Frederik deBoer lances the boil that is our intellectual culture:
It’s my observation that the smart kids that write our culture – not at all restricted to the media or academia, but the larger mass of people who were the high achievers in high school, the people who were in the top reading group and who got National Merit Scholarships, and who now do so much to define our shared cultural assumptions and conventional wisdom – have developed a strange and unhealthy relationship to being smart and having knowledge. Ours is a culture of cleverness, not of knowledge, one that is far more comfortable in assessing wit than in assessing evidence. It is disdainful of the idea that being an intelligent person requires spending hours reading books, slowly absorbing complex ideas, waging war on your own ignorance through attrition. It presumes that you should be well-read but is distrustful of the bookish. (It produces a micro-genre of listicles about the books “everyone” has claimed to have read but hasn’t/has started but never finished.) It places a premium on being smart but is skeptical, even contemptuous, of public displays of the work of getting smart. You want to be the kind of cultured person who knows great books intimately, but if you have Proust on your knee on the subway people will roll their eyes at you. That kind of thing: obviously smart but not, like, all tryhard about it. You are expected to work out relentlessly to train your body and to show everyone that effort, but your intelligence must be effortless, even accidental.
I dunno, maybe I’m not part of that culture – I’m certainly not smart enough. But I do wonder if that culture is slightly overwhelmed with the sheer mass of knowledge it must absorb at breakneck pace. Frederik has further thoughts on the cause of the problem:
It is an artifact of the sickness within American “meritocracy.” Though I am frequently a harsh critic of the coastal striving class, this condition is not something that they’ve done. It’s something that was done to them. This condition was inflicted on them by a socioeconomic system that harms and degrades people and then tells them it’s their fault. It’s the fault of an economy that compels large groups of people to try and climb up a narrower and narrower ladder together until they have no choice but to push others off.
Which sounds like the naturally competitive system humans appear to indulge in effortlessly, honestly speaking. Even within cooperative systems, in my experience, there is an element of competition – who can be kindest, most helpful, that sort of thing. That said, Frederik has a point – there are many more losers than winners, and our system doesn’t really work very hard at making the losers feel OK with that result.
