Doomscrolling Ourselves to Death

我们正在“末日刷屏”中走向死亡

I’m not the only parent who feels increasingly anxious about their children’s media diet. For teenage boys in particular, entertainment often comes in the form of YouTube, which for any adult briefly glancing at the screen seems to feature an array of thumbnailed gawping imbeciles, besides an invitation to watch the latest work of creativity: ‘I took a bath full of Diet Coke and Mentos’ or ‘I cemented a microwave to my head’. In comparison to this, the mindless television I watched in the 1990s seems as narratively complex as Dostoevsky.

并非只有我一个家长对孩子们的媒体摄入感到日益焦虑。对于十几岁的男孩来说，娱乐往往以 YouTube 的形式出现。任何成年人只要瞥一眼屏幕，看到的似乎都是一堆缩略图里张着嘴的傻瓜，以及观看最新“创意”作品的邀请：“我泡在装满健怡可乐和曼妥思的浴缸里”或者“我把微波炉粘在了头上”。相比之下，我 90 年代看的那些无脑电视节目，其叙事复杂程度简直堪比陀思妥耶夫斯基。

Most of all, it’s notable that many children aren’t reading anymore, and it’s steadily become a topic of interest among fellow parents, then worry, and now panic. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that something quite bad is happening.

最值得注意的是，许多孩子已经不再阅读了。这逐渐成为了家长们关注的话题，从担忧演变成了现在的恐慌。我们无法忽视一个事实：某种非常糟糕的事情正在发生。

Every catastrophe needs its Jeremiah, and for this we have Times columnist James Marriott, whose increasing anxiety about the decline of literacy was articulated in a hugely popular substack post last year. Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book, The New Dark Ages, published this week.

每一场灾难都需要它的“耶利米”（预言家），而我们有《泰晤士报》专栏作家詹姆斯·马里奥特（James Marriott）。去年，他在一篇广受欢迎的 Substack 文章中表达了对读写能力下降的日益焦虑。在深入撰写了关于“为何再无人读书”的文章后，他决定将这一主题扩展成书——本周出版的《新黑暗时代》（The New Dark Ages）。

I wouldn’t call the book ‘urgent’ because I usually take that to mean ‘worthy scolding by an ideological ally’; it’s entertaining, informative, often amusing and makes a coherent case in 50,000 or so words, which many of us can still manage. But the implications he lays out are disturbing, and influence everything around us.

我不会称这本书为“紧迫的”，因为我通常认为这个词意味着“来自意识形态盟友的值得一听的训诫”；它很有趣、信息量大、时常令人发笑，并用大约五万字的篇幅提出了一个连贯的论点，这对于我们许多人来说仍然是可以读完的。但他所阐述的含义令人不安，且影响着我们周围的一切。

James and I have become friends over the past couple of years, drawn together by a mutual sense of despair, and he’s probably the only person in journalism even more pessimistic than I am. If you believe the media to be a circle-jerk of people helping their mates (which it is, obviously), bear that in mind, but reading his prose one gets a sense of how likeable as well as articulate he is, even if born in the wrong decade. His upbringing will seem as alien to those raised in the coming years as the world of Boethius would have been to Alfred the Great.

过去几年里，詹姆斯和我成为了朋友，我们因共同的绝望感而走到一起。他可能是新闻界唯一比我更悲观的人。如果你认为媒体只是一个互相帮助的“圈内人自嗨”（显然确实如此），请记住这一点。但阅读他的文字，你会感受到他不仅口才出众，而且非常讨人喜欢，尽管他似乎生错了时代。他的成长经历对于未来几年成长起来的人来说，就像波伊提乌的世界对于阿尔弗雷德大帝一样陌生。

‘Literature was our religion: the way we explained and interpreted our lives. As a child I quickly learned that every possible event — from a major bereavement to a minor playground contretemps — could be cross-referenced against a novel by Thomas Hardy or a poem by Philip Larkin. There was a quote for everything. I was dragged off to Shakespeare plays at what now strikes me as a rather cruelly young age (“if you’re not enjoying it”, I remember my dad telling me, “you can just read your book instead”). We worshipped pretty much all the canonical English poets but in our pantheon of literary saints, Shakespeare was Jesus or, more probably, God.’

“文学曾是我们的宗教：是我们解释和解读生活的方式。小时候我很快就明白，任何可能发生的事件——从重大的丧亲之痛到操场上的小摩擦——都能在托马斯·哈代的小说或菲利普·拉金的诗歌中找到对应。万事皆有引语。我被拖去看莎士比亚戏剧时，现在回想起来，那年纪小得近乎残酷（我记得我爸爸告诉我：‘如果你不喜欢，你可以读你自己的书’）。我们崇拜几乎所有经典的英国诗人，但在我们的文学圣殿里，莎士比亚就是耶稣，或者更可能，是上帝。”

‘We celebrated his birthday every year with a homemade cake and in the holidays we were taken on solemn pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon. I recall that I was once presented with a Shakespeare-themed stuffed bear (it was wearing a t-shirt with a quotation from Hamlet).’

