Dumber and dumber:
The rise of man and his dumbing down
By Richard Douglas
The rise of man and his dumbing down
Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a
better world. They are taking it
further and further away from that better world. Since the Renaissance these
modes have worked.
As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will
continue to work. But now that
for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else,
the whole structure of
reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It
begins to be seen for what it
really is - emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually
empty.
- Robert M Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motocycle Maintenance
This is a world which has grown alienated from ideas, in which people are
losing the
capacity to truly believe in anything. Values have become almost entirely
relativised, convictions
reduced to mere opinions. Society is now so dominated by official experts
that people have become
divorced from their own abilities to make sense of the world, to determine
for themselves what they
really think. All the official beliefs of society, all the things we regard
as true, are now so remote and
impersonalised we find it very hard to truly identify with them. Meanwhile,
our personal lives become
utterly personal and subjective, and we all but lose the wherewithal to
govern these with our beliefs,
to structure our lives, to achieve any real certainty in the personal
choices we make. Isolated from
principles, we live our lives in an increasingly banal fantasy land in which
our natural priorities are
inverted. The serious becomes trivial, and the trivial, serious; news turns
into entertainment, and
entertainment, news.
Why should this be, after centuries of progress? Why should society be
getting dumber now,
just when more people are receiving more education than ever before, when
society is
technologically more powerful than it has ever been? It doesn't make sense.
We have all been
brought up with the idea that things should be getting better and better,
society more and more
powerful. So what is going wrong?
In large part this very attitude, this belief in the inevitability of
progress, is to blame.
Confident that the movement of society was inescapably upwards, we have
grown complacent about
the need to exercise ourselves intellectually. The point of using one's mind
has been lost; if things
are advancing anyway, why should we bother puzzling things out ourselves?
The intellectual life has
been steadily draining out of society, leaving behind institutions which
people attend, and beliefs
which people parrot, that are little more than empty husks. While society
has been progressing in
material terms, this movement has concealed a growing intellectual decay.
These parallel movements, of material rise and intellectual decline, are
more than casually
linked. The philosophy of progress encourages dumbing down through making us
used to not
thinking for ourselves. Faith in progress has been built on a belief in
objective truth. This belief
actively discourages us from using our own minds. We are meant to switch off
our personal thoughts,
to disregard our merely subjective opinions, to dispassionately accept the
evidence before us. The
idea of objective truth upholds a model of intellectual passivity. Thomas
Huxley, the nineteenth
century British biologist, best known for his championing of Darwin,
reflected this when he said the
scientist should "sit down before fact as a little child". Practise this
attitude, it was thought, and we
would automatically advance. The more we suppressed all that was personal to
us, the more
"objectified" we would become. In doing this we would be rationalising
society, removing from it the
knots and folds of impulse and passion, thus allowing it to catch the great
winds of history and blow
us into the future. Yet in removing impulse and passion from our
intellectual work, we risked
removing ideas from our personal lives and humanity from our ideas.
There is, then, a contradiction at the heart of our ideas about progress.
It is strange to
realise it, but our confidence in the inevitable rise of man was from the
outset twinned with a
thorough mistrust of his personal powers as a thinker. In order to take in
the objective facts around
us we had as far as possible to stop listening to our own thoughts. In this
scheme of things,
speculation, imagination, intuition - thinking - were to be repressed. The
advancement of society
was to be achieved alongside - and indeed through - the abolition of
thinking. Thinking is bad. It gets
in the way of observation. Too personal, subjective, unreliable. The great
lesson we learn as we
grow up, the single underlying message our education gives us, is that
thinking on our own will get us
nowhere. Only by following the right methods, by amassing evidence in the
proper manner, by
excising our personal responses, will we enjoy any communication with the
truth, and so play our part
in progress.
Is it any wonder in these circumstances that society is becoming denser and
denser? Or at
least, that the ordinary intelligence, the intellectual wattage of day to
day life, is diminishing? This is
only the result of what we have been brought up to believe; we have been
taught not to think. The
reason it is becoming noticeable now is that the effects of these ideas are
today more wide
reaching than ever before. The project of the Scientific Revolution, begun
in the sixteenth century,
has in the last fifty years finally come into fruition. Science, and the
ideal of objective knowledge it
upholds, has fully conquered society, leaving us no intellectual model,
religious or philosophic, which
could buttress a serious belief in our personal abilities to understand
reality.
Our minds have been colonised by the scientific ideal in two ways, one
active and one
implied. The first is through the education we receive at school, which
discourages us from thinking
for ourselves; the second, through all the technological wonders of the age,
use of which
discourages us from thinking at all.
