Are We Dumber? (Californication, Nicholson Baker's underpants, Wendell Berry, Atari)
Are we dumber? It's a question we're asking ourselves all the time now. I encountered the query most recently in an episode of Californication, when struggling novelist Hank Moody (David Duchovny) laments the deterioration of the English language represented by such acronyms as LOL, BRB and even BJ. I'm not a big fan of language policing, and I tend not to worry about the surface manifestations of linguistic evolution. But the episode got me thinking about the larger question, again: despite the various acoutrements of "developed" economies, are we actually less advanced than previous generations? Are "advancements" really regressions? Are we dumber?
Midwestern Americans of my generation arrived just a little too late to have much say in this debate. By the time we matured, we were reacting. Corporate farming had overtaken the family farm ideal. Our parents had moved into town, gotten educated, and joined the machinery of a consumer society. Sure, in many cases, we inherited some of their self-loathing over this--our parents drove us into the country on Sundays and taught us the names of cows. We visited the family homesteads, where giant combines tilled right to the edge of the still visible foundations of the houses our parents had grown up in. Then we returned home and went for the high score on Asteroids again.
There's no way my grandparents--rest their souls--could challenge my high score on Asteroids.
We got differently smart. Smart in irrelevant ways, maybe. About an hour after watching that Californication episode, I was in bed reading Nicholson Baker's novel, A Box of Matches. To me, this book is a classic example of advanced human intelligence, when that intelligence has nothing much to focus on:
"I can pick up a pair of underwear with my toes. There are two ways to do this. Most people would grab a bunch of fabric by using all of their short, stubby, 'normal' toes to clamp it against the ball of their foot and lift it, but because of my unusual middle toes, which are long and aquiline--distinguished--I can lift up the underwear by scissoring my middle toe and my big toe together onto the waistband: then I lift the underpants and hand them off to my hand and flip them towards the dirty-clothes bin. By then I'm ready to fall over, but I catch myself by planting my underpant-grasping foot back down on the floor. If you throw underpants in a particular way, the waistband assumes its full circular shape in the air, slowly rotating, on its way towards the dirty clothes."
Beautiful. An elegy for twentieth century consciousness. Not that there aren't still hold-outs. For example, Wendell Berry is out there achieving deep understandings of human necessity on a daily basis--trying to wake us up. But I think that for every Wendell Berry, there are ten Nicholson Bakers--and for every Nicholson Baker, there are ten of me--well-meaning but undisciplined people who are neither smart nor attentive enough to realize the grace we exhibit in just getting undressed.
But who have extremely high scores on several old school Atari games.
Midwestern Americans of my generation arrived just a little too late to have much say in this debate. By the time we matured, we were reacting. Corporate farming had overtaken the family farm ideal. Our parents had moved into town, gotten educated, and joined the machinery of a consumer society. Sure, in many cases, we inherited some of their self-loathing over this--our parents drove us into the country on Sundays and taught us the names of cows. We visited the family homesteads, where giant combines tilled right to the edge of the still visible foundations of the houses our parents had grown up in. Then we returned home and went for the high score on Asteroids again.
There's no way my grandparents--rest their souls--could challenge my high score on Asteroids.
We got differently smart. Smart in irrelevant ways, maybe. About an hour after watching that Californication episode, I was in bed reading Nicholson Baker's novel, A Box of Matches. To me, this book is a classic example of advanced human intelligence, when that intelligence has nothing much to focus on:
"I can pick up a pair of underwear with my toes. There are two ways to do this. Most people would grab a bunch of fabric by using all of their short, stubby, 'normal' toes to clamp it against the ball of their foot and lift it, but because of my unusual middle toes, which are long and aquiline--distinguished--I can lift up the underwear by scissoring my middle toe and my big toe together onto the waistband: then I lift the underpants and hand them off to my hand and flip them towards the dirty-clothes bin. By then I'm ready to fall over, but I catch myself by planting my underpant-grasping foot back down on the floor. If you throw underpants in a particular way, the waistband assumes its full circular shape in the air, slowly rotating, on its way towards the dirty clothes."
Beautiful. An elegy for twentieth century consciousness. Not that there aren't still hold-outs. For example, Wendell Berry is out there achieving deep understandings of human necessity on a daily basis--trying to wake us up. But I think that for every Wendell Berry, there are ten Nicholson Bakers--and for every Nicholson Baker, there are ten of me--well-meaning but undisciplined people who are neither smart nor attentive enough to realize the grace we exhibit in just getting undressed.
But who have extremely high scores on several old school Atari games.
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