Before now, I confess to having not spent a great deal of time thinking about the ‘death of intellectualism’.
However, having previously heard of the concept, its relevance dawned on me when I learned of the Department of Education’s ‘National Year of Reading’ campaign. Over the course of this year, I have seen a staggering number of initiatives encouraging reading both in school and the wider community. This includes attending school discussions about how to increase reading enthusiasm, assemblies promoting literacy, as well as the aforementioned campaign.
While I am no exception to the ‘reading slump’, I have always experienced reading as an activity undertaken to complement and enrich life and was surprised upon hearing that it was in unprecedented decline, as suggested by these schemes.
In fact, The National Literacy Trust report a 36% decrease in reading for enjoyment amongst young people over the last 20 years, posing the question – how has reading, crucially a way of challenging opinions, expanding the mind, and enabling nuanced thought, undergone such a metamorphosis?
Many attribute the decline in literary pursuits to the digital age.
Indeed, social media has given rise to a pervasive phenomenon whereby books are no longer intellectual mediums, but collectible commodities. It is not uncommon to see videos, garnering millions of views, entitled “dark academia book recommendations”; “books that make you look smart”; and even “buying books based on their covers”.
Though ostensibly positive in that it encourages reading at all, this movement essentially reduces books to their ability to fit an aesthetic. It reduces literature to a prop which fuels intellectual posturing and superficiality.
Moreover, videos like “fast paced books to get you out of a reading slump”, and “how to read a book every day”, treat literature as an activity requiring guidance or lifehacks. Consequently, readers no longer seek out books in the pursuit of intellectual development, but read for the sake of spectacle, accumulating book titles to claim quantitative rather than emotional engagement.
It also leads people to the consumption of less complex narratives as many no longer think they can read books which carry intellectual or philosophical weight beyond that of young adult “fairycore” fantasies.
It wouldn’t be right to judge someone simply for reading these novels either. However, fiction from the likes of Colleen Hoover, or Sarah J. Mass, are increasingly the only literary outlet for people, many of whom don’t even attempt to broaden their horizons.
It is no exaggeration to say that this state of affairs poses a threat to intellect. Ever more, books with ambiguity, complexity, and depth are being branded “impossible to read” and are thus discarded, simply due to their demand for sustained engagement or perseverance of mind.
Even the etymology of the word novel reveals this principle. Derived from the Latin novus, meaning “new”, the form itself implies discovery. Therefore, to read exclusively within one narrow genre – a genre which provides neither linguistic nor thematic challenge- seems inconsistent with its broader purpose.
It is important to highlight that truly great literature does more than just calm- it alarms, warns, disturbs, comforts, shocks, and teaches, unlike the undeveloped fiction which now dominates, which provides only instant gratification.
At its core, reading widely is a way to expose yourself to many schools of thought. A way to verse yourself in things unversed, to familiarise yourself in the unfamiliar, and to put yourself in shoes vastly different from your own.
Throughout history, books have served as ideological catalysts to hold power to account, to spark revolution or even to ignite uprising. Works like Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense’, Karl Marx’s ‘The Communist Manifesto’, and Mary Wollestonecraft’s ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, directly influenced populations to challenge established authorities, proving the written word, books, to be influential vessels of thought, identity, and culture.
Though some might view reading’s decline as largely inconsequential compared to other more garish threats of the modern day – the monopolisation of AI for example- the loss of reading in our lives is symptomatic of something far more profound; the erosion of intellectualism in our society.
A culture willing only to consume what is easy, gradually loses not only its attention span but the capacity for deep thought itself.
