From The Princess Bride to KPop Demon Hunters
The following is a new chapter from a memoir in progress. These monthly installments are only available to full members. For access, please consider upgrading your subscription. I’m also proud to be a Give Back Stack. 5% of my earnings in Q4 will go to Centre County PAWS, a no-kill shelter focusing on adoption, education, and community assistance.
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Against Post-Literacy
Two years ago, Sam Kahn mused that literacy — the ability to read, write, and comprehend complex written texts — will soon be a thing of the past. True to form, Sam was ahead of the curve. It wasn’t until this fall that James Marriott’s “The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society” attracted wide attention, boosted in part by George Saunders’ endorsement.
Marriott claims that we’re lapsing back into a “pre-literate” state of emotional suggestibility:
Cut off from the cultural riches of the past we are condemned to live in a narcissistic eternal present. Deprived of the critical tools to question and develop the insights of those who went before us, we are condemned to endlessly repeat and pastiche ourselves, superhero film by superhero film, repetitive pop song by repetitive pop song.
It’s annoying that Marriott will get credit for Kahn’s idea via Saunders’ endorsement, but that’s sometimes how things go. Be that as it may, I’ve been thinking about the literacy question while trying to understand why it’s so difficult to share movies I loved as a child with my own children. Thousands of years of human culture might be walled off from Gen Z and Gen Alpha, but my kids and I can’t even talk about early Disney, say the difference between the original Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs and the recent remake. Not because they aren’t skilled at critical thinking, but because so much of what they consume is now dictated by preference, not their literary or visual acuity.
I propose an addendum to Kahn’s and Marriott’s commentary on post-literacy. Reading rates are falling, but is discernment really fading, too? Are we really reverting to a demon-haunted world? Can we who were raised on Beavis and Butt-Head and Dumb and Dumber really claim a moral or aesthetic high ground?
My kids are fantastic readers. The house is littered with books, and they routinely score at least a year ahead of their cohort in language skills. My six-year-old, who just began reading silently, recently enjoyed a local production of Murder at the Renaissance Faire, in which a famous actor goes missing and the audience must identify the killer from among the surviving cast. He even had an evidence-based theory about who was, in his words, “the most suss.”
We could perhaps get off in the weeds about how Captain Underpants and The Babysitters Club don’t really count as reading, but my kids love James Herriott, E.B. White, and C.S. Lewis, too. Some YA series, like Wings of Fire, are quite thematically complex, and Wolves of the Beyond even requires young readers to comprehend invented words, like malcadh, which means “cursed one” in Kathryn Lasky’s fantasy tale. Besides, my grandparents weren’t really straining their synapses on Dick, Jane, and Spot. CliffsNotes (sans apostrophe) was founded in 1958. And I attended school forty years ago with many mouth breathers and knuckle draggers who preferred pirated cassettes of The Jerky Boys to Wuthering Heights.
So the Zeitgeist shift must cut deeper than reading. It’s a disposition, not just declining literacy, that shows a troubling turn in our youth.
Here’s what it is: My kids aren’t interested in the new Snow White, so they won’t watch it. Not because it’s beyond them or because they lack interiority, as Kahn suggests, but because they have a nearly infinite amount of entertainment choices with finite screen time and hold their autonomy more sacred than any collective notion of taste. The original Disney film is so pathetic from that standpoint — as a voluntary use of finite personal viewing time — that it would be embarrassing to even suggest it for Family Movie Night.
If we were truly returning to a neo-feudalism, as Marriott claims, with literacy and power concentrated at the top, then we might expect to see more passivity and acquiescence to authority among the young. Instead we see a world given to stridency both hard and soft, an age equally defined by activism and quiet quitting. The throughline? You can’t tell me what to think, watch, or do. There isn’t world enough or time.
We’re not talking about feudalism, we’re talking about fandom, where voluntary belonging matters more than any unifying creed. My kids aren’t rubes. They are, simply, fans of whatever passions they choose. And incurious about everything else. (Or almost)
