There is growing concern among we literary folk that Americans are reading less and less.

But is it true? The answer is, I’m afraid, “yes” and “no,” and the explanations for what this means are not good.

Let me explain.

Among all surveyed, the average time spent reading daily for pleasure dropped from 25 minutes in 2003 to about 15 minutes in 2023.

This is not good, and the drop in the total number of individuals who actively read for pleasure is even more disconcerting: From 2003 to 2023, that number plummeted from 28 percent of those surveyed to 17 percent.

Worst of all, the study revealed the amount of time Americans spent reading to children was practically nonexistent: The average time that all participants read to children was about one minute daily. Only 2 percent of those tracked in the study said they regularly read to a child, on average about 28 minutes per day.

We are reading less; the number of us who read is shrinking; and we are doing little to encourage subsequent generations to read.

But there’s a snag in the data: While we are reading less text for pleasure, we are increasingly reading—maybe better, “staring at”—“stuff” on screens.

In other words (so to speak), while we are forced to look at more information, we are voluntarily reading fewer words.

The type of text we are increasingly compelled to look at focuses on quantitative information: more on how much of a thing is present, and less on what its presence means for us. This type of text is called prototext, or sometimes protowriting.

Like the clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, circa 3200 B.C., which focused entirely on information about grain harvests, slaves bought or sold, taxes, and so on, prototext contains more information about the amounts of things and less about how we should feel and think about those things.

Spending lots of time with prototext tends to focus our thoughts more on quantification and less on contemplation.

Many analysts—and here I include myself—who bother with this sort of stuff predict that our drop in reading text indicates rough times ahead for America.

Historically speaking, relative to our European counterparts, Americans have always been more fixated on the quantification of processes, a “how much of this do I need to do to get that” approach to life. While quantification has helped us grow into an industrial superpower, it is not without its problems.

Second, and beyond the views of ourselves and our place in the world, there is a growing number of thinkers who are concerned that our decline in reading text is but the slouching calm before a very disruptive political storm.

Marriott speculates that an increase in time with prototext and a decrease in reading text signals a decline in deep thinking skills and a resulting decline in complex thought.

As a teacher in the humanities with nearly 40 years of experience, I agree with Marriott.

Reading, and its physically acted-out companion, writing, are not natural behaviors for us humans. Both require the memorization of abstract symbols (think letters and punctuation marks), and then the purposeful reordering of those symbols into other symbols (words and sentences) that then stand in for concepts. Both skills require deep, persistent thinking, and given the cognitive difficulty of these processes, it is a wonder that we ever bothered to learn to read and write in the first place.

Our ability to become literate, and then pass this skill along to subsequent generations, was an absolute prerequisite for the advanced reasoning employed in theology, philosophy, history, and then science. These disciplines are the cornerstones of our present-day Western democracy and advanced society.

Pull the supporting habits of reading and thoughtfulness out from under these foundational stones, and, notes Marriott, what tends to happen is a tumble backward into public discourse that is more emotive, nonrational, and tribal; that is, all the disruptive habits that we find in the villages of nonliterate societies, as well as on most social media platforms. Both are places where booming charisma beats out logical, rational thought.

Marriott spends a lot of time calling out a whole slate of politicians and online influencers whom he sees as charismatic troublemakers. I will not follow his lead by naming names and further encouraging anyone’s derangement syndrome. A “who’s who” of internet or political blowhard-baddies is not what should primarily concern us.

Rather, we should focus on the causal connection between our decrease in reading and thinking and our increasingly loud, emotionally driven public discourse.

It is a well-established historical pattern that explosive public emotions undercut democracies. When we read, think, and talk less, we tend to react and shout more, increasing our naturally occurring “us vs. them” outlook on the world. Such polarization can override historically hard-won sociopolitical inhibitions and lead otherwise thinking people into conflicts that drag on endlessly, or worse, kill millions.

This was the case in post-World War I Europe. It was assumed that the horrors of that war, the “war to end all wars” in which nearly 20 million people died, were so terrible, so gruesome, that Westerners would never willingly go to war again.

However, under the extreme economic pressure of the 1930s Depression, Europeans lost patience with the democratic processes of their countries and willingly threw themselves into the emotional rhetoric, the “vibe,” as we would call it, of demagogues like Germany’s Hitler, Italy’s Mussolini, and Spain’s Franco. Once in power, these mesmerizing madmen launched World War II, burning the world down and slaughtering millions more than the first go-round.

Is the increasing drop in American literacy a harbinger of an impending democratic collapse? This is a difficult question to answer, because nothing is inevitable until it happens. But the gathering storm of data does not look good. Our founders knew well that a vigorous democracy depended on an informed and thinking citizenry. That’s the whole point of the First Amendment.

If what has gone before is any indication of what’s to come, I believe it’s true that when we stop reading, stop thinking deeply, and spend most of our time staring, we become vulnerable to “charismatic charlatans,” as Marriott puts it. These glib and alluring influencers, who seem to be blogging, streaming, and generally barking everywhere underfoot, are not deep thinkers. The danger that they pose to us is not that they are attractive, but rather that they tend not to think, or at least not to think deeply, about what might happen to all of us as a result of their actions.