The Dumbing Down of America - Here's Why

[LizzieMaine]

The dumber people are, the more crap they'll buy. Simple as that. Thinking is bad for business.

 

[LizzieMaine]

After watching much current television, "It Pays to be Ignorant" seems to be the soul of intellectual wit and grace.

The days when The Saturday Review of Literature was known to every educated American have sadly long since passed. Imagine a modern Henry Scheerman hiring a Henry Seidel Canby to assemble an editorial board including Dorothy Fisher, William Allen White, Christopher Morley and Heywood Broun!

It seems inconceivable.

I can't imagine Fisher, White, Morely, and Broun even being alive in such a world as we have today. And yet in the Era, they weren't obscure niche ntellectuals but household names familiar to everyone who read popular magazines or listened to the radio.

That's what "dumbing down" of culture means. It isn't about sinister conspiracies or evil educational philosophies or any of the rest of that. It's about an entire society that can't be bothered to sit down for half an hour some evening and just read an interesting essay with no other purpose but to consider an interesting idea.

 

[LoveMyHats2]

What you say is 100 percent accurate. One current trend even from the media, they can write or say anything and have the general public believing the story even if it is a total fabrication. I can see a link or connection if you will, from sales of items to sales of a story. Manipulation for profit, ease of operation, greed.

 

[Gingerella72]

I work with teenagers every day, kids who have grown up in modern schools. They aren't *dumb.* Not at all. They read a lot, everything from Proust to "Twilight," they have decent vocabularies, they can carry on a conversation without too many "like yah, y'knows" in it. They're smart kids, they would have been smart in 1937, and they're smart today. They do have a pretty shallow understanding of 20th Century history, but being around me is getting them squared away in that area.

But they don't seem to *think* the way I do, and I have to be very clear and very specific in what I want them to do -- they don't seem to have the talent for improvisation that I had at their age, the ability to work out an alternative way of doing something if the original idea doesn't work out. If something unexpected happens, they call for me to come over and fix it, rather than improvising a solution on the spot as I would have done.

I think the Internet has a lot to do with this. The Internet gives you information and answers, but in a lot of ways it does your thinking for you. Got a question or a problem? Go to Google and get an answer, bang bang bang. No need to suss it out for yourself, no need to analyze the situation and consider the various issues and figure out how to resolve it. The Internet makes life too easy -- and for a growing kid, that's a very dangerous thing. We learn from challenges, not having solutions dished up to us in easy bite-sized morsels.

That may not come from a lack of being able to think for themselves. I remember a lot of times being in an unexpected situation that I could have figured out for myself, but didn't, because I thought I would get in trouble if I didn't do it EXACTLY the way I was told.

As for computers, they can either be a great educational tool, or a complete crutch. What worries me with kids today is spell-check, especially if the computer corrects the word automatically without giving the person a chance to look up the correct way. They don't even know if something is misspelled.

 

[tonyb]

Bread and circuses, anyone?

 

[vitanola]

It isn't about sinister conspiracies or evil educational philosophies or any of the rest of that. It's about an entire society that can't be bothered to sit down for half an hour some evening and just read an interesting essay with no other purpose but to consider an interesting idea.

Faith in a "Sinister Conspiracy" offers the believer absolution for his or her own cupidity or intellectual sloth, does it not?

 

[tonyb]

Faith in a "Sinister Conspiracy" offers the believer absolution for his or her own cupidity or intellectual sloth, does it not?

It certainly does.

This is not to say that sinister people never conspire, of course, but only that the intellectually lazy and/or dishonest first look for villainous influences outside of themselves and their own characters.

 

[vitanola]

You know, the word "troglodytic" has frequently come to mind of late.

Oddly enough, my spell-check flags "troglodytic" and "troglodytical" as mis-spelled, though the noun "troglodyte" flag it does not.

 

[Feraud]

Faith in a "Sinister Conspiracy" offers the believer absolution for his or her own cupidity or intellectual sloth, does it not?

Yes it most certainly does. Reminds me of those poor doomsday preppers storing all that food and firearms in bunkers fearing social collapse when either the government or their neighbors will come for them.

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

What you say is 100 percent accurate. One current trend even from the media, they can write or say anything and have the general public believing the story even if it is a total fabrication. I can see a link or connection if you will, from sales of items to sales of a story. Manipulation for profit, ease of operation, greed.

