Too much information risks a new dark age

Historians deplore the prejudiced and overgeneralising term “Dark Ages”. The centuries that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, with their barbarian invasions, shrinking populations, declining literacy and crude carvings, are now recommended to us as having been relatively pleasant.

Recent histories of the period suggest the “Light Ages” or the “Bright Ages” as alternative labels. But I am unable to quell my doubts.

Partly, I cannot persuade myself to prefer the squat churches and clumsily illuminated manuscripts of late antiquity to the elegance of classical Roman temples and Greek epigrams. But principally, I believe that it is rather a good thing for a society to be haunted by the myth of an age of ignorance.

• Burial site reveals crossroads between Roman and Anglo-Saxon Britain

That humanity is not inevitably enlightened, that knowledge can disappear and that fear and superstition are powerful foes for even an advanced civilisation are excellent lessons for the 21st century.

Smugly secure in our era of omniscient algorithms and garrulous chatbots it is tempting to think of our own century as the lightest of all. Particle accelerators crack atoms like walnuts, cars guide themselves suavely down motorways and all the world’s knowledge fits into the metal and glass box lodged in my pocket.

There is hardly a washing machine or refrigerator that is not proclaimed by its manufacturer to be “smart” — the spread of reason to household appliances is a development undreamt of by even the most megalomaniac of the Enlightenment philosophers.

But ignorance can flower even in the midst of an information age. Consider this alarming statistic. For virtually the entire history of IQ testing, average scores rose consistently at a rate of about three points a decade, a trend known as “the Flynn effect”.

By the turn of the millennium the average American was smarter than 95 per cent of the population had been a century previously. But in the early 2000s scores began to go backwards. Some blame air pollution, but the most plausible explanation is that digital technologies such as iPhones are making us less literate, more distracted and more prone to outsourcing everyday cognitive problems to computers. The recent Pisa scores — the international measure of educational attainment — registered an “unprecedented” drop in global literacy.

It is hard to feel that the current spread of measles across Europe is characteristic of an enlightened time. The anti-scientific superstition of antivaxer parents would once have seemed more characteristic of the 11th century than the 21st.

If the original Dark Ages were characterised by a dearth of information — even the most stubbornly optimistic historian of the early Middle Ages will be forced to agree that there was a decline in the production of books and manuscripts — our own looming dark age may be attributed to a surfeit of information.

• The historic sites and hidden gems fuelling an English Heritage revival

Witness the confused parents quoted in a recent Guardian report on the antivax movement who are disregarding NHS advice and taking to the internet to “learn about it all and make the right decisions”. Conspiracy theorists, astrologists, homeopaths and political lunatics of all stripes thrive in the same bewildering atmosphere of information glut. The GB News presenter Neil Oliver, who warned his fans that the Covid vaccine was linked to “turbo cancer”, is, thanks to his platform, more dangerous than any medieval quack doctor.

Dire auguries are everywhere. The number of people reading books — for centuries the most reliable barometer of civilisation — is falling. A recent study found reading in “sharp decline” in America. In the UK almost half of adults never read. University humanities departments close almost weekly. The latest grim news comes from the University of Kent, which last week announced plans to shut its departments of art history, philosophy, anthropology and modern languages.

Optimists will point to widening access to university and a new emphasis on employability. But when we look back at the great civilisations of the past we do not judge them on their ability to launch a certain percentage of graduates into careers at top-flight management consultancy firms but rather on their art, their literature and their architecture.

A society that values the arts as little as ours has a better claim than most to be passing through a dark age. As Melvyn Bragg warned in his eloquent speech to the House of Lords last week, opera is being destroyed by underfunding, music education is in scary decline and the theatre is “dying”.

In golden ages, the wealthy are patrons of the arts: every art gallery in the world is a testament to the enlightened munificence of another era’s super-rich. In our own time the world’s wealthiest companies have all but declared war on artists. Thanks to meagre royalty payments offered by the streaming platforms it has never been harder to be a musician. The executives of Spotify and TikTok are the Visigoths of the 21st century. Sam Altman, whose AI software is already putting writers and artists out of work, is a veritable Attila the Hun.

A plausible counter-case could be made. It might centre on the vitality of the video games industry, the wonders of the iPhone camera and the high standard of television drama. My aim is not to prophesy certain doom but to urge vigilance. There is nothing inevitable about civilisation. It is more precious and more fragile than we usually care to remember.