According to an article by Susan Jacoby in the Washington Post, Americans
are dumbing down. (See below)
And yet, according to James Flynn (probably the world's leading researcher)
in What is intelligence? (CUP, 2007), American IQ (as shown in test scores
anyway) had been improving during the last century. In the army, and then
again in industry, I met many men who couldn't read and write (including
skilled toolroom men). There was a fascinating account some months ago of a
retired Scottish millionaire -- the local laird! -- who would walk to the
village shop every day to buy the morning paper. After he'd died one of his
staff said he couldn't read but liked to look at the photos!
Intelligence is highly correlated with good health and handsomeness. And
all these are correlated with a minimum number of sub-par variations in our
genes. There are anything up to three thousand of these and any one of us
may have two or three hundred. Some of the more serious of these defective
variations can cause diseases (e.g. multiple sclerosis) and the top 10-20
of these (depending on the country) are detectable in the any of the sperm
and eggs of couples who undergo IVF. And then, of course, only the sperm
and eggs which don;t contain these are used. If this were extended much
more widely then multiple sclerosis and many more diseases would be
permanently excluded from ever appearing again in the general population.
As more of these defective genetic variations are identified and the
harmful effects given some sort of rating (weighted according the
seriousness of the disease and the frequency of the genetic variation in
the population) then I think that all intelligent young people will want to
have something along the lines of a genetic passport before they finally
choose their partner.
Keith
The Dumbing Of America
Call Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces
By Susan Jacoby
Sunday, February 17, 2008
"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.
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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