Universal education has undermined older ways of thinking, all but
destroying common
sense - the essence of which is precisely that it is the beliefs held by a
society in common. The
academic spirit within the school system works against this, fetishising
knowledge, creating a
specialised territory of the intellect, quite removed from the individual's
life in the world. The personal
and intellectual become separated, and every piece of common wisdom one
learns outside school
is relegated to the status of myth, fantasy, or prejudice, not to be treated
seriously at all. While
liberating us of restrictive customs and irrational superstitions, schools
have also deprived us of a
sense of intellectual belonging. We are no longer part of a world which
collectively makes, upholds,
and passes on its truths. Instead, as intellectual beings, we are stranded
in a new world of many
separate provinces, each foreign and remote to the other.
Technological advancement throughout this century has rendered us
increasingly passive,
not just physically but mentally. Since the war, technology has made life
more comfortable for all, and
so extended the influence of science throughout society, in a different but
perhaps yet more
important way than education. Technology does not itself teach us any
lessons. What it does is dull
our minds and erode our independence. We become used to not applying
ourselves in our daily
lives. Just a few decades ago, everyday life presented a continual series of
little challenges. Simply
to have to make up a fire every morning taught one mental discipline and
gave weight to the
quotidian, creating a conduit between the world within the mind and that
without. Such a thing was a
small job and yet one knew it was important, both because of the acute
physical discomfort one
might experience before a fire was lit, and because of the potential to burn
the house down if one did
not do it right. Tasks like this are intellectual, although we would not
generally recognise them by that
name. They require the active use of the mind, the application of one's
mental resources in order to
solve a problem. To go through life meeting such challenges is to get a
solid grounding in the way of
the world, to understand that life is full of natural checks and balances,
that everything costs, that hard
work and concentration are required for success in anything. It is, simply,
to keep one's mind sharp;
not necessarily intellectual, in the sense we would normally understand, but
nonetheless keen.
In a more comfortable age, our minds are allowed to develop untrained.
Lacking a firm
connection with the outside world, our thoughts become free to whistle about
as they please, and we
learn no common sense lessons about how the world works. Our mental and
physical lives become
disconnected, and the intellectual loses its grounding in the everyday. It
is this which allows the ideal
of objective truth to work its full effects on us. Used to not applying
ourselves in our everyday lives,
we are only too ready to resign our interest in the field of abstract ideas.
Used to thinking we have no
personal influence over our physical circumstances, we are equally ready to
believe we have no
influence over our intellectual environment. We withdraw our active
intelligence, both from our
physical tasks and duties, and from our intellectual learning. Our lives
shrink to a purely personal
sphere, in which the only things we relate to, the only things we treat as
actually being real, are those
subjects we deem wholly subjective. Thus we take an exaggerated interest in
entertainment, trying to
turn all things into entertainment and to drive all these to the level of
pure entertainment - wholly
subjective, wholly fun, wholly private and unofficial, wholly unstructured,
without any kind of check. We
try to live without any reminder of a single underlying reality, a world
which has its own naturally
produced rules to which we are all subject. Accordingly, we become lost,
bereft of guidance, unsure
what to believe, what to do. We spend our lives in a dreamworld, desperately
searching for
something tangible, something to truly believe in, but capable only of
voyaging deeper into fantasy,
into a wholly subjective existence. Our withdrawal from the wider world,
both the physical world
around us and the world of ideas, leaves us perpetually unsatisfied,
perpetually seeking a firm sense
of place in the world and a genuine communion with what lies outside of us.
So long as we do not
challenge the ideal of objective knowledge, this is the state in which we
will remain.
As it stands, it is all but impossible to subject any of society's ideas
about ideas to criticism.
The terms of these beliefs preclude it. The ideal of objective truth has
progressed to such an
influential point, and society's intellectual work become so bureaucratised
and specialised, that one
has virtually no chance of effecting a profound change in the way we think.
Intellectual progress is to
be made incrementally, in tiny steps, in tiny fields, new ideas emerging
slowly, and only from those in
official positions. To criticise the underlying thinking of society is
almost impossible since there are
no official disciplines devoted to such general study. Such criticism
depends not on bowing down
before fact, but on arguing one's case. It runs counter to the ideal of
intellectual passivity our society
enshrines. The authority one draws on is not technical evidence, the special
currency of the
intellectual bureaucrat, but reason, which is freely available to all. In
short, to attempt to change the
intellectual foundations of a society, one must feel at home in the world of
ideas. One must feel a
personal connection with principle, a sense both that principles matter to
one's personal life and that
one can have a personal say in what they should be. This necessarily puts
one out of step with
society, with the established methods for broadcasting intellectual work.
The fact is that in today's
society, philosophy has no place. The study of philosophy, yes, the history
of ideas; but philosophy
itself, philosophy as an active living thing, no. There are not the
transmission belts which might
connect thinker and society. Or rather, these belts are only to be found
within official compounds,
societies in themselves which seldom convey any thinking into the wider
world beyond.
