James Marriott seems to me to be cut from cloth that has fallen out of fashion. He is no proselytiser for any particular political creed, but a sceptical observer and interpreter of the political battlegrounds of our age. More into Keats than clickbait, his instinct is to think deeply rather than rush to formulate a viral opinion.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Marriott is a columnist at The Times, where he reviews books and podcasts and writes about society and ideas. We meet at the British Library, where he has been working on his upcoming book, The New Dark Ages, due to be published in September. Marriott\u2019s debut expands on his Substack essay, \u2018The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society\u2019, which sparked debate with its exploration of how the decline in reading may impact Western civilisation, democracy, and intellectual thought.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As we speak, it strikes me that Marriott\u2019s words seem careful and considered, almost as if prewritten. We begin by discussing his upbringing in Newcastle. He inherited his interest in poetry and literature from his father, an English teacher. As a child, he dreamed of studying at Oxford; an aspiration that was fulfilled when he got a place to read English Literature at Lincoln College. \u201cLike a lot of people who went to Oxford, I had all kinds of fancy ideas about what it was going to be like\u201d, Marriott says. \u201cIt was going to be like Brideshead Revisited. I was going to make all these marvellous, eccentric friends.\u201d Marriott was understandably disappointed when myth turned out to be a poor guide to reality. He\u2019s disarmingly honest about his initial difficulty at Oxford: \u201cI felt very lonely and shy. It took me a year and a half to really start enjoying university.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Journalism was not Marriott\u2019s first aspiration. \u201cAfter I graduated university, I was full of the idea of being a poet\u201d, he explains. \u201cBut it quickly became clear that being a poet is not a viable career option in the 21st century, so I abandoned that.\u201d Marriott\u2019s route into journalism was somewhat unconventional: \u00a0 his first job was in the rare books trade at Bernard Quaritch Ltd in London. He found himself surrounded by priceless manuscripts \u2013 including a first edition of Milton, a legal document signed by Napoleon, and a children\u2019s book dating to 1807.\u00a0 It was, he emphasises, \u201can amazingly fortunate position to be in\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Marriott, however, had his sights set on The Times Books section. He wrote reviews in smaller outlets until he was noticed by the paper\u2019s Literary Editor, who took him on. Sheer luck and persistent determination played their parts. \u201cI\u2019m aware things could have gone very differently for me\u201d, Marriott reflects. \u201cI could easily have not ended up being a journalist \u2013 life is all sliding doors and coincidences.\u201d<\/p>\n
Column-writing, he admits, is an odd discipline. \u201cIt\u2019s partly a nightmare to say something new every week.\u201d A colleague told him that \u201cevery opinion column is either obvious or wrong\u201d. It\u2019s a worry he can never truly escape. \u201cYou always fear, am I just saying something incredibly obvious and incredibly banal?\u201d\u00a0 Yet Marriott is keen to emphasise the rewards of his job. The lifestyle is strikingly similar to that of an Oxford humanities undergraduate. \u201cI spend my entire life reading books, trying to have ideas, turning in my weekly essay\u201d, he says, before adding with a smile: \u201cIt\u2019s a pretty lucky way to live.\u201d<\/p>\n
That life, however, exists within a media landscape in flux. No longer are print newspapers a product of widespread consumption; Apple News is simply more convenient than buying a Times subscription. The world in which books and broadsheets claimed cultural preeminence is no more. Journalists have had to adapt. Indeed, Marriott tells me that he is scheduled to film two TikToks the following week. It is hard to imagine his restrained, literary style competing with the churn of short-form video and algorithmically amplified outrage. \u201cBeing a newspaper columnist 20 years ago was a big deal, and columnists were household names\u201d, he observes. Yet today, they occupy a smaller corner of a far more crowded media ecosystem.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Marriott fears that lost amidst this shift is a shared cultural and moral reality. \u201cHistorically, newspapers helped form the nature of a modern nation state\u201d, Marriott explains. \u201cEverybody read the same newspapers in the same language, and disparate groups began to think of themselves as a nation.\u201d Now, as reading declines and media fragments, people are less likely to identify with a national public and more likely to belong to diffuse political tribes. \u201cCan you have modern national democratic politics in that environment?\u201d, Marriott asks. \u201cI think we genuinely don\u2019t know.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the fracturing of the media landscape is only one strand of a broader unravelling of the liberal world order. The technocratic, optimistic politics of the post-WWII era have been replaced by the populist politics of the present. The edifice of democracy is cracking; we are watching a page of history turning.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Does Marriott think the post-war liberal consensus is gone for good? \u201cI think we\u2019re hurtling into a new era\u201d, he replies. \u201cSince the end of the Second World War, we\u2019ve experienced 100 years of liberalism, stability, functioning democracy. And I think we can too easily assume it will last forever.\u201d Yet he cautions that \u201cthe lesson of history is that societies change all the time\u201d. He points to 600 years of social transformations \u2013 \u201cthe printing press, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution.\u201d\u00a0 Throughout this history, he says, there has not been an example of \u201can ideology as dominant as liberalism fading out and coming back\u201d. It\u2019s that recognition of the transience of our political age that so often characterises Marriott\u2019s writing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So, why do people often view liberal democracy as the natural endpoint of political evolution? \u201cIn the late \u201890s, it wasn\u2019t a mad thing to think\u201d, Marriott notes. \u201cThe world was becoming more democratic and more wealthy. Everything just seemed to be working very well.\u201d<\/p>\n
