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| Smartiness is uselessness. by Zsenitan 02/13/2008, 12:40am PST | ||||
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| Kids appear to be reluctant to trench 4 years and $100,000 into a liberal arts degree because it doesn't lead to any useful job opportunities.
Americans fear and despise intellectuals, whatever those are. The guys at Financial Times urge you to read Horace! As soon as you are done with the financial times. But these are just pulled from recent newsreels. There is a wash of anxious reflection by people who write for a living; they survey a country with worrying literacy statistics and a strikingly profitable attitude about entertainment purchasing, and they gasp with horror and wonder where it all went wrong. Meet-cute-ing with their target audiences, they bandy about titles like The New Dark Age! Whoa! Further gasping and more Napa valley chardonnay. But the Dark Ages metaphor is apt - just not in the sloppy earthtoned way they're using it. I will go through it slowly in case any of them are actually reading (gasp!) In the Dark Ages, real wealth or real power were the only ways to matter, and they were concentrated in the hands of very few people. For every Lord Egbert there were many hundreds or thousands of unsung peasants, people whose lives were so massively unimportant that we have not names, dates, hide, nor hair of them until the resurrection of the census, and even then, they are numbered, not named; they were chattel, who, in excessively generous circumstances, were listed by their first names only under the contents of milord's dairy or stable. Such were the people who tilled the land, sewed the (charmingly rustic I'm sure) clothes, baked the bread, pressed the curd, and formed peasant militias as last lines of defense. Did they read? Were they educated? No! And a lot of good it would have done them. There is no alchemy that turns knowledge into money, satisfaction, ability, or fame; by and large its influence is disruptive, and the sort of person whose head is full of great ideas and scintillating prose very seldom puts shoulder to ploughshare in any useful capacity. The corporate lords spiritual and temporal is a pat detail; the part where we have overlords is uninteresting. The interesting part is the peasant paradise that has spilled, like bosoms pent up too long, into our present age. And the voluptuous thing promises to goooosh forth eternally! Mike Judge made Idiocracy and few people will credit him for all the stealing they've done out of his extrapolation of the Peasant Paradise Slippery Slide, but they do raid the larder a bit when getting on with this subject. Stupid everyone, they've all forgotten the best lessons of the Dark Ages: all those peasants were under someone's control, and someone wasn't stupid. Not-stupid people took over their stupid neighbors in loads of ways; my absolute hands down favorite is the Donation of Constantine. All the splendid intrigue of the pre-Gutenberg era reads like a farce written by an information theory student - decades of slaughter stemming from diversions of family trees, the imprisonment and torture of skeptics, Carnival and pissing in the Holy Water! The upshot of all this is that while it is possible to engender more tolerance for The Life Of The Mind, it is not possible to force the American Workhorse to drink of it, and this is bad. The intellectuals are actually upset about the wrong thing entirely: anti-intellectualism isn't at all a bad thing for the average person. It's horrible for the country, but you'll never hear a word of that. It's always "our kids are worse than their kids at 4th grade arithmetic!" "Our undergraduates don't want to read Rosseau!" Never "China is run by technocrats; the majority of the Central Party board hold advanced degrees in the hard sciences or engineering. They have a billion engineering fetuses on the way and they've already outmaneuvered us financially. Here are your simplified Mandarin flashcards." Do you know how the Dark Ages ended, America? The Vikings came and raided all the places where wealth was concentrated: the castles and monasteries, all places protected from the peasantry by honor and armor, but tin cans to the Norsemen - with their superior weapons and thirst for territory and the way they did not give a shit about your god! After raiding, they set up shop wherever they landed and got down to breeding. You may remember some of their more famous scions, like William The Conqueror ("Norman The Conqueror" as it was once unforgettably rendered unto me in a political science class, by a graduate student.) |
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Smartiness is uselessness. by 02/13/2008, 12:40am PST  William the Conqueror ENDED the feudal system of property? by 02/13/2008, 7:10am PST Also: by 02/13/2008, 9:52am PST You're the grand master of missing the point. by 02/13/2008, 11:45am PST Re: You're the grand master of missing the point. by 02/13/2008, 12:57pm PST when we can vote for our own bread and circuses we are useless NT by 02/13/2008, 2:15pm PST QFT! by 02/13/2008, 2:43pm PST lawl u r dum NUFSED NT by 02/13/2008, 5:05pm PST |