“我们每年都用自制的蛋糕庆祝他的生日，假期里我们会被带去斯特拉特福德进行庄严的朝圣。我记得我曾收到过一只莎士比亚主题的毛绒熊（它穿着一件印有《哈姆雷特》引语的 T 恤）。”

Such a veneration for the written word naturally made him sensitive to disturbing stories about declining literacy that began circulating around the turn of the decade. ‘The first rumours that something important was happening reached me via friends working in universities,’ he writes: ‘I came close to going into academia myself (though I don’t think the world is a poorer place for the loss of my proposed PhD on landscape imagery in post-war British poetry).’

这种对文字的崇敬自然使他对本世纪初开始流传的关于读写能力下降的令人不安的消息非常敏感。“关于重要事情正在发生的最初传闻，是通过在大学工作的朋友传到我这里的，”他写道：“我曾差点自己进入学术界（尽管我不认为世界因为失去了我那篇关于战后英国诗歌中景观意象的博士论文而变得更贫瘠）。”

Anecdotes were soon backed up by data, showing significant declines in reading comprehension among students, as well as an even sharper drop in the number of adults and children reading for pleasure. The chief suspect seemed obvious: it’s the phones. (Everything’s ‘the phones’). Yet the more Marriott looked into it, the more he came to believe that the real transformation came with television, as Neil Postman had warned in his 1985 polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death.

轶事很快得到了数据的支持，显示学生的阅读理解能力显著下降，成年人和儿童为消遣而阅读的人数降幅更为剧烈。主要的嫌疑对象显而易见：是手机。（一切都是“手机”的错）。然而，马里奥特研究得越深，就越相信真正的转变始于电视，正如尼尔·波兹曼在 1985 年的檄文《娱乐至死》中所警告的那样。

‘Postman believed that the rise of TV — with its bias towards triviality and charismatic personalities — was beginning to undermine the kinds of reasoned and productive public discourse on which a civilised democracy depends. He was dismissed by some of his critics as a crank and a Luddite. The passing of time has revealed that he was a prophet.’

“波兹曼认为，电视的兴起——及其对琐碎事物和魅力型人格的偏好——开始破坏文明民主所依赖的那种理性和富有成效的公共话语。他被一些批评者斥为怪人和卢德分子。时间的流逝证明，他是一位先知。”

Having collapsed at the end of antiquity, literacy rates began to show an uptick from the 12th century, initially in the urban centres of northern Italy but then rapidly rising with the invention of printing; even then, however, the nascent books trade overestimated how keen the public were, and he recalls the case of ‘two hapless Roman publishers who wrote to Pope Sixtus IV at the end of the fifteenth century asking for help because they had printed 20,000 books in a fit of over-enthusiasm and were unable to sell any of them.’

在古代末期崩溃后，识字率从 12 世纪开始回升，最初是在意大利北部的城市中心，随后随着印刷术的发明迅速上升；然而即便在那时，新兴的图书贸易也高估了公众的热情。他回忆起“两名倒霉的罗马出版商在 15 世纪末写信给教皇西斯都四世寻求帮助，因为他们在一阵过度热情中印刷了 2 万本书，却一本也卖不出去”的案例。

Then came Protestantism, with its emphasis on reading the Bible - in Sweden the Lutheran Church even banned the illiterate from marrying - and the Enlightenment, of which Marriott is a great fan. This produced both a republic of letters among our continent’s intellectual elite, but a much broader spread of empathy, enabling many people to see beyond the categories of social class, sex or race, into the soul and mind within.

随后是新教，它强调阅读《圣经》——在瑞典，路德教会甚至禁止文盲结婚——以及马里奥特非常推崇的启蒙运动。这不仅在我们大陆的知识精英中产生了一个“文学共和国”，还使同理心得到了更广泛的传播，使许多人能够超越社会阶层、性别或种族的范畴，看到内在的灵魂和思想。

‘In a book you can find yourself paying close attention to someone you might have very easily dismissed had you encountered them in real life. The wealthy male readers of Pamela spent hours with the innermost thoughts of a serving girl, a kind of person many of them would not have given so much as a second thought to had they encountered her in the street.’ Likewise, with readers of Olaudah Equiano’s memoir The Interesting Narrative, now able to see life through the eyes of a slave in a way that was transformative: ‘what it was like to be stolen from one’s home…’

“在书中，你会发现自己正在密切关注一个在现实生活中遇到时很容易被你忽视的人。《帕梅拉》的富有男性读者们花了数小时阅读一名女仆的内心想法，而这正是许多人在街上遇到她时甚至不会多看一眼的人。”同样，奥劳达·埃奎亚诺的回忆录《有趣的故事》的读者们，现在能够以一种变革性的方式通过奴隶的眼睛看生活：“被从家中偷走是什么感觉……”