In 1959 Walter M. Miller Jr. published A Canticle for Liebowitz, which quickly became a science-fiction classic. The book is set in a dystopian American Southwest more than a thousand years after it was written. But Liebowitz is far from run-of-the-mill 1950s-era science fiction.
The reader learns that, after humans nearly destroyed all of humanity with nuclear weapons in the middle of the 20th century, there was a great revolt against those people—the educated—who had made such destruction possible. Without science, technology, and innovation going so badly awry, the world would not have been destroyed.
And the root source of science, the mob concludes, is books. They begin rounding up and burning every book they can find. Thousands of years of history, science, literature, philosophy, story, and song are destroyed overnight. People proudly claim the title Simpleton to identify themselves with those who are unwilling to partake in the type of activities (reading) that nearly led to the world’s destruction. Only in the Church, and especially to monastic communities, are books, and the skill of reading, valued and preserved.
A world without the written word, where literacy is not merely disregarded but despised, is a terrifying proposition: a new Dark Ages ruled by superstition and ignorance. But what Miller didn’t predict, what no one who grew up before the advent of the smartphone could have predicted, is that we would enter this Dark Age voluntarily; that we wouldn’t need angry mobs to burn books, because we’d just stop reading them.
Literacy in the Western world is in freefall. A study from the University of Florida found that the time Americans spend reading for pleasure declined 40 percent between 2003 and 2023. Pleasure reading among children is now at the lowest level on record. After 300 years of becoming more literate, more intelligent, more communicative, we in the West are regressing. Like Miller’s mobs of Simpletons, we’ve ceased to see the value in books. It seems to not be something we did intentionally, unlike the mobs, but that we just sort of let happen to us.
I probably don’t need to tell you that the decline in literacy tracks with the introduction and widespread adoption of the smartphone, a device that may as well have been developed by a Simpleton to ruin our capacity to read. All previous technology that could (and did) displace reading for pleasure—television, movies, even radio—was designed to get and keep our attention for extended periods of time. But the smartphone and its accompanying software is the first device that is purpose-built for minimizing attention and maximizing distraction. We flip between apps, scroll between videos, and receive notifications of things that seem to need our attention right away.
The fracturing of attention and resultant decrease in attention span can make it difficult to focus long enough to read, to be sure. But there is another, more insidious cost. Because the smartphone is mobile, and because our modern society relies on this connection, it can feel impossible to unplug and turn off.
When you have the option to do your banking, grocery shopping, and medical appointment booking all on your phone, you are in effect always at the bank, the grocery store, and the doctor’s office. You can see someone with a cool new water bottle at your kid’s soccer practice and have an identical one ordered before you reach the parking lot. Red lights are no longer an inconvenience on the way to work. They are a chance to check your email because you are, effectively, already at work.
Having these capabilities is incredibly convenient. I can add olive oil to my Kroger delivery order the minute I realize I’m out (though I can’t help but notice that in the 1990s my mom seemed to get by fine with a paper list on the fridge). But I have to wonder: if having access to all our errands, work, and social life on our phones all the time is so convenient, if there are so many things that save us time and make our lives more efficient, why does it feel like we have less time to read?
The answer, I think, is that there is always something better to do. Not better in any real sense, of course. But there is always something more urgent, more pressing, more practical.
Home in the evening used to be a space where the only things to which you could give your attention were family, chores, and uninterrupted, long-attention leisure, like books, newspapers, magazines, and television. If there was a crisis at work, you wouldn’t find out about it until morning. If you needed to have a conversation with your child’s teacher, it would have to wait until drop-off.
It’s not that we have more things to do now than in 1900, 1950, or 1995, and it isn’t just that we’re spending our leisure time scrolling TikTok and Twitter (though that is undeniably part of the problem). We now have the option to do more things during the time that was previously occupied by reading. The dream of the techno-consumerist-capitalist has come true: we are both infinite producers, always busy with practical tasks like working and shopping, or infinite consumers, scrolling passively from reel to reel (and, let’s be honest, advertisement to advertisement).
But here is the thing about life: all the things that make it worth living are a complete waste of time. Having coffee and conversation with someone you love is a waste of time. It doesn’t do anything, and it probably keeps you from something productive. Going for a walk in the woods is a waste of time. Playing with your children is a waste of time; think of all the emails that are unanswered while you make a block castle that won’t even survive the next tantrum! Prayer, worship, singing, and laughter are a waste of time. They have no value in the short term, because their worth transcends and exceeds the moment. They aren’t productive and they aren’t consumable. But these are the things that life is made of.
What do we lose when we give up reading for fun? Reading books has many well-documented benefits for the human brain, but these are infinitely exceeded by what it does for the human soul. To take up a book and read it is to be invited into the heart and mind of another human being. It is a chance to explore and encounter worlds, times, places, and people that you can never know any other way. And most significantly, book do this in a way that movies, TV, and YouTube never can: by forcing us to be active participants, and not just consumers, in the world of the book.
And at the same time, reading, like prayer, forces us to accept that, in the end, our time is not our own. Whatever we make, or achieve, or do in this life, in the end, when we commend our spirits into the hands of the One who made them, everything we have done will have been a waste of time. Everything, that is, except those things with value that extends beyond the bounds of this mortal life—the things that make us really, truly, human. And if that is true, then Walter M. Miller is right: it is the call of the Church to remember what everyone else has forgotten: the soul-saving joy of wasting time, lost in a world of words. Tolle lege!
The Rev. Barbara White serves as associate rector for worship, formation, and communications at St. Francis in the Fields Episcopal Church in Louisville, Kentucky.
