Interesting reading in the comments, too. My main complaint is the author goes too heavily into the pseudo-classical literature style in his writing.
I tracked down reprints of this piece on Google, and it appears that the author is a game programmer. Figures.In today’s Washington Post, Susan Jacoby argues Americans are in serious intellectual trouble. This is not true. America's kids are as fine a generation as we've ever raised. They may not read as many books as we did, but they're good kids, creating works of power and beauty, far beyond what we created in our own heyday.
Public ignorance, she says, can’t be discussed without sounding like an elitist. I remember John Kerry’s supposed elitism and the charges leveled against him, but he shared a membership in the ultra-elitist Skull and Bones with his folksy opponent George Bush. While it is true politicians have always aspired to appeal to common folk, this country has never elected a common man. The closest we ever came to a Common Man was Andrew Jackson, who would go on to evict the Cherokee and was easily America’s worst president. I recently spent some time in Osage County Oklahoma: native people prefer not to carry the 20 dollar bill in their pocket, for Black Heart’s face is upon it. Jimmy Carter, another Common Man, proved a disaster in office.
The grumblings of old people is as constant a refrain as the twittering of birds at dawn. Cicero’s crotchety whine of “O tempora, o mores” has passed into cliché. The old have always believed themselves smarter than the generation behind. The old have the advantage of experience and the disadvantage of inflexibility.
Jacoby refers to Lincoln’s eloquence at Gettysburg: the Shakespearean cadence of that marvelous speech. Lincoln’s entire education was centered on Shakespeare. We must resist the urge to insert our modern selves into a November afternoon in 1863, to say the audience was any more intellectual or educated than ourselves. Lincoln was self-taught, with only 18 months of formal schooling. William Herndon taught him law. Nor was the Gettysburg Address a campaign speech, it was composed in several drafts, meant as a minor adjunct to a much longer speech after the president of Harvard University, Everett Hale. The world of 1863 featured professional oratory: in a world without radio or television, the written word was all there was.
Richard Hofstadter’s polemic "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" is woefully dated. Intellectuals and cynics have always controlled the public debate, and William Randolph Hearst made fortunes on info-tainment long before the revisionist Hofstadter emerges to praise Andrew Jackson in his far more influential The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1948). I have several significant beefs with that old fraud Richard Hofstadter: he was always a Marxist, even when he went over to the Ruling Class. He is the archetypal revisionist historian.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a gentleman and I will not disparage him overmuch. Dumbness hasn’t been defined down: it’s merely become more visible. The video culture began on a high note: early television was innovative, high-minded and deeply committed to education. But so was the printing press, in its day. Mass literacy and book ownership descended to the right of the common man. When radio was invented, Nicola Tesla built Wardenclyffe Tower to make world communications possible. Technology always starts on a high note: the early Internet was a hopeful thing. That it became a pornographic peep show is incidental: you are reading this essay on a website dedicated to the proposition that people can get smarter here.
Books and magazines are falling off, we are told. We are not told of the exponential rise of the Internet, of Google’s initiative to digitize the books of the world. News appears first on the Internet: Islamic terrorists put their videos up on the Net first. The technology never mattered anyway. Children in Niger and the Congo are on the Internet now. Small languages have a new lease on life: I just submitted the Osage (Niukonska) language Wazhazhe charset for Unicode inclusion.
If book reading is the yardstick for education, then yes, America’s in trouble. But is this of necessity a big deal? The book-reading public has always been a relatively small part of the body politic: the lurid serial form called Penny Dreadful has always sold well. Mark Twain and Charles Dickens wrote many books for newspaper consumption. What is the practical difference between LonelyGirl’s YouTube confessions and what preceded it in text form? I would argue the novel was a form invented for entertainment purposes only, and was mummified by the worshipful educational establishment.
Mankind changes little from age to age. The storyteller has always been part of human society, and the stories weren’t always pretty. Grimm’s Fairy Tales were gruesome little parables, every bit as horrific as any snuff video. Cinderella’s sisters mutilate themselves to fit into the glass slipper and most of the villains are sentenced to death in horrible modes of execution. Odysseus’ companions are eaten alive by Polyphemus, turned into pigs, every one of them dies before Wily Odysseus returns home, to kill the suitors. The Sangreal is awash in blood, gore and horror. It all sounds quite video-gamish to me. Jacoby calls my sort of argument Balderdash (what a silly old word that is, from Latin balducta, milk curds), but mankind has always sat around the fire, from infants to the elderly, their mouths agape in delight and horror, as the storyteller unrolls his magic carpet. Every modern theatrical and literary form has its ancient equivalent. There is nothing new under the sun.
