The Dumbing of America

[Hawkwings]

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction -- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.

Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.

I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.

No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."

As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.

The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.

People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important."

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.

Posted without comment.

[Singular Intellect]

Yes, this was quite apparent some time ago when my friend's girlfriend from the US was visiting us here in Canada from Texas (nice enough woman). During the course of a couple of conversations she remarked I must have a "college education" because I was seemingly knowledgeable about several subjects, mostly because of tid bits I'd read here and there.

And to think I never even finished High School (do to the obvious the stupidity and laziness of my youth).

[Admiral Valdemar]

I get that a lot. I'm a goddamn genius to most people. Doesn't get me the ladies though, which I thought was the whole point in knowing trivial crap.

I need big throbbing biceps with that big throbbing cerebrum.

[Singular Intellect]

I get that a lot. I'm a goddamn genius to most people.

It's made even worse by all the years I've spent on SDN; at times people stare at me blankly when I ask them if they don't understand what <insert logical fallacy here> means.

Doesn't get me the ladies though, which I thought was the whole point in knowing trivial crap.

I need big throbbing biceps with that big throbbing cerebrum.

Well, honestly, I have the large build and muscular arms, but they don't really help either, unless you're just looking for one night stands with sleazy women (which I'm obviously not).

[Admiral Valdemar]

It's made even worse by all the years I've spent on SDN; at times people stare at me blankly when I ask them if they don't understand what <insert logical fallacy here> means.

The hilarity in explaining faults in personal syllogisms to Laypeople. "No, dad, that's a red herring. Yes, it does bloody apply. Don't you use that tone of voice with me, mista!".

Well, honestly, I have the large build and muscular arms, but they don't really help either, unless you're just looking for one night stands with sleazy women (which I'm obviously not).

Hey, all the more for me then.

[Nephtys]

This is the downside of America's focus on 'equality'. What people tend not to realize however, is that the idea was 'all men are created equal', not that all people are equal.

People with education and skills are looked down upon as 'people who don't do work'. Whatever that means. Intellectualism is seen as a form of high-minded elitism that HAS to be bad, because they view themselves as 'better' than a random person. I suppose this also contributes to the 'every kid needs a college education, no matter how worthless the degree' issue.

[White Haven]

One thing that brought this problem into crystal-clear focus to me was reading Civil War-era letters from soldiers. These were just ordinary cannon-fodder a century and a half ago, and despite that they turned out letters that were more thought-out, literate, and sophisticated than ninety percent of the present-day US. Depressing.

[Illuminatus Primus]

The equality angle is hilarious. Americans want cultural/intellectual equality, but not economic equality or even equality of opportunity. The Right has hoodwinked the entire nation and built the rhetoric from the ground up.

[Battlehymn Republic]

Andrew Sullivan blogged about this today. His rebuttal:



Is YouTube Making America Stupid?

18 Feb 2008 01:39 pm

[Peter Suderman] Susan Jacoby, following up on this Times Online piece, seems to think so. Right now, she says, there is "a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism."

Jacoby has joined the ranks of a growing cohort I think we should call techno-moralists. They run basically the same game as the moral scolds who shriek every time Quentin Tarantino or Eli Roth release new movies, or Rockstar Games puts out another edition of Grand Theft Auto. But instead complaining that culture is being debased by particular imagery, their complaint is that new technologies—particularly the internet—are causing the downfall of Western Civilization.

We saw this recently with Doris Lessing, for example, who in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech intimated that computers and the internet are rotting our brains. We hear ominous warnings that text-messaging teens are "losing very natural, human, instinctive skills" to a steady stream of communication via 160-character blips. Thanks to a combination of technology and laziness, American kids, we're told, are "dumber than dirt."

But are we really headed for an electropocalypse heralded by whatever's in this week's Best Buy flyer? Somehow I doubt it. Text messaging for example, seems to have made kids more comfortable with writing, and some evidence suggests that kids are actually growing more literate. Meanwhile, on the violent imagery front, violent crime amongst youth is down since 1993, when violent video games like Mortal Kombat began appearing.

Now, I'm not naïve enough to think that it's all sugar plums and roses. New technologies do cause changes in the way we live, and some of them will probably be at least partially negative. Shorter attention spans might become the norm, but so, I suspect, will greater ability to process larger amounts of discrete information. Memorization will decrease, of course, but ability to link and organize facts will probably increase. As video becomes more dominant, strong writing skills may not be as prevalent, but the ability to communicate in the grammar of film—sounds, images, spoken words—will grow as cheap high quality video cameras become the pens and notepads of the next generation.

So yes, as new technologies insinuate themselves into more and more lives, there are and will be trade offs, but Jacoby just ignores them. Instead of actually addressing the challenging and complex ways technology is transforming society, she's chosen simply to be offended—which, as far as I'm concerned, is an anti-intellectual stance if there ever was one.

[DrMckay]

MMMmmmmmmmm. Sheeple...

[Illuminatus Primus]

Complaining about TV and new-fangled computers and games is just another way right-wingers can try and co-opt the fruits of their own shit: a society dumber because of a very poor emphasis on investment in social and intellectual capital and falling standards. Somehow I think things would be okay in spite of TV and computer games if our schools didn't suck shit and the right-wing didn't pay public homage to openly anti-intellectual ideologies.

[Battlehymn Republic]

No, this is a phenomenon that expands to both sides of the spectrum, actually. Doris Lessing seems to be rather liberal, she was the one who was warning about the possibility of someone trying to assassinate a President Obama. And Mark Morford, seems to be quite liberal.

[Battlehymn Republic]

Heck, Jacoby, who wrote this article, seems to be quite liberal herself, judging by Wikipedia.

[Darth Wong]

Well, honestly, I have the large build and muscular arms, but they don't really help either, unless you're just looking for one night stands with sleazy women (which I'm obviously not).

Broad shoulders and a solid chest don't necessarily get you women. But skinny-ass shoulders and a sunken chest can lose you the opportunity. Rebecca once told me that if I didn't have broad shoulders and a solid chest, she would not have had any interest in me. As she put it, "I refuse to go out with a guy who looks weaker than me."

However, interestingly enough, she is turned on by guys who are very smart, as long as they fit the physical expectation. But she's just one woman, and for many women, it is seemingly neither your physique or your intellect; it's your wallet.

[Patrick Degan]

A stupid populace is easy to control. Every fascist dictatorship and every party machine has understood this basic fact. The stupid will always vote against their own interests since they are never made aware of what those are and are easily gulled —which well suits the present oligarchs. Worked in the South during the bad old days of Jim Crow and now it's been applied nationwide.

They've actually managed to accomplish the Texafication of America.