lead a meeting, draw up a financial report, and quote from or even write one of the newspaper articles common today because all the components of a newspaper article, a speech, and a report are ready-made: The phrases, the worldview, and the arguments are all canned, as it were. You don’t need to cook anything; there is nothing at all to prepare. The young man certainly knows about exploiters and the exploited, socialization and reaction, “bourgeois ideology” and miners’ strikes in England. But he still can’t form a sentence because he hasn’t been taught to combine. The human mind’s natural tendency to connect what belongs together and eliminate what is foreign has been thoroughly weaned off. It has been fed with fixed, indestructible complexes of thought and words, and the fruitful effort of independent synthesis and analysis has been taken away from it.
Homo sovieticus was technically literate, but often functionally illiterate and intellectually debilitated. He was incapable of producing independent thought, struggling as he was to summon up so much as a single sentence of his own.
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At the time Joseph Roth was reporting from Leningrad, the total literacy rate in the USSR was claimed to be 56.6 percent. Ten years later, it was 75 percent, and, by the 1950s, it was allegedly 99 percent. Whether all of these Soviet citizens could have passed the basic psychotechnical test Roth described is questionable, but the Soviets could claim victory in their war on illiteracy, as would every developed country, and most developing countries, over the course of the twentieth century. With literacy among developed nations assessed at 99.9 percent, and globally at 90 percent, we have become accustomed to talking instead about a myriad of other kinds of literacy — cultural, media, digital, financial, emotional — while taking it for granted in its most fundamental form. Yet literacy entails more than being able to read a stop sign, a drive-through menu, or a TikTok hashtag. It entails the “fruitful effort of independent synthesis and analysis,” something beyond so many Soviet citizens, and so many of our own contemporaries.
Evidence of what might be called Potemkin literacy is all around us. Open a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Jane Austen’s Emma and in the introductory material you will find a desperate bid on the part of the editor to teach the reader, in effect, how to read. Given that it “isn’t necessarily easy or enjoyable” to read Austen’s work, the reader is advised to “pace yourself … spread out the reading so that you’re doing some each day rather than big sections all at once.” You can always “read passages aloud,” though “For a real challenge, try reading Miss Bates’s speeches. Readers often skim or skip these, but there’s much to be gained from paying attention to them.” And since “Long novels such as Austen’s are a workout for our attention spans and memories,” you might instead prefer to “Try an audiobook. Let a talented narrator with a delightful accent read to you” (although that might seem to defeat the purpose of purchasing or borrowing a book in the first place). All of this only serves to normalize the notion that classic literature constitutes a daunting obstacle to the modern psyche, but there is an understandable reason why publishers have felt the need to provide these kinds of disclaimers, pointers, and stratagems.
The inability to consume literature or understand history leads to a culture that is not only dry and sapless, but increasingly brittle.
Like the Soviet students in 1927, present-day pupils are steeped in received ideas, buzzwords, platitudes, and formulaic arguments but are being weaned off the crucial ability to synthesize and analyze. Consider a 2024 study of English majors at two midwestern universities, in which subjects were asked to read the wonderful first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ peerless novel Bleak House and render them into “plain English.” The results were a fiasco. They were published in the official journal of the College English Association, the CEA Critic, under the title “They Don’t Read Very Well.” Only 5 percent of the English majors had a “detailed, literal” understanding of the text, while the majority “understood so little of the introduction to Bleak House that they would not be able to read the novel on their own,” though they almost invariably went on to express an irrational confidence in their ability to read (and understand) the following nine hundred or so pages.
Given the original text, “As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill,” and helpfully informed what kind of theropod dinosaur Megalosaurus was, one subject perused the passage as through a glass, darkly, and responded to the facilitator: “[Pause.] [Laughs.] So it’s like, um, [Pause.] the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no…[Pause.] so everything’s been like kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he’s says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill.” As the researchers wearily observed:
The subject cannot make the leap to figurative language. She first guesses that the dinosaur is just “bones” and then is stuck stating that the bones are “waddling, um, all up the hill” because she can see that Dickens has the dinosaur moving. Because she cannot logically tie the ideas together, she just leaves her interpretation as is and goes on to the next sentence. Like this subject, most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them. In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results. Worse, their inability to understand figurative language was constant, even though most of the subjects had spent at least two years in literature classes that discussed figures of speech.
It’s little wonder, then, that another recent study conducted by Brian Porter and Edouard Machery, and published in Scientific Reports, found that modern-day nonexpert readers struggled to distinguish human-written poetry from AI-generated poetry, but on the whole favored the products of chatbots to Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickinson, presumably because “the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.” Here we have a world turned upside down: Immortal Elizabethan sonnets, highly structured and full of figurative language, are interpreted as the hallucinations of a malfunctioning chatbot, and the inanities of artificial conversation entities are taken for high literature.
