G.K. Chesterton on the Death of Literacy

A new Atlantic cover story argues that America is sliding into a postliterate age—but G.K. Chesterton diagnosed the same collapse in 1928, years before Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman raised the alarm. Joe Grabowski goes solo to walk through Rose Horowitch's statistics on the death of reading, then turns to two Illustrated London News essays in which Chesterton describes a public that has stopped reading connected prose and now only kisses books it has never opened. What emerges is a practical challenge for anyone who wants to recover the habit Chesterton simply assumed his own readers still had.

In This Episode:

• Why G.K. Chesterton said so little about illiteracy—and what that silence reveals about how genuinely new this problem is
• Chesterton's 1928 warning that making reading "easier" signals a slump in reading rather than a boom
• What Chesterton meant by a public relapsing into the horn book and the cat on the mat—and why Joe Grabowski thinks he would have said much the same of reels, Shorts, and TikTok
• The 1921 essay in which Chesterton argued that the books shaping the world are the ones nobody has actually opened: Darwin, Marx, and the rumor that replaces the text
• Why Chesterton's critique lands on podcast listeners too—the risk of becoming the very type of person Chesterton described, taking opinions secondhand from influencers and favorite podcasters

Resources Mentioned:

• "The End of Reading Is Here" by Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic
• "On Reading, and Not Being Able To," The Illustrated London News, December 8, 1928
• What Mr. Belloc's Servile State Means by G. K. Chesterton

FOLLOW US

• Instagram
• Facebook
• X

SUPPORT

• Consider making a donation
• Visit our Shop

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

Chapters:

• 00:00: Introduction—A Crisis Worth Paying Attention To
• 04:20: The Atlantic Article: Rose Horowitch on the End of Reading
• 06:42: The Numbers—Who Still Reads, and How Little
• 09:06: Schools, Screens, and the Warnings of McLuhan and Postman
• 11:29: Why It Matters: Media Literacy in an Age of AI
• 13:56: If No One Reads, Who Wants to Write?
• 16:19: Writers Come from Readers
• 18:31: Turning to G.K. Chesterton and His 1928 Essay on Reading
• 23:20: Newsprint Headlines, Reels, and the Attention Economy
• 25:38: The 1921 Essay—The Books the World Has Not Read
• 30:07: An Examination of Conscience
• 32:33: The Challenge: Take the Book Down off the Shelf