The dumbest generation?

Via Tiberius Gracchus, I read a despondent post from Ashok Karra; do read both the original and the reply.

Ashok’s lament is based on Mark Bauerlein’s book, The Dumbest Generation:

“that our unparalleled access to knowledge is coeval with a culture of decadence which allows the construction of entire worlds around our purely adolescent selves”

Our time is not uniquely stupid, or, if it is, we have no way of showing it to be so. In this, I largely agree with Tiberius. However, Ashok’s post picks up on something of a theme I’ve seen of late in books like Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and how to Stop it. Essentially, it argues that the combination of easy access to information through the internet and, crucially, easy means of putting information on the internet¹ means that our culture is degraded because our population does not think critically. This affects everything – politics, music, literature, the arts, everything. I think that those authors and Ashok are missing the point.

Let us take one of the supposed high-points in the intellectual life of our species; classical Athens. Aristotle believed that part of the human condition was to be a zoon politikon. This is often rendered as ‘political animal’ but such a translation loses some of the meaning of ‘political’; it means ‘of the polis, or Greek city-state. The good life was achieved by living in, and taking an active part in, the city-state as this fulfilled man’s (and it is man’s – women had very little status in ancient Greece) various needs and potentials. That option isn’t open to us now; even engagement in the municipality isn’t the same because national identification has primacy for most people. Since that high point, we have gone downhill, according to Ashok and others’ argument, and thought less and thought less critically.

Unfortunately, that’s a load of rubbish.

It’s often nice to think that the Athenian agora was full of people wandering around, alternately philosophising and politicising. I rather think it more likely that it was a mixture of something that student politicians in the UK would recognise – scandal, rumour and faction – and people just trying to get on with their lives.

Socrates was in the habit of accosting people in the agora in Athens to discuss whatever was on his mind; not necessarily philosophers, but whoever was going about their business there. In response to a pronouncement from the oracle at Delphi that he, Socrates, was indeed the wisest in Greece, Socrates decided that his wisdom came in recognising that he didn’t know much and was prepared to analyse things critically and honestly. His compatriots gave unthinking, uncritical answers – dumb answers – to his questions, asserting knowledge when what they had was prejudice (in the sense of having pre-judged based on existing personal and societal biases and received wisdom).

We might take another moment of great conflict and change – the foment around the time of the North American War of Independence. At the same time as Tom Paine was proseltysing his radical messages, one retort ran

So you, great Common Sense, did surely come
From out the crack in grisly Pluto’s bum

(Tom Paine – A Political Life by John Keane)

As Mark Steel commented – what is that, magical realism?.

I will not deny for a moment that there were some interesting, eye-catching developments from those periods – and those are just two in history – I will deny that those periods were awash with it. Yes, perhaps more people were aware of great debates. I wonder how many read much more into them that they did into the arguments between two feudal lords in other times and places.

If I may borrow, via Ed Murrow, a phrase from Shakespeare:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves

Trivia, rumour and gossip are as much a part of the human condition now as they ever have been; it is part of our social nature. I am prepared to accept that our liberal-capitalist-democratic order is fragile and requires a more active and informed citizenry to survive, which in turn requires a long, hard look at the nature of politics, education and the media in the west, but that doesn’t mean the material we have to work with is qualitatively worse or that it has been made so by the internet.

xD.

1 – This is an interesting effect, deserving of study. It is principally the ease by which it can be done. Once upon a time, you either had to code directly in HTML (and CSS and the rest) or use a WYSIWIG editor like MS FrontPage. You still had to sort out how to upload your files and storage space was frequently limited. The Web 2.0 phenomenon is not so much about social media as faster internet speeds, cheap storage and user-friendly interfaces (hard and soft) so that you don’t have to know anything about computers beyond standard office skills to have a blog, edit Wikipedia or post something to YouTube.