People are lamenting, and not unreasonably so, that people are losing the ability to process literature. However, I believe that A: Such a thing did not really exist, and B: If it did, it was something along the lines of “past generations knew how to ride horses better.”

I think the reason is survivorship bias, which my reading of decades worth of cheap thrillers has shown. Basically, people see the literary works that endured in popular conciousness, not the far cruder ones people actually read.