Letters to the Editor
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Balderdash!
This whole concept comes from a long line of older people lamenting the stupidity and increasing unintelligence of youth.
Lots of studies show how today's generation is not as "smart" as their parents. But how do you test that? Many in today’s "dumb" kid generation are able to navigate the web, hook up a computer, and use machines to preform tasks that their parents find difficult if not impossible.
More interesting than the over-done old smarties vs. young dummies is the idea that the nature of intelligence has changed. My parents had to do math sums in their head, or use a slide-rule. Thus, at basic numeracy, they would appear to be "smarter". However, give me a graphing calculator, and I'd definitely blow them away. The sort of intelligence of the old was memorizing facts and figures, because the information was not readily and constantly available. Today's generation can just look it up on their mobile phone if they don't remember something. They've extended their brain into the internet, and so long as they know how to FIND certain information, memorizing it is a waste of space and brain capacity.
Ms. Jacoby's impression of college dorms may be similarly misleading. So students aren't all sitting around discussing things with each other (I'd personally debate her on this because as someone who graduated college only 3 years ago, I remember quite a few 'academic' discussions with friends), maybe they're all on the internet IMing each other to discuss.
I get the impression that Jacoby thinks that because its IM, that means it can only be used to discuss last night's episode of South Park and what party you're going to. Many students read Salon (I started reading it in college), and sit a write messages going out to the world about serious topics. But you know, they aren't engaged in vigorous "discussion" then, are they?
Don't get me wrong, America is full of complete morons. I'm just not convinced it's any more moronic than it ever was.
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Who else but the choir?
The most interesting thing about this article was Susan Jacoby's claim of surprise and disappointment that she should find herself preaching to the choir on her tours. She should certainly be prepared to find more of the same with a book entitled "The Age of American Unreason." Who but the choir would even think to crack it open?
As a previous poster said, it looks to me like just one more in a long string of lamentations about how everybody these days is a bunch of idiots. Couldn't say I don't agree, but it seems odd that writers in this tired polemic genre don't seem to have much of a sense of history. Which era of American history was the age of reason? 1940-1945? 1860-1865? Have we really fallen so far since the golden days of the Salem Witch Trials? Are there fewer bestselling books promoting atheism now than there were 20 years ago?
Could it be that Susan Jacoby just finds iPods annoying?
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Misguided but worthwhile
I remember an incident in my Latin class when the professor was discussing grammar. She brought up the outrage of various grammarians at the Oscar Meyer Wiener commercial tagline: "I wish I was an Oscar Meyer weiner". The correct grammar, of course, would be "I wish I were". Egad! Language, my professor said, changes, and that which was wrong before becomes right when enough people use it. When I related this incident to a friend who studied linguistics, he exploded. Grammar, he said, is a set of preposterous (and arbitrary) rules the elites come up with to separate themselves from the "vulgar" masses.
The line between "smart" and "dumb" is fuzzy and contorted. My advisor in graduate school always listened to jazz and classical music, while these days, I can walk in on my current supervisor and find him blasting trance. Both are tenured professors, smart and educated, experts in their field. Go figure.
There was a time when Shakespeare's plays (and theatre in general) was considered to be a vulgar type of entertainment for the masses. Ballet was a form of strip-tease. Actors were considered the worst sort of scoundrels and the knight poems of, say, Chretien de Troyes were trash reading for the lazy and bored. Don Quixote went bonkers and began attacking windmills as a result of, Cervantes tells us, reading too many medieval romances... texts that today are rigorously studied by academics and revered as treasured classics. But I'm preaching to the choir, ain't I?
Lamenting the loss of intellectualism in these scary modern days is a dead end. We cannot go back to how the world was, we have to go forward. Whenever someone writes a lament like that, they've probably reached the stage of their career when they're ossified in their perceptions, unable to absorb the new and therefore must sit on their porch lamenting about the bygone "good old days". Of course, I haven't read the book. But you know... I don't really want to. I'd much rather read something stimulating than a treatise by some disenchanted intellectual about how I'm too plugged in to my computer.
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!!!
The current crop of leading presidential candidates not only aren't dumb, they aren't even trying to appear dumb...
Oh yes they are, because any attempt to publicly discuss what they really think or feel or know about practically any issue would probably be a complete disaster, given the low intelligence of the electorate.
For example, how about Hillary explaining exactly what was going through her head when it came to voting in favor of military action against Iraq. For example, was she aware of what Obama said in his speech and did she weigh up his point of view versus that of Bush and decide that Bush was right? Or did she just think that the country was too dumb to understand a NO vote, so it just wasn't worth the hassle? I for one certainly don't feel that she is trying to treat the electorate on equal terms intellectually.
However, one of the reasons Obama is doing rather well is that his public political persona appears to be a bit closer to his real self than the other candidates. By writing an autobiography that appears to have been written by himself, and not by a ghostwriter--a stunningly original idea in itself--he has given us a better opportunity to get an idea of what makes him tick and how he would approach the problems of governance.
Regarding articles about hip-hop etc. It is not the subject matter that is important but the way it is said and the quality of the thought that counts. In the 1970's Australian journalist Clive James was the TV & film critic of the London Sunday newspaper The Observer--a lowly position, one might think--but the quality and wit of his observations was such that people were talking about lines like: As far as talent goes, Marilyn Monroe was so minimally gifted as to be almost unemployable, and anyone who holds to the opinion that she was a great natural comic identifies himself immediately as a dunce.
Of course wit of this kind could not be allowed and he was soon given his own TV talk show called Saturday Night Clive.
What is said here about religious fundamentalism is right on the money. I live in the South among bible-believing Christians, but I rarely--never, really--meet anyone who has ever read the Bible or even has familiarity with the most popular parts. No one has ever noticed, for example, that St. John's Gospel contradicts the other three gospels in almost every single detail of the character and career of Jesus.
However, infidels rarely understand that fundamentalist churches provide a sense of community, babysitting etc., in a way that no other organization can.
My very religious fundamentalist friend spends all his weekends at church activities, but who else would play softball with him? He has deformed hands and feet and no amount of steroids would ever make him into an athlete, though in the eyes of God he is a star player.
The people who go to fundamentalist churches are all right. The ministers, though, are complete bastards, because they know better, but they mislead people just because they can.
A lot of Americans are pretty stupid--no doubt about it--but are they any more stupid than people of other nations? You might want to try hanging out with some Hispanics or Jamaicans before you rush to judgement.
In any population only a very small percentage will be really intelligent or original thinkers and if you look at the things that we have in the US vs other countries, we must have something going for us. We are pretty darn good at building roads, for example.