Letters to the Editor
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Huh??
I was intending to read the article until I saw the subheading:
'no wonder it's drowning in religious fundamentalism and political ideologues on both sides, argues Susan Jacoby.'
I agree that we're drowning in religious fundies and political ideologues, BUT FROM BOTH SIDES?? Not only are we NOT drowning in left wing ideologues in government, there ain't ANY!
Can't bother to read something that starts off from such an unreal premise!
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Scholars: try enlightening the discourse for a change
An invitation to discussion:
Yet another article about how stupid Americans are becoming.
I see at least one of these a week. The more of them I read the more I find myself resenting them and I suddenly realized why. Most of these articles are decrying television and mass media as the harbinger of American idiocy. Excuse me, but I learned a lot from television. Like any form of communication, there are varying levels of “literacy” and engagement with the material. You give Moby-Dick to one guy and he might come away thinking it was an awesome adventure tale, which it is. You give it to another and he sees that, plus a deep meditation on the American zeitgeist. The fact is that I can watch Battlestar Galactica and see the same things.
Also, these alarmists are holding up reading as the bastion of all that is wholesome for a thoughtful republic. Have they failed to notice that when people do read it is usually stuff as trashy and worthless as the worst examples of television, or worse? Publishing companies are not making all those romance and thriller novels or magazines like Cosmo and Maxim because they want to give deserving writers a shot. They do it because that shit sells like hotcakes. Reading is overrated.
What is really at work here is an elitist and reactionary sense of what comprises material worthy of intellectual discourse. These narrow-minded scholars would serve the public better by thinking about ways to enrich our experience of the television we love rather than insist that we turn them all off and read their tedious books. A good example of this is what Blackwell Publishing has done with their Philosophy In Pop Culture series of books. Its latest offering is called Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Knowledge Here Begins Out There and it illustrates how my detailed viewing of BSG is actually giving me a crash course in Hegel, Nietzsche and the theory of knowledge, among other things.
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There seems to be a whole body of thought built on the notion that the government would NEVER harm or lie to us.
Unable to grasp even the basic principles of statistics or the scientific method, Americans gullibly buy into a cornucopia of bogus notions, from recovered memory syndrome to intelligent design to the anti-vaccination movement,
The left seems particularly succeptible to this notion that government is always honest to us and only means the best for us. I do not know where such weird notions come from.
There is great reason to doubt stupendous numbers of things being put out by our vast government: vaccinations, FDA approved food additives, fashionable big pharma profit center drugs, the government's desire to impose itself on evey nook and cranny of our lives, the whole NASA lies conundrum I detail elsewhere, the media shutdown of war zones and the atrocities being committed behind closed doors, on and on and on
I totally distrust a left and anyone who buys lock stock and barrel everything their government tells them to be gospel.
Yet we seem more and more surrounded by doofuses who tell us to UNQUESTIONINGLY trust and believe in wacky and strange new manifestations of big government excretions.
You can keep your left, you can keep your liberal. If the price of trusting the left is to be poisoned, spyed on, told what to do by government, then you can severely fuck off.
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What's a Luddite?
Kidding!
"The real problem with TV, and to a lesser extent the Internet, is that while some of it is excellent, much of it is not -- and all of it has become ubiquitous."
So true! But, this has always been the case. I'll explain:
In our post-modern, media heavy culture, it's easy to arrive at the conclusion that all works of art, be they visual, music, film or literature are all handled with the same sense of gravity. That is, everything is presented as being equal, all voices and expressions equal in value and merit and all work neither "bad" nor really "great".
But it's not true. The old phrase "The cream rises to the top" is still very accurate. The great works of art survive decades and generations because of their quality and insight. Great art endures. Don't believe me? Go grab a dozen issues of Art in America from the mid 1980's. Flip through them. How many names do you still recognize? Of all of the artists listed and reviewed within, how many have pieces in major institutions today?
There's also something so wonderful and pleasureable about books, the act of reading, holding and looking, that technology won't erase. Barnes and Noble and Borders have CDs and DVDs but they also seem to have a lot of books in there too.
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@ Lynx
Lynx wrote:
America's never really been more well read or intellectual than it is today. This sadly comes off as just another book written by someone screaming that things ain't like they used to be when they were kids.
I'd sure like to know what part of the country you live, Lynx, because I've not found this to be the case (e.g. as the rule, not the exception) in ANY of the places I've lived in the States.
In my experience, I have found most citizens (in the specific locales) to be poorly informed - most don't even read one newspaper (my current neighbor brags about it) and as for books - don't mention any non-fiction or any that entail depth or intellectual demand.
The students are abominably lazy and expect to be hand-held every step of the way. In my last (and final) teaching gig - Calculus Physics, 3rd term, students demanded I provide "equations" for each and every exam. That is, all the possible equations that might be used. Another student berated me after he received 7/10 in an optics lab - asserting he had always received 10 merely for "turning one in" by his previous prof.
One of the most pernicious devices speeding this deterioration is the "teacher evaluation" which is now used more as a vehicle of extortion (for inflated grades) than providing any useful insight.
As for college kids today based on what I've seen, I would put any ten of them against ten from my own era (1964-65) in a debate - say: 'The War in Vietnam was Unjustified'- and am certain the latter group would thrash them. Those kids in the 60s knew more, they read more (not merely abridged online texts) and they could argue with formidable logic and clarity.
Anyway, I am still ingtrigued about where this enclave of intellectual activity exists. I may wish to move there!