The New Dark Ages

If the world feels dumber it is not because people are literally becoming less intelligent. It is rather because smartphones are making our culture simpler and more trivial. It is almost impossible to support subtlety or complexity in a world of shattered attention and near constant distraction. If the rise of reading in the eighteenth century was accompanied by an explosion of sophisticated and innovative kinds of thinking, in the twenty-first century, complexity and difficulty are being systematically routed out from every corner of our society. We are undergoing what might be termed a Great Simplification.

As our culture loses its capacity to sustain complexity and difficulty we will find ourselves doomed to an increasingly inadequate understanding of the world. Self-help books and derivative films are fine in themselves but there are aspects of the human experience that simply cannot be described by lists, formulaic plots and easy declarative sentences. Not everything that is important or true can be said simply. The kinds of sophisticated and ultimately unsum-marisable knowledge associated with great music, films or literary fiction often require difficult language or ambigu-ity. And they almost always require sustained concentration from the reader. The important things Leo Tolstoy or Joni Mitchell have to say about life will only be understood if you can pay attention. Distracted and unfocused, our culture risks being transformed into a smartphone wasteland. We seem fated to endlessly repeat and pastiche ourselves, superhero film by superhero film, repetitive pop song by repetitive pop song.

It sometimes seems ideas, complex arguments and history have been all but phased out of democratic politics.
Increasingly, many modern democracies find themselves almost helpless to debate serious issues. It’s not happening in Parliament. It’s not happening on social media. Most people aren’t reading newspapers. What happens to a democracy that forgets how to think?