A book can almost have a personality. It was written by somebody, and it is about something. Neither of these things can be said of a Kindle, or a Nook, or an iPad. They are not written at all and are not about anything. After libraries have all closed down or become free computer centers, there will still be people like me, feeling like monks in monasteries preserving books in their own private libraries.

There was the Great Flood. There were the Ten Plagues of Egypt. There was the Fall of Rome. There was the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem and the Fall of Constantinople. And then this: The Encyclopedia Britannica went out of print.

While the Simpsons just celebrated its 500th show, the world’s greatest learned publication couldn’t even make it to its 250th anniversary. Will the last person who even knows what Western civilization is please turn out the lights?

I submit that this is the most significant cultural event of the last fifty years. No. Make that a hundred. The New Dark Ages are upon us.

T. S. Eliot ended his poem, “The Hollow Men,” with the words:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

The sing-song rhythm of the first three lines evokes a child’s careless playground chant, as if Eliot meant to say that the end of the world would be attended with a general lack of awareness that anything significant was really happening–and that, when it did happen, it might go unremarked or even unnoticed.

If you want proof that our own culture is experiencing this very kind of end, just look at the malaise with which we have greeted the Britannica announcement. Note the general cultural yawn directed toward the announcement that they will be suspending their print edition.

The best anyone could do was to give the glib assurance that there was nothing to worry about, since Britannica will continue in an electronic edition.

If someone important to you died, would you find comfort from being told that he or she would continue on in a digital form? No. Encyclopedia Britannica is dead. We now have only its electronic ghost.

Our cultural landscape is fast becoming welter and waste. Before the barbarian onslaught of the computer, one would go to a place and read a thing. There was a library, and it had books, and one went there to read them. Go into a library now, and look to the right, where there are rows of shelves of books, but no people. Then look to the left, where there are rows and rows of people–sitting at computers.

Soon the shelves will be gone, the books sold, leaving only the people, staring mesmerized at their screens. They won’t even notice that the books have been taken away.

Every technological revolution has its benefits—and its casualties. The invention of writing was itself a technological revolution. In his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato tells a story about the old god Theuth, the inventor of many arts, including arithmetic and geometry. But his greatest discovery, said Plato, “was the use of letters.” He came one day to Thamus, the Egyptian god-king, who dwelt in Thebes. Theuth presented his great invention, writing, to the king. “This,” said Theuth,”will make the Egyptians wiser. It will increase their memory and improve their wit.” But the Egyptian king was not impressed.

“Because these letters are like your own offspring,” he said, “you are blind to their faults. This discovery of yours will only create forgetfulness in the learner’s soul because he will no longer need to use his memory. He will trust to the written characters instead of his memory, and will not remember them himself. These letters of yours may help in reminiscence, but they are not an aid to memory. Your hearers will become, not disciples of the truth, but of a semblance of truth only. They will be hearers of many things, but they will learn nothing.”

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