My friend Philip linked me to a delicious opinion piece by David Brooks in the New York Times that begins with the lament:
All my life I’ve been a successful pseudo-intellectual, sprinkling quotations from Kafka, Epictetus and Derrida into my conversations, impressing dates and making my friends feel mentally inferior. But over the last few years, it’s stopped working. People just look at me blankly. My artificially inflated self-esteem is on the wane. What happened?
In the sixties, dropping an obscure phrase from Camus or Sartre was hip, and a dozen years later it was cool listen to esoteric tribal music or display icons from someone else’s religion. Last year the iPhone changed the equation: media replaced culture. Rather, being plugged into the now replaced understanding the past.
Last night at a party, instead of one-upping each other with modernist cultural artifacts, people talked of Tweets and Twirl and other blips on the radar of the greater social network. Esoterica still rules, but the successful social climber has to stay ahead of the curve: very early to the game but also among the first to announce that the new stuff has become old hat.
The game has shifted from plucking tidbits from high culture to spotting fragments out of the void. We’ve given up on things that take time. What was inside you was once what counted; now it’s your connections to things outside of you. No one cares where you’ve been; everything rides on where you are going.
I’m not passing judgment. That’s just the way it is. And so it goes.
Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.
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Yes, that’s just the way it goes, but it’s scary.
Trivia is still trivia. However, losing the ability to draw lessons from history that illuminate a solution to current ‘problems’ is a step backward.
For example, Michael Crichton has used lessons from history very effectively at his web site to show that politicized science (as currently supports the superstition of global warming) has resulted in serious environmental damage in the past.
Complexity Theory and Environmental Management
http://www.michaelcrichton.com/speech-complexity.html
Jay, you old coot, it’s not about knowledge (the stuff “inside you” as you put it), it’s all about information. Or so says everyone I talk to about the appalling lack of general education most people under the age of 35 seem to have. Why should anyone need to understand say, the rise of the Nazi movement, when they can tap a few times on the front of an iPhone and get about a gazillion different pieces of information on the topic? Why should it be necessary to have any context? Why study it in schoool? Why talk to a WWII veteran? It seems to me that the medium has become the message. And, if I had my damn iPhone with me right now, I could probably look up who said that.
Rex, knowledge itself is migrating from the inside of the head to the shared space among a lot of heads.
Googling for bits of meaning is no substitute for understanding the larger context — but sifting Google-bits may be an effective and more enjoyable way of getting the little-bitty details than reading 2″ wide history books.
The judgment, the understanding, the links to culture, and the perspective has to be there to make the bits meaningful: that has to be there, no matter what. You’re saying you expect that to be inside kids’ heads.
I’m speculating whether judgment is following info-bits out of our noggins and into our peers. Choosing your friends would become the most important activity in life. They’re the folks you’ll be inventing reality with.
“Don’t wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.” (Albert Camus)
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