Before the Internet and social media, there was Johann Gutenberg’s seventeenth-century movable-type printing innovation. (The Chinese invented something similar centuries before, but without impact). It revolutionized the spread of literacy and contributed to the Protestant movement’s break from the Catholic Church.Between the printing press and the Internet, there were other things: the telegraph, radio, and TV. None diffused written texts as the Internet and the printing press have done. Books became the “social media” of the time—with many of the negative side effects the Internet has now.

　　There have been endless studiesover the centuriesabout how the fast spread of literacy disseminated general knowledge, but almost no mention of how, when accompanied by increased prosperity, it also gave rise to less elevated literature. Ridiculous, shallow, and jargon-filled fluff contaminated what passed for “culture.“

　　By the fifteenthcentury, the plaguehad largely passed, and Europe’s decimated population increased rapidly. Between 1500 and 1750, it went from 65 million to 127.5 million. This rapid flux disrupted older methods of transmitting and accessing information, among people and across generations. The printing press filled the void, and the number of books printed increased from about 8 million to 400 million by the end of the seventeenth century. Now the world’s population stands at eight billion, up from only one billion a century ago, with books in print and available instantly on Kindles everywhere in the world.

　　Already in the sixteenthcentury, writers such as Rabelais, known later for the satiricalGargantua and Pantagruel, supplemented his income by writing “old wives tales and nonsensical stuff.” These sold,whereas serious books did not. Nicolas Bourbon made fun of him by publishing two volumes in 1533 and 1538, titledNothings.Lucien Febvre, a French historian, declared, “There was no dishonor in writing nothings. It was only the turn of the phrase that mattered, and the prosody.”

　　But when young people read nothings, their heads may be full of air. Inthe seventeenthcentury, Molière, one of the greatest playwrights, made fun of this trend and the literate groups who embraced it—ridiculous pedants, parvenus, writers, hopeless amateurs mouthing words but clueless about meaning. More broadly, he saw the young making fools of themselves, under the influence of shallow, sentimental, or pseudo-intellectual literature.

　　Molière’sLe Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The Middle-ClassGentleman) is a good example of this kind of critique. The play is about a man who inherits money from his self-made father in the clothing business.Hewants to belong to the aristocracy, never realizing that this goal cannot be accomplished just through badly imitated clothing and the spouting ofpretentiouswords.This is one of many works of Molière that describes the echo chambers of the seventeenth century, with the idle spouses of the nouveau riche and their equally idle children all interacting with new classes of impostors, pseudo-intellectuals and fake priests—drawing their “culture” from reading “nothings.”

　　Another telling example can be seen inMolière’s one-act comic work, The Ridiculously Precious (Les Prècieuses Ridicules). Two young women, indulged by their father, spend their timetalkingto equally silly girls, reading silly books, and preparing cosmetics; they are the seventeenthcentury’s TikToks. They reject as “deplorable” their father’s recommended marital prospects, all hard-working, respectable men. Instead, they dream about aristocrats sweeping them off their feet in pastoral surroundings with romantic sonnets—expecting their father to finance their daydreaming.

　　When the father scolds them that their gobbledygook “is not even French,” the young women tell their startled Father that they have changed their names, since the names they were given were vulgar: “The name of Polyxene, which my cousin has chosen, and that of Arminte, which I have given myself, bear superlative grace which even you must recognize as undeniable.” The father’s reaction is that “the source of such impertinence is no mystery. This stilted fashion of precious bearing has infected not only Paris, but has flowed into the provinces, where our two squabs have sucked up their full share of it.” Just like today’s young fools, the young of Molière’s day experimented with pronouns and identity, inventing endless genders in their desperate quest to be novel.

　　The jilted hard-working suitors sendthemtheir two male servants, masquerading in aristocratic outfits with fake titles to avenge their coarse dismissal. The two servants, though, have no better understanding than the young women do. They have memorized the same silly books, and parrot the jargon—but their understanding is nil. They invent nonsensical verses, singing and dancing with ridiculous pretense—and the young women swoon.