Reminds me of the age old truth, "The love of money is the root of all evil."
Truer words were never spoken or written that relate to what we all can see happening in this world today.
Watch, "Zeitgeist: Addendum" for an eye opening look at what is really at the root of the world's ills. It explains in detail the so-called Fractional Reserve "monetary" system which creates "money" out of thin air. It's a system that is purposely confusing and obscure. Designed that way in order to make us feel just a bit dumber when trying to cope with the sheer nonsense of it all.

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

What you say is 100 percent accurate. One current trend even from the media, they can write or say anything and have the general public believing the story even if it is a total fabrication. I can see a link or connection if you will, from sales of items to sales of a story. Manipulation for profit, ease of operation, greed.

Danged double post,..sorry about that.

 

[Foxer55]

Just because there are conspiracy theory proponents doesn't mean there aren't any conspiracies.

 

[Fletch]

You want some kebab with that?

 

[Gregg Axley]

Now that's clever.

 

[vitanola]

I wish Cuddles Szkall were here to go "SHEEE! whilst bringing his hands to his cheeks,


Note post #126. It may be the word for the week.

 

[tonyb]

You know, the word "troglodytic" has frequently come to mind of late.

Oddly enough, my spell-check flags "troglodytic" and "troglodytical" as mis-spelled, though the noun "troglodyte" flag it does not.

From what I can gather, there's never been a lack of willful ignorance among our species. Whatever one's political persuasion, heeding that which buttresses it while disregarding that which challenges it is, sadly, many (most?) people's default mode. (I don't place myself outside that company, by the way, but I do try to be mindful of that human tendency and keep it in check.)

Confirmation bias, it's often called, and these days it's all the more easily fed by round-the-clock access to media that is anything but fair and balanced. Left, right or clear off the edge, a person looking to "win" a rhetorical battle has no difficulty finding ammunition.

What gives me hope is that most people come to recognize such intellectual sloth and dishonesty. They eventually stop paying any attention to that guy who's making all that noise. The pity of it for that poor fellow is that he's usually the last to realize (if he ever does) that all his talking has been a waste of his breath, and his life, for that matter.

 

[Fletch]

What gives me hope is that most people come to recognize such intellectual sloth and dishonesty. They eventually stop paying any attention to that guy who's making all that noise.

But if the guy has learned to put his message over subtly and indirectly - to make it sound like anything but "noise" - he can hold people's attention for much longer. Maybe even longer than people are conscious of. Intellectual sloth and dishonesty, cautiously encouraged, cleverly couched and cynically promulgated, can take deep root.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The inevitable result of a society that values the scoring of "talking points" over actual, rational discussion of issues.

It's very illuminating to listen to broadcasts of "America's Town Meeting Of The Air," a weekly radio program that ran from the mid-thirties to the mid-fifties. Each week, representatives of various points of view were given an open microphone to address the topic of the week, with a period of open questioning from the audience to follow. The program was sternly moderated -- personal attacks on any speaker, speechifying from the audience, and any attempt to hijack the discussion were immediately and unapologetically quashed. Occasionally the comments would be heated, but for the most part, the discussions were reasonable, calm, dignified and respectful, with actual *discussion* of the topic instead of shouting and sloganeering.

You couldn't do such a program today. "Discussion" is a matter of all or nothing, kill or be killed, and moderation is seen as an attempt to "stifle freedom." (We even hear that directed to we, the moderators, here at the Lounge.) A sad commentary on our times.

 

[tonyb]

But if the guy has learned to put his message over subtly and indirectly - to make it sound like anything but "noise" - he can hold people's attention for much longer. Maybe even longer than people are conscious of. Intellectual sloth and dishonesty, cautiously encouraged, cleverly couched and cynically promulgated, can take deep root.

Yes, we can cite examples of that as extreme as entire populations (or at least a critical mass thereof) coming to believe that exterminating another national/ethnic/religious/whatever group is a reasonable course of action.

 

[Foxer55]

LizzieMaine,

You couldn't do such a program today. "Discussion" is a matter of all or nothing, kill or be killed, and moderation is seen as an attempt to "stifle freedom." (We even hear that directed to we, the moderators, here at the Lounge.) A sad commentary on our times.

I am put off by 'discussions' where one side thinks they have to start raising thier voice or hollering and screaming to make a point or win a contest. Another new game is to conduct arguments full of specious statistics and logic to support preconceived conclusions. Historically, we have evolved in western culture a system of quiet, utterly boring council where issues are debated to death until a reasonable solution appears based on the myriad of details involved. Screaming, hollering, and a motherload of tangent statistics are no substitute for deliberation regardless of how boring it may be.