The problem is greater than just the ability of students, even university English majors, to read Dickens profitably. Still more studies on “brain drain” have found that the “mere presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity,” and that subjects struggled to recall details from a two-minute video, eventually requiring the researchers to break up the content into more digestible sixteen-second clips. What we have here is a scourge of what can only be termed “brain rot,” an inevitable consequence of modernity, like low birth rates and Type 2 diabetes. The transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau famously bemoaned the phenomenon in Walden — “While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” — but it was the Frenchman Algernon T.B. de Bale, M.D. (Professeur Honoraire des Maladies des Femmes, et des Maladies de la Respiration), in his 1879 treatise Exhausted Brain and Nervous Exhaustion (Hereditary and Acquired): Nature, Causes, Symptoms, Consequences, and Rapid Cure, who began to take brain rot seriously:
“Softening of the brain” — the popular, but erroneous, term for cerebral ramollissement — is one of the most destructive and insidious of all the forms of degeneration growing out of a phospholigic condition. Many able and energetic men have I seen, at the zenith of their efficiency and in the plenitude of their power, stricken with this brain-rot — this decomposition in the citadel of life — drop out of existence as gradually and noiselessly as a leaf slowly tinges, withers, and then flutters to the ground.
The spread of brain rot, with its attendant “growing want of power to concentrate the attention, and the increasing loss of memory” was, for Monsieur le Doctor, a “calm scientific fact which should sink into the the hearts of the present generation with the force and solemnity of a century of sermons.” Yet the pace of modern life only accelerated, our attention spans diminished, and our powers of retention atrophied, until we arrived at our present predicament.
This loss of attention span and memory, individual and collective, has resulted in what the South Korean-German philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han calls the “crisis of narration.” Unable to connect with previous generations, eras, and epochs, we find ourselves rudderless, anchorless, languishing in the doldrums of hyper-modernity. Human happiness, as Han writes,
is not a momentary event. It has a long tail that reaches back into the past. Happiness feeds off of all that has been a part of a life. It does not have a shiny appearance; its appearance is an afterglow. We owe our happiness to the salvation of the past. This salvation requires a narrative tension in which the present integrates the past, thereby making the past a continuing influence, even resurrecting the past. In the state of happiness, salvation reverberates. When everything becomes part of a maelstrom of actuality, a storm of contingency, there can be no happiness for us.
It may seem a small thing not to be able to follow the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, but what it presages, writ large, is a devastating break with the past, and our very understanding of what it means to be human and to be fulfilled.
Pace Virginia Woolf, human character did not undergo a fundamental change “on or about December 1910,” or at least not to the extent that it underwent one in June of 2007, when the iPhone was released and our species began its (d)evolution from Homo sapiens to Phono sapiens. And now we are casting about in an attempt to undo the damage, with schools banning cell phones, reintroducing physical books, and bringing back the venerable blue book exam, and with numerous nations considering full bans or increased parental consent requirements when it comes to the use of social media by minors. It is the ultimate indictment of techno-optimism, and of the very idea of progress (a “grand heresy of degenerates,” as Charles Baudelaire put it), that we have found ourselves at such a pass.
As technological advances continue and artificial intelligence becomes omnipresent, the “citadel of life” will remain under siege, enervated by brain drain and corroded by brain rot. Still, human character may have changed on or about June 2007, but human nature and human physiology did not. The human brain remains the Builder’s most marvelous edifice, its 86 billion neurons capable of as many as 100 billion operations per second, using a mere 20 watts of power to do so. Brain rot, on the other hand, is purely a sociocultural phenomenon that can be undone at any time for the sake of the generations to come. There are times when, to borrow the words of C. S. Lewis, “going back is the quickest way on,” and now is obviously one of those times.
By Bill Wilson for The American Spectator
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in his infamous opinion in Buck v. Bell (1927), asserted that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Eugenics has thankfully largely fallen out of fashion since then, but we might adapt his notorious words for a more humane purpose. Surely three generations of mind-fried adolescents are enough. A modern society can hardly expect to function when its constituent members are raised to be fundamentally illiterate, unable to understand figurative language, connect with the past, or focus on something for more than approximately sixteen seconds. Under those conditions, not just a person but an entire civilization will, as Doctor de Bale so evocatively put it, “drop out of existence as gradually and noiselessly as a leaf slowly tinges, withers, and then flutters to the ground.” The inability to consume literature or understand history leads to a culture that is not only dry and sapless, but increasingly brittle. “Because we lack sufficiently strong communal narratives, our late modern societies are unstable,” Byung-Chul Han writes in The Crisis of Narration (2024). “Without a shared narrative, the political, which makes shared action possible, cannot properly form.”
The fate of the republic hinges in no small part on addressing this narrative and cognitive crisis in our homes and our educational institutions. As long as the bastions of the citadel of life are crumbling away, our collective future will remain imperiled, for the prospect of endemic stupidity and one-sidedness, thoroughly weaned off the ability to form connections with ourselves and our predecessors, can hardly be considered a future at all. We should not like to find ourselves in what Charles Dickens, in Bleak House, called a “deadened world,” a world desensitized and stifled, almost as if “wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool,” in which one “cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun.” This is figurative language, we must concede, but it is compelling all the same, at least for those still in possession of eyes to read, and minds to understand.
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