He adds that we are prone to a \u201chuman bias\u201d: \u201cWe get used to our lives, and we find the idea of change very hard to believe. We\u2019ve read our local sense of stability into a kind of wider universal law that just doesn\u2019t exist.\u201d Marriott argues that the universe does not bend inevitably towards liberal democracy; there is no \u2018end point\u2019 of political evolution, only the volatile vicissitudes of political systems rising and falling. All political systems eventually decay, so why should democracy be the exception?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Before political systems fall, the habits of thought that sustain them begin to unravel. In his viral 2025 essay, Marriott argued that we are living through a counter-revolution against reading driven by smartphones. His argument is not simply that people are reading less, but that this shift alters the very structure of thought. Put simply, the way we communicate shapes what we can communicate.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We are not, Marriott points out, short of information. Quite the opposite: we are overwhelmed by it.\u00a0 In pre-literate societies, forgettable ideas simply disappeared. Today, the bulk of information sinks into what Marriott terms the \u201cgreat swamp of the archive\u201d. This is an information environment which prizes memorability over accuracy and contrarianism over nuance. One is rewarded for being striking, provocative and emotionally charged.<\/p>\n
Populism is a natural beneficiary of this shift. In our conversation, Marriott points out that social media algorithms \u201cfavour a particular kind of content, which is angry, loud, simplified\u201d. In contrast, \u201cbroadsheet newspapers traditionally provide nuanced context and analysis, and that just doesn\u2019t fly\u201d. Whereas writing rationalises thought, short-form videos allow one to bypass logical argument. Populism, with its emphasis on style of communication and simplicity of message over substance of policy, is uniquely situated to take advantage of the social media algorithm.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yet Marriott maintains that this is not the whole story of populism\u2019s ascendance. An inescapable reality is simply that social media has democratised the information environment. The erosion of traditional media has removed the \u201cgatekeepers\u201d that once filtered and framed public discourse. \u201cLiberal ideas have been imposed in society artificially from above, via the BBC and The Times\u201d, Marriott suggests. Yet now, those very institutions are receding from their former preeminence in public life. Without these institutions and norms, \u201cliberal ideas don\u2019t come naturally to people\u201d, he explains. \u201cI don\u2019t think people are behaving like good liberals when you throw them all together in a big mass on Twitter.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHuman beings are naturally dogmatic\u201d, he adds. \u201cPeople don\u2019t like changing their minds. They don\u2019t like having their points of view challenged.\u201d Yet humans are responsive to environments that reward open-mindedness. Perhaps, then, the problem with social media is not that it reveals our innate nature, but that it incentivises and amplifies our most illiberal instincts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the same time, the beliefs people hold are not always adopted through careful reasoning. Marriott points out that columnists writing about ideas can \u201coverestimate how committed people are\u201d to them. \u201cWe are social apes, and we care much more about social status than we do about the truth\u201d, he observes. \u201cWe are much more likely to adopt ideas because they seem status-enhancing and will help us fit in in our groups.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor a lot of people, there was no point at which they changed their mind and wrestled with the ideas of progressivism.\u201d What actually occurred, he suggests, is that people suddenly believed these ideas \u201cbecause everyone else believed it\u201d. Ideas are often embraced less for their intrinsic merit than for the social advantages they confer and the sense of belonging they provide. What looks like ideological conviction may, in practice, be a form of social alignment.<\/p>\n
This presents a paradox for the columnist. To write about ideas is to assume that ideas matter and that people arrive at their beliefs through argument and reflection. Yet the more seriously one takes ideas, the harder it becomes to value how most people come to hold them.<\/p>\n
As our conversation ends, Marriott seems acutely aware that the world which shaped him is receding. This sense is only sharpened when I point out that he, as a columnist, is writing for an audience that is increasingly insouciant about reading. \u201cI\u2019m feeling a bit sad watching something that I grew up believing was the most important thing in life turning into an antiquarian endeavour\u201d, Marriott says, a flash of despondency crossing his face. He adds that his interest in poetry is, in this age, seen as \u201can eccentric hobby, like collecting Victorian China\u201d.\u00a0 One can only hope that the cloth he\u2019s cut from comes back into fashion.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"James Marriott seems to me to be cut from cloth that has fallen out of fashion. He is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24358,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3189,13,3690,10929,5925],"class_list":{"0":"post-24357","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-populism","11":"tag-reading","12":"tag-the-times"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116484070639080071","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}