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不唸書的下場是我們的政治越來越愚蠢了?
Is the decline of reading making politics dumber?
As people read less they think less clearly, **scholars **fear
Sep 4th 2025
The experiment was simple; so too, you may have thought, was the task. Students of literature at two American universities were given the first paragraphs of “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens and asked to read and then explain them. In other words: some students reading English literature were asked to read some English literature from the mid-19th century. How hard could it be?
Very, it turns out. The students **were flummoxed by legal language and baffled by **metaphor. A Dickensian description of fog left them totally fogged. They could not grasp basic vocabulary: one student thought that when a man was said to have “whiskers” it meant he was “in a room with an animal I think…A cat?” The problem was less that these students of literature were not literary and more that they were barely even literate.
Reading is in trouble. Multiple studies in multiple places seem to be showing the same thing. Adults are reading less. Children are reading less. Teenagers are reading a lot less. Very small children are being read to less; many are not being read to at all. Reading rates are lower among poorer children—a phenomenon known as “the reading gap”—but reading is down for everyone, everywhere.
In America, the share of people who read for pleasure has fallen by two-fifths in 20 years, according to a study published in August in iScience, a journal. YouGov, a pollster, found that 40% of Britons had not read or listened to any books in 2024. Reading for displeasure is little better: as Sir Jonathan Bate, an English professor at Oxford University, has said, students “struggle to get through one novel in three weeks”. Even the educated young, another greybeard said, have “no habits of application and concentration”.
Such laments should be treated with caution: almost the only thing bookish sorts love more than books is complaining about books and reading. They always have done: the greybeard above was Dickens in, ironically, “Bleak House”. Almost as soon as people stopped fretting about the arrival of reading—Socrates feared it would “produce forgetfulness” in those who used it; Ecclesiastes says that “of making many books there is no end”—people started fretting about its decline. As Ecclesiastes also says, “there is nothing new under the sun”.
Arguably, however, what is happening now is new. It is not just that people are reading less, though they are; the texture of what is being read is changing, too. Sentences are getting shorter and simpler. We analysed hundreds of New York Times bestsellers and found that sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s.
Open the Victorian bestseller “Modern Painters” by John Ruskin and you will find that its first sentence is 153 words long. It contains the stern advice that you should not trust the “erroneous opinion” of the public and includes a subheading that reads: “Public opinion no criterion of excellence”. Open Amazon’s current non-fiction bestseller, “The Let Them Theory” by Mel Robbins, and you will find that its first sentence is just 19 words long. A subheading reads “How I Changed My Life”. Among its stern advice is that, to get things done, you should count backwards like NASA at a rocket launch because, “Once you start the countdown, 5-4-3-2-1, there’s no turning back.” This is a reminder that Ruskin knew a thing or two.
Smartphones are blamed for dwindling reading habits—and certainly the number of distractions has increased. But reading has always been a bother. “A big book”, said Callimachus, an ancient Greek poet, “is a big evil.” This is particularly true after lunch. You sit down to read then, as one writer noted, the sun streams in, the day feels “50 hours long”, the reader “rubs his eyes” then finally places the book “under his head and…falls into a light sleep”. Given that that particular reader was a fourth-century monk and ascetic he was probably not distracted by Snapchat.
So it is not merely that distractions have increased: the sheer desire to read seems to have declined. In the Victorian era, self-improvement societies flourished. In the Scottish hills, shepherds “maintained a kind of circulating library”, writes Jonathan Rose in his magnificent book “The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes”. Each shepherd left books in the crannies of walls for other shepherds to read. In Victorian mill towns, workers saved up to buy books. In one Scottish locale, a boy noticed a ragman reading a book. The book—which the ragman lent him—was Thucydides. The boy was Ramsay MacDonald, who would go on to become Britain’s first Labour prime minister.
Today that zeal for personal advancement has diminished. Some blame the high cost of books and closing of libraries for modern intellectual apathy—but books have never been cheaper. In Roman times, a book cost three-quarters of a camel (ie, a lot). In the Victorian era, a copy of Lord Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” cost a labourer about half a week’s income. And yet, by the end of the 18th century, literacy rates among Scotland’s autodidacts were among the highest in the world. Today “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” is free on Kindle, and readers can find plenty of other books that cost less than a coffee. But reading rates keep falling.
A blunter explanation is that people just cannot be bothered. Professor Bate got everyone in a bate with his comments about students not reading: saying such things, he admits, might seem “old fogeyish”. Speak to professors, however and they all lament their students’ waning attention spans. When Professor Rose began teaching, he taught “Bleak House”. He would not attempt it today, he says, partly because of “constant pressure” from university deans to “assign less and less and less reading” and partly because “students simply won’t read it”. In multiple surveys young people describe reading as “boring” and “a chore”.
It is possible to say: who cares? English professors may well lament a fall in literacy, but that may be simple self-interest: less a concern about a declining custom than a declining number of customers. Yet literacy affects more than university reading lists. For one thing, increasing literary sophistication seems to lead to increasing political sophistication. At its simplest, Athenians in the fifth century BC could begin to practise “ostracism”—voting to banish people by writing their name on ostraka, scraps of pots—because, as William Harris, an academic, points out, they had achieved “a certain amount of literacy”.
By contrast, decreasing** literary sophistication** may lead to decreasing political sophistication. Our analysis of Britain’s parliamentary speeches found that they have shrunk by a third in a decade. We also analysed almost 250 years of inaugural presidential addresses using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. George Washington’s scored 28.7, denoting postgraduate level, while Donald Trump’s came in at 9.4, the reading level of a high-schooler.
