Seven Features Of Post-Literate Politics

Inspired By Walter Ong's Classic Book, 'Orality and Literacy'

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The written word, fundamental to Western society for hundreds of years, is in retreat. Evidence for this has accumulated on different fronts, from time-use surveys to studies of cognitive processing. For a survey, read these recent articles by Sam Freedman for Comment Is Freed and John Burn-Murdoch for the Financial Times. We can debate the speed with which this is happening but no longer the direction of travel. It’s happening across societies, and the drop-off is steepest among the highly educated people who tend to constitute our elites.

We can’t pin this one on the phones since it is hardly a new trend. When Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves To Death in 1985, he blamed TV for the marginalisation of writing, which he argued had had a ruinous effect on the intelligence of our political discourse. But smartphones seem to be accelerating the changes that Postman was decrying. Social media started out as text based, but the dominant platforms TikTok and YouTube are now primarily visual and oral/aural. The LLMs we use are text-based for now, but will probably follow the same trajectory.

The age of literacy is not literally over: the majority of people in developed nations will continue to read and write. Books will sell in large numbers for a long time to come (I hope). But the written word will not be as central to our societies as it was, and this has profound ramifications, because it isn’t just about swapping one tool of communication for another. It’s about how we use our intelligence. We can learn about where we’re headed by looking at how pre-literate people used their intelligence.

Postman’s book was deeply indebted to Walter Ong, a Jesuit priest, professor of literature, and historian, who died in 2003 at the age of 90. Nobody wrote more knowledgeably or perceptively about the difference between pre-literate and post-literate cultures than Ong. His 1982 book, Orality and Literacy, is a short, densely insightful distillation of a lifetime’s research.

Beginning with a discussion of Homer, an oral storyteller, and ranging from papyrus to print to electronic text, Ong shows us how writing made the modern man. While our brains are not specifically evolved for decoding written symbols - it’s a relatively new technology - reading and writing remoulded human cognition and society. They changed the very texture of individual experience, making us more reflective and analytical, and generating new forms of culture. Shifting from a primarily oral culture to a primarily literate one enabled philosophy, science, democracy, and literature.

As Ong put it, literate human beings are "beings whose thought processes do not grow directly out of simply natural powers, but out of those powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of writing.” We are cyborgs of the script. A corollary is that the retreat from writing will rewire our brains and reshape our societies; indeed, it’s already doing so: longstanding trends in politics and public discourse are rooted in it.

Ong’s book doesn’t discuss politics or make predictions, but as I read it I kept thinking about how our politics is changing. I couldn’t help but reflect on the rise of Trump, a creature of TV and now social media, who seems to embody, in all his garish extremity, the qualities that now get rewarded in public discourse. Trump is both a new figure and an ancient one.

So here are seven features of post-literate politics. (The first three are free to read; the rest are for paid subscribers only. Upgrade to a paid sub for the whole piece and for a rattle bag - and for all the future full-fat Ruffians you’ll be able to enjoy.) Please accept what follows in the spirit with which it’s intended - provocation and stimulation. What I really want to provoke in you is a desire to read Ong.

1. The End of Objectivity. Ong argues that writing enabled us to think of knowledge something separate from ourselves or from any one person. It “separates the knower from the known.” By doing so, it enables objectivity, or at least the idea of objectivity; of truths that exist apart from whoever is speaking. In oral cultures, says Ong, all knowledge is embedded in human contexts and relationships rather than floating free in an abstract realm. Knowledge is something performed by specific people within specific communities. People say what feels right to them, or what helps them at any given moment, and assume that everyone else is doing the same.
   
   You can see the gradual collapse of objectivity everywhere today, from the rise in appeals to “lived experience” to the insistence that “science is political” to the difficult that some journalists have distinguishing advocacy from reporting, to the ubiquity of memoir-based storytelling. In political discourse, it manifests as pervasive distrust and cynicism about personal motivations. Even among experts, arguments and truth claims are discussed almost exclusively as tactics: what side does it put this person on; who are they shilling for; whose talking points are these?
   
   It also manifests in a stunted ability to take perspectives from beyond the current moment. Keir Starmer can think operationally and reactively but not strategically or philosophically, a deficiency shared by his immediate predecessors. Print culture cultivated our ability to think problems from first principles.
   

2. The Rise of Mysticism. We all watched those extraordinary pictures from St Peters. Somehow, in 2025, and after a scandal that would have killed off less resilient institutions, the Vatican felt like the centre of the world again. Christianity, thought to be withering away, is undergoing a revival. It’s not just traditional or organised religion: all forms of faith-based thinking are on the rise. Astrology is booming, says the Economist. QAnon is one of several mass conspiracy theories that are approaching the status of a theological worldview, with their own scriptures and revelations.
   
   Ong discusses how oral cultures tended toward more mystical, participatory forms of knowledge which understand reality through mythic, spiritual frameworks. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that as literate culture declines, people gravitate toward epistemologies where truth is felt, experienced, or revealed rather than proven via empirical evidence and linear argument.

   
   This is also to do with how people feel about our new technologies. The way we talk about AI has a lot in common with the religious discourse of two thousand years ago; prophecies of salvation and apocalypse. Writing, like AI, emerged first in certain sectors, mastered by certain people. Ong says that it was regarded, in this period, as an instrument of occult powers, wielded by magicians. Traces of this attitude can be detected in the language: the modern word “glamour” is an etymological cousin of “grammar”. Similarly, “spell” means both putting letters in correct order, and using words in the service of magic.
   
   The uneven distribution of our new magical powers, and the sheer bafflement they engender, is likely to cause profound anxiety and increase our yearning to feel connected to some higher reality. We will see a merging of religious mysticism with politics. We are leaving behind an era of secular, relatively cool, technocratic politics, for something weirder, more superstitious and premodern.

3. Heavy Characters. Ezra Klein recently observed that Trump is less like a politician in the sense that we’re used to and more like the grand ayatollah of the Republicans. That is, not even Trump’s own supporters expect him to make logical arguments, or to have a precise grasp of policy. For them, he is bigger than politics and indeed above earthly law, a mythical figure with a spiritual connection to his country. The failed assassination confirmed the sense that he is touched by some higher power.
   
   Ong writes a lot about how important memorability and mnemonics are in pre-oral cultures (more on this below, point #6). The modern equivalent of memorability is noticeability - winning attention, as well as retaining it. Ong says that oral cultures generate “heavy” characters; heroic, outsized, bizarre, unignorable. Heavy characters have striking and distinctive attributes that seize our attention. For Cyclops’s single eye, see Trump’s orange face and Boris Johnson’s hair. Heavy characters, says Ong, perform outsized deeds: they climb mountains and build monuments. Trump’s border wall is a physical embodiment of his powers.
   
   “Colourless personalities cannot survive oral mnemonics,” Ong says. I fear for Josh Shapiro and Christine Whitmer. ”Heavy” doesn’t just mean charismatic, by the way. JFK and Obama were charismatic, but they were “light” in the sense that they were admired for their essentially literate intelligences - for their learning, subtlety and self-awareness. We may not see their like again in the White House.
   
   You can see this effect elsewhere in the culture. Over the last twenty years, American’s bestselling nonfiction “ideas” author was superceded by another, contrasting figure. Malcolm Gladwell is a “light” figure: cool, nuanced, witty. He has admirers rather than believers. Jordan Peterson is “heavy”: zealous, eccentric, bombastic. His fans treat him like a cult leader.