　　If “social media” has had unanticipated impacts, Molière has already given us the solution: To stop subsidizing the idleness and boredom of what passes for “education” and “culture.”

　　The end of the play offers a suggestion for how to stop such nonsense. The working masters tell their servants to firstengage indisciplined work, and only then pursue their social ambitions. The father announces that he will no longer subsidize the women’s idleness: “I grow weary of having you on my hands. … Go hide yourselves; foolish geese. …And you who have caused their folly—novels, poems, songs, and sonnets—all the pernicious amusements of idle minds—you can all go down a long, deep well with your empty preciousness!”

　　Discipline, responsibility, and a strong work ethic were all in danger of fading as a prosperous generation gave way to a more decadent one. Now consider our planet, populated by eight billion. In countries where many hard-working parents and grandparents prospered, they misguidedly over-indulged their offspring, both directly by paying tuitions for their idleness, and indirectly, with subsidies through governments’ massive intermediation, creating increasing numbers of impostors passing for “academics,” “intellectuals”and “students.” Molière perceived the risk of “three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves,” that later Nietzsche wryly warned about: Against boredom even Gods struggle in vain.

　　The more things change, the more they stay the same, as can also be seen when Molière’s characters debate marriage. While one of the sisters inThe Learned Womendefends marriage and family life, the other scolds her: “What a poor part you act in the world, to confine yourself to family affairs, and to think of no more soul-stirring pleasures than those offered by a husband and by brats of children! … Raise your thoughts to more exalted objects … [and] give yourself wholly to the cultivation of your mind.“This might sound admirable, but this sister, along with her mother and aunt, only parrot the words of the “philosopher” Mr. Trissotin, who wants to marry only for a dowry and abandons the plan when circumstances change and he believes that the family has gone bankrupt.

　　The father has long seen Mr. Trissotin for what he was: “Writing all that his pedantic person everywhere shows forth; the persistent haughtiness of his presumption … and knows everything except what should be known. … All his talk is mere rubbish, and one is for ever trying to find out what he has said after he has done speaking.“

　　Again, cut to the present. In theJournal of Marriage and Family, with a subsidized worldwide circulation of 6,200, Bethany Letiecq at George Mason University states her theory that marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy … [and] is also a hidden or unacknowledgedstructural mechanism of White heteropatriarchal family supremacy that is essential to the reproduction and maintenance of family inequality in the United States.She admits that her view draws on “critical feminist and intersectional frameworks to delineate an overarching orientation to structural oppression and unequal power relations that advantages White heteropatriarchal nuclear families (WHNFs) and marginalizes others as a function of family structure and relationship status.Never mind that the overwhelming evidence is aboutthe extraordinary benefits ofstrong families everywhere. History repeating.

　　If “social media” has had unanticipated impacts (whether that media is found in books, the Internet, or academia), Molière has already given us the solution: To stop subsidizing the idleness and boredom of what passes for “education” and “culture.” Whereas politicians and self-serving academics have been justifyingand financingfor decades the increasingly gargantuan size of this sectorinvokingits ability to create “human capital,” diminish inequality, encourage mobility, and enhance civic virtues.It achieved none of that, not during the sixteenthand seventeenthcenturies, not between the two World Wars in Europe, and not now as the events on campuses around the world show. Technology changes, but human behaviour does not.

　　Just this week Biden forgave another $7.7 billion in debt relief,bringingtotal “student” debt relief to $167 billion. I put the word “student” between quotation marks, since the evidence suggests that the certificates these students bring home are often backed by little more than “nothings.” Funneling more money into empty books and fruitless pursuits will not help young people to establish themselves, nor will it help our culture. Our young people may seem increasingly shallow and silly, but Western society is not doomed. The time has come to borrow a strategy from a seventeenth-century playwright, and stop subsidizing their idleness, and the foolish and misguided institutions that facilitate it.

　　History may not exactly repeat itself, but it rhymes.