Truman made his way past all the familiar landmarks of a twentieth century autodidact self-education: The Bible (which he claimed to have read through twice by the time he was twelve), Plutarch’s Lives, the complete works of Shakespeare, Plato’s Republic, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Eventually, he read every single one of two thousand volumes stored in Independence’s library — including all the encyclopedias. It’s an inspiring story but not at all a unique one.’

[Günther Anders] saw a similar apathy of the imagination in another atrocity that was coming to be widely known at the same time: the Nazi death camps. As Anders insists in his essay “Reflections on the H Bomb,” it was reductive calculation that made such evils possible. “The mass exterminations under Hitler could be carried out,” he says, “because they absolutely transcended the moral imagination of the agents,” thereby making “possible a new, truly infernal innocence.”

Walter Benjamin was [Günther] Anders’s cousin, and Hannah Arendt his first wife.

One of Anders’s most important concepts was the “Promethean gap”: the “growing asynchronicity between the human and the world of their own products.”

Øystein Hernæs was able to map the effect on test scores of cohorts of soldiers as cable TV arrived in their areas. What he found was that as cable marched across Norway intelligence fell in its wake: “for each year that their hometown had full coverage, IQ dropped by 0.08 points”. “Higher exposure to commercial television”, Hernæs’s study bluntly concludes, “reduces cognitive ability”.’

It’s worth pointing out that the idea that culture is becoming more simple or stagnant and repetitive is not one of history’s recurring moral panics.

‘As the journalist Adam Mastroianni has neatly pointed out, for most of the twentieth century people tended to worry about the exact opposite problem: that there was too much novelty and too much pretentious difficulty.

For Marriott, ‘there is nothing inevitable or eternal about modern civilisation in all its desirable complexity and comfort’, nor is it written that it may survive ‘a world filled with demons, anti-vaccine conspiracies and “ways of knowing”’. Democracy followed the rise of literacy, and it may struggle to function in a world where the analytical way of thinking that comes with reading is alien to many voters.

To me, that is the most salient and worrying trend: that people in positions of power and influence are now notably ignorant about history and the classics, comfortable only with referencing pop culture. I suspect that the crisis of faith in our institutions is driven not just by a sense that they are corrupt or biased, but that the people running them are not very smart. The cultural elite has abandoned cultural elitism.

‘Many of us are suspicious of hierarchies of cultural value,’ [Marriott] writes: ‘To suggest that it is “better” to spend your day reading War and Peace than watching TikTok carries the dangerous ring of elitism. I was once reprimanded by a writer in a British magazine for my “belief that some writing is simply ‘better’”; a view, I was told, that is “inherently damaging, and marginalizing”… A recent report issued by Britain’s most important cultural funding body, the Arts Council, warned against the use of “terms like excellence” which may promote “unhelpful hierarchies about what kinds of work are valued”.’