This is not inherently a bad thing. Often simple prose is good prose, and few people have ever wished politicians’ speeches to be longer. Professor Bate is more pessimistic. Lose the ability to read complex prose and he fears you may also lose the ability to develop complex ideas that “allow you to see nuance and to hold two contradictory thoughts together”. The medium is the message, and the message is currently 280 characters long. (“Bleak House”, by contrast, weighs in at around 1.9m characters.)
There will be other losses from a reading decline. Few engines of social mobility are more effective than reading: just ask the Scottish shepherds. Rich children may do it more, but reading is an egalitarian invention. No one—not your nanny, not your tutor, your friends or your posh school—can impel you to devour a book except you. Reading is not merely a tool: it is also one of life’s great pleasures, as Dickens knew well. As Joe, the kind blacksmith in “Great Expectations”, says: “Give me a good book…and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better.” Once people forget that, things really will feel bleak. ■
大家好，今天要跟大家聊一個有點沉重，但也很有趣的主題：「閱讀的衰退，會不會讓政治變笨？」
故事要從一個實驗開始。美國兩所大學的文學系學生，被要求閱讀狄更斯《荒涼山莊》開頭的幾段文字，然後解釋其中的意思。聽起來簡單吧？結果——非常難。學生們完全被法律語言搞糊塗，被隱喻卡住。甚至有人以為「whiskers（鬍鬚）」是指「房間裡有動物吧？像是貓？」——可以想像教授們有多頭大。
問題不只是學生「不夠文學」，而是，他們甚至「不太識字」。
📉 各種研究都指出：我們正在「集體不讀書」。成年人讀得少，孩子讀得少，青少年讀得更少。連小朋友被爸媽念故事書的機會也下降了，許多甚至完全沒有。這就是所謂的「閱讀鴻溝」。
在美國，20 年內，閱讀休閒書籍的人數下降了 40%。英國情況也差不多：2024 年，四成的英國人一本書都沒讀。即使是大學生，他們也覺得讀一本小說要三週以上，好像在爬山。教授們說得更直接：年輕人「沒有專注的習慣」。
當然啦，學者抱怨年輕人不讀書，好像從古至今都一樣。蘇格拉底就曾擔心，文字會讓人健忘。《傳道書》裡也寫過：「著書多，沒有窮盡。」但現在的狀況似乎真的有點不一樣。
📖 文章裡提到一個有趣的發現：我們的句子越來越短。 《紐約時報》暢銷書裡的句子，平均比 1930 年代縮短了三分之一。
維多利亞時代的暢銷書《現代畫家》第一句長達 153 個字，還附帶哲學性的標題：「大眾的意見不是衡量優秀的標準。」對照現在 Amazon 的暢銷書，開頭只有 19 個字，標題則是「我如何改變人生」。更別提「方法」是：倒數 5 秒就能逼自己行動，像火箭發射一樣。
這種對比，不只是風格變了，而是「思維的深度」也可能跟著流失。
📱 很多人怪智慧型手機，說它搶走了我們的注意力。確實，分心比以前更容易。但其實「讀書本來就麻煩」。古希臘詩人就說過：「大本的書，就是大麻煩。」甚至在四世紀，一位修士寫道：讀到一半就打瞌睡，把書當枕頭。顯然，他也不是因為 Snapchat而分心的。
真正不同的是：想要讀的慾望，變少了。
維多利亞時代，工人和牧羊人拼命自學。他們會把書藏在石牆縫裡，輪流傳閱。有人甚至因為向破布商借到一本修昔底德，而啟發了政治志向，最後成為英國第一位工黨首相。那種對「知識改變命運」的熱情，如今似乎消失了。
有人說，是因為書太貴或圖書館關閉。但事實上，現在的書比歷史上任何時候都便宜。《哈羅德遊記》當年要一個工人半週工資才能買，而現在 Kindle 上免費。問題不是買不起，而是：大家懶得讀。
📚 教授們無奈地承認，他們已經不敢再開《荒涼山莊》這樣的大本書課程了。原因不只是學校壓力，而是學生根本「讀不下去」。在調查裡，年輕人直接說：讀書「很無聊」、「很累」。
那問題來了：我們真的需要擔心嗎？
其實，閱讀和政治之間有著微妙的關係。古雅典能夠實行「陶片放逐法」，就是因為有足夠的識字率。識字能力，直接影響了政治參與和思考深度。
現代數據也反映了這點。英國國會的演講篇幅，十年內縮短了三分之一。美國總統的就職演說，用可讀性測試來比：華盛頓的演講屬於研究所等級；川普的演講，只有高中程度。
這不一定是壞事。簡單的文字，往往也能清楚有力。但學者們擔心的是：如果我們失去閱讀複雜文本的能力，就可能也失去思考複雜問題的能力。 無法同時容納矛盾，無法理解細微差異。當政治只剩下 280 個字的推文，深度自然也消失了。
最後還有一個更現實的問題：閱讀是社會流動的最佳工具之一。當年蘇格蘭牧羊人靠閱讀跨越階級，今天卻連免費的經典書籍都吸引不了人。閱讀，不只是學習的工具，更是一種生活的樂趣。
正如狄更斯筆下的鐵匠 Joe 說的：「給我一本好書，再加上一個暖爐，我就心滿意足。」
如果我們忘記了這種樂趣，人生可能真的會變得更「荒涼」。
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