Ms Jacoby may have been reading books in a tree house ( I favored my father’s study ) where modern children may obsess over their Facebook account. But how much effort did you put into decorating your three-ring binder, Ms. Jacoby? Which cliques did you join or wish to join? Which lunch table did you sit at? Children have always self-segregated, expressed themselves in the art and music they chose.
Ms. Jacoby says America isn’t interested in complicated policy choices. I would argue nobody’s interested in policy decisions until they’re directly affected. Franklin Roosevelt was a complex man who understood the power of radio, communicating directly with America via his Fireside Chats, which began long before Pearl Harbor. Raised in an elitist world, he was humanized by his polio. FDR’s genius was not his very considerable intellect, but his empathy. His wife’s role is not well understood to this day, but Eleanor Roosevelt poked holes in the bubble surrounding every politician in high office, exposing him to the suffering of the American people.
I seriously question any survey which says one in five American citizens believe the sun goes round the earth: this discounts the American sense of humor which writes Yes into the box labeled Sex. Americans do speak a second language: more Americans speak Spanish as a native language than English in the continental USA. It’s a perpetual source of amusement to me: ask an American about his heritage, he will never say “American”, he will respond with “oh, I’m Polish on my Dad’s side, Scots-Irish on my Mom’s side, and there’s some Cherokee in there somewhere.” The mythology of America is one of assimilation and collective identity.
And let’s put to rest this idea America’s become stupid in the mean time. Intelligence comes in many modes: we are a utilitarian people. Trade schools are doing land office business: if art history and literature departments are now in decline, they never did terribly well. They were always the refuge of those who couldn’t climb the mountains of the math and chemistry required for the degrees which ensured good jobs in the outside world.
Intellectualism and high culture have never been our forte. More women than men now graduate from four year colleges. As the costs of college have risen, fewer people feel can afford to attend. The teaching profession is poorly paid. If academia shouts out its disaffection with modern times from the dizzying heights of the ivory towers, it is an ancient tradition. It goes right back to the time of Socrates, accused of corrupting the youth of his day with the heresies of critical thinking. There never were any Good Old Days. What passes for Critical Thinking in our day has become a vile parody of itself, as anti-intellectual as anything coming out of the Know Nothings Jacoby rails against. I consider myself a well-read man, but my children grew up on the graphic novels of Neil Gaiman, the dark complexities of Nine Inch Nails, the beautiful and intricate worlds of Myst and the Airtight Garage by Moebius. They read widely and well, pushing bravely into the dark and violent corners of literature and art, as well as the strong beauties of a brave new world Ms. Jacoby neither knows nor understands. Intellectuals they have become, but not poseurs or dilettantes. I have shot them like arrows into the world, sharp and deadly and precise.
Unique in the generations of American children, this generation did not despise the music or culture of their parents. They are prematurely wise and cautious: they grew up in a world where AIDS and antibiotic-resistant venereal disease is a one-way trip to the morgue. They came of age when 9/11 cured America of its delusions of supremacy and invulnerability. This is a generation with a heart. They enlist in our military with the certain knowledge of the dangers they face. This is a generation with a heart. Old I may be, and a bit wrinkly, but I will stand up for this new generation. They are not anti-intellectual, and I will slap down every assertion of their callous ignorance or their low level of discourse. Most especially, I will attack the likes of that precious old huckster Richard Hofstadter and his equally pedantic peer Allan Bloom, he of “The Closing of the American Mind” The artists, coders and scriptwriters behind the video games Ms Jacoby so despises know their Homer and Swift, and give life to visions of staggering power and beauty. America’s mind has never been more open than now. They're good kids, Ms. Jacoby. Maybe you should meet a few of them.
A lot of "humanities" blah blah blah. Essentially self-praise for the game industry which is so fucking rich on Swift (I'm sure they're huge fans of HP Lovecraft too, he's classic after all).
