I'll note that the photograph on the wall by the kitchen, which shows a lightning bolt against the night sky, was taken while standing about five or six feet away from my co-blogger, as we both aimed our cameras randomly at the sky clicking the shutter when we thought we sensed lightning on the way. By the way, while I'm at it, here's a picture of the cat, since I haven't posted one in weeks:
Anyway, several thoughts ran through my head at the bookstore. First, bookstores are humbling. I read a lot of books, enough to fill several bookshelves over the past decade, and it doesn't even scratch the surface of the good literature out there, to say nothing of the rest of the stuff they have, from good to dreck. For someone who likes to read everything by an author, it's frustrating, since every time I finish off one, several new guys appear to take their place.
More disconcerting, it struck me even more than it usually does that we really do live in a time where someone in the middle class and above in the developed world literally has the entire sum of human knowledge available to them, and is forced to choose the degree and direction of their ignorance. Every foreign language we don't learn, or basic piece of learning we skip past is by choice. Of course, some people out there are more ignorant than others, but most people are too polite to just come out and say that way too many people are content being ignorant and stupid. I am not such a person, and noting my own incapability with respect to cars and virtually everything related to style, I'll happily endorse the point of view that way too many people are stupid and ignorant. For those that care to challenge this statement, I'll post polling data in the comments about how many Americans recognize people about whom they really should know in order to qualify as a moderately informed citizen.
On a more practical level, I wonder what the future of the book will be. Book technology hasn't really evolved all that much over the past couple of centuries, but that may change soon. Recent developments in electronic ink and electronic paper would seem to have numbered the days of the bound-paper book, but I don't know anyone who really wants to switch over just yet. It's not a matter of storage. iPods now hold 80GB of storage, and The complete works of Shakespeare only take up a little more than 5 MB as text, so you can fit about 15,000 copies inside your e-book if you want to make sure that they are safely backed up. No, it's a matter of the feel of a book, and the convenience, but I can't see that lasting for very long. Imagine, for instance, being able to search for given text in every book you own, something that is rather difficult to do with several bookshelves worth of hardcovers and paperbacks. If we don't transfer over to an electronic book system within a generation, I'll be shocked. Perhaps book publishers will be able to teach their music industry colleagues a lesson: the existence of libraries will make it almost impossible for booksellers to make e-books uncopyable, since people are used to sharing books. Whatever model they devise to remain a viable industry will almost have to be adopted by both the music and film industries, unless the latter beat the publishers to the punch (hint: they won't, because they're really dumb when it comes to this stuff). Hopefully, for fogies like me and the rest of my generation, to say nothing of our parents and theirs, these fancy e-books will still be booklike, since books are nice, tangible symbols of the joy that can be found within literature.
Speaking of books, I would note for anyone out there interested in a little self-betterment, like we discussed above, that virtually every great book that predates the 1920's can be found freely online, either through the Google books program or through Project Gutenberg, which makes the text of a huge number of classic works available to the entire world. Among the many works they have is one that was brought up in comments by my dad, The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. Think of it as a cynic's response to the Conservapedia, which just happens to predate it by a full century. Highlights can be found at wikipedia:
Christian: One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.Those, my friends, are some zingers, if I may say so.
cynic: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
education: That which discloses from the wise, and disguises from the foolish, their lack of understanding.
learning: The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
marriage: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
mayonnaise: One of the sauces that serve the French in place of a state religion.
and possibly the most famous, as mentioned by my dad:
religion: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
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7 comments:
I'll gladly switch to e-format books if it means saving a few trees and being able to carry multiple books in a single, slender container.
"For those that care to challenge this statement, I'll post polling data in the comments about how many Americans recognize people about whom they really should know in order to qualify as a moderately informed citizen."
I don't doubt it and I think the world is full of idiots, but on the other hand I wonder if the modern world doesn't expect too much of the average human. I read somewhere that there is more information in one Sunday New York Times than the average person in the middle ages encountered in their lifetime. Maybe most people aren't prepared to deal with that.
Hey Alexis, you may get your wish as soon as they come up with a reasonably priced display that people are happy with and can look at for a while without eye strain. Lord knows the rest of the technology is in place.
Megan, I agree with you, but people take advantage of this point to really play dumb. Several US government officials with oversight duties over Iraq didn't know the difference between Shi'a and Sunni Muslims. In 2003, there was a survey that found more people could name the winner of American Idol than the Speaker of the House, who is third in line for the presidency in an emergency. 2/3 can't name any supreme court justices. I'll grant you that a working understanding of quantum mechanics or meso-American history or the ability to speak a second language should not be expected to be universal, but there is no reason whatsoever not to expect basic civics knowledge from our populace, who do get to vote, after all. Speaking of voting:
Vote, n: The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
Not everyone can be an encyclopedia, just like not everyone will know that the language of Hungary is known as Magyar (sorry inside joke) but in any case...
While not everyone needs to know the overall flow of history in Mesoamerica, most people know what they need to know. I would agree that overall the respect towards education has diminished in the US. Personally I feel that this is most likely due to the activities of religious fundamentalism and unrestrained capitalism.
To put it bluntly I have always been told that there are two ways to advance yourself in academics: one is to come up with a novel idea and to push it forward, the other is to rip down those around you. I do feel that fundamentalism and the forces of unrestrained capitalism have repeatedly lost arguments with science and education and have therefore turned towards the method of discrediting them as sources of knowledge.
Statistically, the world has just as many stupid as it does have smart. Furthermore I have no doubt the average person on the street is just as smart as anyone else. If you walk down the street in Boston, I have no doubt most people wouldn't know 90% of th government questions you ask, but ask them about the history of the Red Sox and well that's a different story.
In the end we all pick and choose what we are interested in and want to learn.
I totally agree with alexm - the trend towards stupid/ignorant being desirable doesn't seem to be a good thing.
Agreed. It's not that people are inherently stupid, because they really aren't. It's that we're willfully stupid about matters of life and death, like say the Iraq war (government officials not knowing that there are Sunnis and Shi'a and that they have some rivalry!), abd even worse, often proud of this fact. It's not intelligence, it's the values system behind what knowledge is prioritized, and some combination of the media and the broader culture is sick in the head right now. Religious fundamentalism and big media capitalism may not be the only causes, but they do have a major role, just as Alex suggested.
But note that Ambrose Bierce will shortly be declared a liberal terrorist by Dinesh D'Souza
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