Something incredibly important happened three hundred years ago. It was right up there with the most important things that ever happened on earth: people across all walks of life became obsessed with reading. It is hard to overstate how radical that moment was. Historians call it the “reading revolution,” a period when the written word leapt out of monasteries, universities, and elite drawing rooms and landed squarely in the hands of ordinary men and women. It was the greatest transfer of knowledge in human history, and its consequences cannot be overstated.

Here are some of the seismic events that sprang from this reading revolution: the Enlightenment took root in the minds of people who could suddenly read. Ideas about human rights spread because people could finally encounter them.

Democratic movements were built on literate citizens able to weigh arguments, compare ideas, and question authority. Even the earliest sparks of the industrial revolution can be traced back to a world newly trained to think in long, structured thoughts.

Today, we are living through the counter-revolution.

Books are not being banned; they are simply being abandoned. Universities now teach the first truly post-literate generation, students who grew up almost entirely inside the glow of screens. Their mental habits were shaped by short videos, games, and algorithms designed to hook attention rather than deepen it. The result is becoming painfully clear. In America, reading for pleasure has dropped by nearly half in just two decades. In the United Kingdom, more than a third of adults say they no longer read books at all. Children’s reading levels are the lowest ever recorded.

I am not being dramatic when I tell you professors are describing the first class of students who cannot fully read or comprehend a book.

The turning point was the smartphone. When mobile internet access exploded in the mid-2010s, it quietly rewired how people spend their hours and how their minds move through the world. Attention spans narrowed and vocabularies shrank. The kind of sustained focus required to follow a long argument or absorb a complex book became rarer. For many young people, the rich, layered knowledge preserved in books is no longer something they can easily access, not because they lack intelligence but because their minds were never trained for depth.

A society that stops reading loses more than culture. It loses memory, nuance, and the ability to think beyond the moment. It loses the patience required for reasoning and the imagination required for progress.

I remember my own obsession with reading at a young age. We had three channels on our television set and no other way to entertain ourselves when cartoons weren’t on. The public library was a source of entertainment and enrichment. Kids my age read everything–chapter books, comic books, Life Magazine, National Geographic, and even our parents’ books. A visit to the library at school was a coveted activity. Like gym, it was a break from the sometimes mundane process of rote learning.

I recently read a professor’s assessment of his current students’ reading and comprehension level in an article on Substack, and of all the things that have startled me awake these past twenty years, this realization surely rose to the top of my list of deep concerns for humanity. Because a society that can’t read, can’t think. And a society that can’t think for itself must be ruled. And a society that is ruled has no freedom, no creativity, no ability to better itself.

Independent thinking is the foundation of a free society. Democracies don’t survive on passive minds. They require citizens who know how to weigh evidence, recognize contradiction, detect deception, and imagine alternatives. When we stop thinking for ourselves, power concentrates, narratives harden, and people become easier to manage.

This holiday season offers a small but meaningful act of resistance: give a book. Walk into a bookstore. (There’s a lovely one in Lakewood.) Bring a coffee. Wander without an algorithm guiding your choices. Pick up something for a child, a grandchild, a friend. Put a story or a great thought back into someone’s hands. Remind them–and yourself–of the quiet pleasure of getting lost in a world built from sentences rather than swipes.

If we want a future in which we still think deeply, dream widely, and understand one another beyond the speed of a scroll, then we must keep reading. A book is more than a gift. It is a way to keep the light alive.