oh the irony

Americans are reading less. Is that poisoning our politics? | Vox:

As America’s test scores fall and its screen time rises, narratives of cultural decline become hard to dismiss outright.

Yet it’s worth remembering the perennial appeal of such pessimism. More than 2,000 years ago, Socrates decried the novel media technology of his day — the written word — in much the same terms that many condemn social media and AI in 2025. Addressing himself to the inventor of writing, the Greek philosopher declared, “You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing.”

Lovely! Here’s an essay about the decline of reading that features either a misreading or non-reading of a passage from Plato’s Phaedrus. Remember, Plato wrote dialogues, and in this one Socrates is on a walk with Phaedrus, having a discussion about the written and spoken word. Thus:

Soc. At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

So, no: Socrates does not speak to the inventor of writing: he tells a story in which a divine Egyptian king speaks to the inventor of writing. And this isn’t hard to discover, nor is the passage hard to understand.

Bless me, what do they teach journalists these days? It’s all in Plato — all in Plato!

And if you keep reading the dialogue it gets more curious. Phaedrus says that he agrees with Thamus, but Socrates does not, not exactly. He too has concerns about writing, but they are rather different than Thamus’s. For Sccrates, writing shares a problem with several other modes of expression:

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

Socrates believes that writing, painting, and declamatory rhetoric all have the same problem: they are non-dialectical. This is also, Socrates shows in other dialogues, the problem with many versions of what people call “philosophy.” Genuine philosophy, Socrates believes, is dialectical, that is, it proceeds when people physically present to one another put one another to the question in a strenuous encounter that elicits anamnesis — recollection (literally unforgetting) of the knowledge that one’s spirit had before being tossed into this world of flux. Nothing else counts as philosophy; nothing else — not painting; not poetry or speeches, whether in spoken or written form — is productive of genuine knowledge. The critique of Socrates is far more unbendingly radical than that of Thamus.