Things have progressed to this stage because of the fault in our ideal of
objective
knowledge, the irrationality at the heart of rational beliefs. Objective
knowledge is a simply
impossible ideal for the reason that one can never bypass one's own
subjective mind. One can
never have a direct access to reality, independent of oneself. The moment a
piece of evidence
enters one's mind it is contaminated with one's subjectivity, no longer a
manifestation of the natural
Truth to be found out there. There are no "facts" as such for us to sit down
before; we are never
entirely neutral observers, always contributing something, always shaping
our perceptions with our
prior beliefs. The objective ideal is clearly ludicrous.
Of course, as any good scientist would say, no one is meant to take this
ideal literally. It is
simply that, an ideal; something to aim for, not something which might ever
be achieved. No decent
scientist would ever claim he had objective knowledge of anything. All that
scientists ever have are
hypotheses. Science cannot ever prove anything; all it can do is produce
results which are
consistent with certain hypotheses. And this is quite good enough. For all
intents and purposes
these suppositions can function perfectly well as objective certainties.
Yet while all this is true, the fact remains that the objective ideal is
the model which society
looks to. All of our intellectual work is now made in this image. The
scientific ideal began to spread
to the humanities in the nineteenth century; Marx's science of society is
the most famous example.
This thinking has now become victorious. This is not to say everyone is a
Marxist. Rather it is that all
who aspire to intellectual status share Marx's desire to produce work which
rings with the authority of
objective fact. Academics are now highly self-conscious about merely passing
personal comment on
the world. Subjects are now highly specialised, formalised and
bureaucratised, all with the aim of
making them more objective; more serious.
If the objective ideal is impossible for scientists to realise, of course,
it is even more so for
those who study history, literature, politics, and so on. This, though, is
the ideal we have, and no one
wants to let on that his subject is forever condemned to fall short and
remain merely subjective. The
result of this is that the intellectual work of society experiences a
contractile momentum, squeezing
out more and more of the personality from our ideas. Disciplines narrow and
fracture, the focus of
each becoming ever yet more tight. The work of academics becomes reduced to
merely
cataloguing, simply researching, amassing an ever growing wealth of detail
with increasingly little
point. The closest we can come to the objective ideal is to simply reflect
what we are studying, in as
much detail, and with as little interpretation, as possible.
Academics are themselves unable to reverse this trend because that would
require
argument too general, too personal, too subjective to exert any influence
within the system. Society's
intellectual establishment is out of control! There's no hand on the tiller.
We have passed a crucial
point in this contractile movement of our studies. Now our intellectual
institutions are so specialised
and sceptical they can no longer be changed from within.
At the same time that academe is narrowing within, it is also expanding
without, extending
its influence over more and more of ordinary life. It does this directly
first of all, through expanding the
number of its subjects, many of them thoroughly mundane. This wider casting
of the academic net is
only a natural product of the pursuit of the objective ideal; in order to
successfully squeeze out one's
personality from one's work, one needs to continually find more raw
information to catalogue.
Academe also influences society less directly, in the shape of the ideal
which it spreads. This leads
to everyone becoming a worshipper of experts, those that can claim an
objective understanding of
their subject. Steadily, the whole of society becomes academised, all
knowledge impersonalised.
What this means is that society becomes increasingly subject to a
bureaucracy of
enlightenment which is itself becoming increasingly inefficient. The
influence of academe is growing
in inverse proportion to its own intellectual integrity. Within the
university, studies are becoming so
specialised that it is all but impossible for anyone to set their work in a
wider context and make
some sense of it. As for drawing some moral from one's studies - what might
be thought the purpose
of education - this is a very old-fashioned idea, fit only for an
intellectual museum, laughable in the
present day. The example of the university is copied throughout society at
large, leading to an ever
greater specialisation of technical knowledge in every field. Society
becomes increasingly disjointed
intellectually, an incoherence which is mirrored within the mind of the
individual. Knowledge is
fetishised, pushed upwards into the hands of official elites in which it is
then fractured, rendering it
increasingly incomprehensible. The intellectual and personal spheres become
disconnected, and
we all become disenfranchised from the world of ideas.
As academe has passed a crucial point of incoherence, so has society. Ideas
have slipped
out of our control. We do not identify with them, we do not trust in our own
abilities to change them,
we are not prepared to listen to others make them. We have a great
intellectual inheritance, but
without the care and maintenance provided by living thought this is an old
pile which is falling to bits.
© Richard Douglas
MOQ Online: Forum 
Dumb and dumber
by Richard Douglas
There is a fatal flaw in the intellectual foundations of our society, a
fault which is only truly revealing
itself now, in the late twentieth century. We know its effects as "dumbing
down". This is a world which
is losing faith in rationality, in the official answers given by society's
intellectual establishment. Belief
in aliens, the powers of Nostradamus, codes in the Bible, conspiracy
theories of all sorts; all these
testify to a growing irrationality. Or rather, what they are signs of is an
increasing difficulty in
separating fantasy from reality.
