It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Subscribe to our Patreon, and get image uploads with no ads on the site!
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
I see it with my kids they don't even look at Wikipedia to gain knowledge it all come from YouTube as they don't even have to read.
You're right, my wife is not a moron, far from it. She's pretty savvy, and willing to turn her hand to anything (rewiring the Lotus dashboard is just one example), and that's why I fail to understand why she watches what I would describe as rubbish. But, to be fair, she thinks a lot of stuff I watch is crap, so I guess it goes both ways!
In all groups there are plenty of individuals who genuinely buy into believing that their successful strategies are simply the right ones irrespective of environment. After all, it it worked for them, why wouldn't it work for everyone else? This makes them believe that anyone who doesn't follow a similar strategy is unworthy and stupid.
I don't buy into that kind of thinking at all. I think it's much more interesting to try and work out why strategies that are different to the ones I'm familiar with work in other environments. I'm middle-aged, white, male, educated and privileged and work in a knowledge profession, so my own strategies aren't dissimilar to the ones expressed in the standard elite narrative.
So I'm wondering what is going on in the social environment that makes the current "dumbing down" strategy so relevant to so many? I've got some thoughts on that. I think a lot of it lies in current approaches to social mobility and cohesion. Two things are particularly relevant...
The dominant social narrative is broadly 'meritocracy'. This suggests that while we may all have a wide range of varying advantages and disadvantages from accident of birth (a mix of nature's genetic endowment and nurture's provisions of class, wealth and environment), the greatest share of social rewards should go to those with the greatest preexisting advantages.
Also, as the social fabric changes to allow greater concentrations of social rewards (through underlying globalised communications and financial innovation) it is expected that these gains are separate from any expectation of increased responsibility to the social fabric that permits them. As an analogy it's like seeing society as a camel train crossing the desert - we give the best riders the fastest camels and allow them to race off out of sight. At some point as the distance between them increases it's obvious to wonder whether it's still one single camel train at all. I don't mean "the 1%" here, but the professional middle classes, like me, for whom the 'meritocratic' structure does pretty well. It's more like 20% of the camel train that's fucked off over the horizon.
We know that the promises of meritocracy are rigged. If you're young your university degree won't actually mean shit except a lifelong debt as you stare down the barrel of a zero hour contract, and you're not getting on the housing ladder gravy train so you'd better keep paying us rent. We're very sorry, now piss off. That's the new environment - it's one where the 'elite' strategy for success is a bust. People are navigating their way through a strategy that promotes success through entirely separate values. In the new environment you can win a bit of social reward and kudos with flat-earth conspiracy theory and an inside scoop on Celebrity Love Island. Dumbing down is so popular and pervasive because it makes a lot of sense in the environment that's been left behind by the professional classes buggering off on their fast camels. That democracy's crude numbers game serves to actually give it the upper hand politically is fucked up, but entirely deserved.
About forty years ago, some authority figure in education decided to cease penalising schoolchildren for spelling errors for fear of upsetting the little darlings. Some of those children are now school teachers. They could not correct the current pupils' spelling even if they wanted to. (Which, they don't. Too much effort!)
The information age bombards us with increasing quantities of supposedly factual data - to the extent that there is insufficient time to filter or organise it, let alone find uses for it.
Information overload is a convenient distraction from the fact that the British economy is heading down the drain and, by rights, the country should be declared bankrupt.
It will get progressively worse; "intelligence", culture and education will be more carefully ring-fenced by the wealthy as time goes by to keep their position secure in the future chaos that come after post truth, overpopulation and economic stagnation.
People revelling in appearing thick is a) nothing new at all (watch any 1950s teen movie) and b) nothing to do with anti-intellectualism. Most people who think it's cool to be thick won't think they know better than their doctor and decide not to inoculate their kids, won't advocate the NHS spending money on homeopathy, or spend their time researching and promulgating conspiracy theories. I'll think you'll find most of the people presenting the real anti-intellectual threat speak and spell just fine, and think they are exceptionally clever.
Meritocracy as an outlook makes no promises other than you will be judged on your merit - what you're good at doing. Not for your social background. Not for your race. Not for your gender. Not for your sexuality.
But this unfortunately is not the dominant narrative. This is the ideal we are striving for, but it's so hard to obtain - and for a variety of reasons. You can't win any sort of social reward or kudos with flat-earth conspiracies and celebrity love island. What you most often get is derision. We've seen it on this forum in the guise of Sambostar and SirAxeman.
Everyone is a comedian it seems, and nobody takes anything seriously. Nihilism really has set in and we're rotting from it.
I agree with you broadly on your first points. But I don't think the dumbing down is anything to do with embracing meritocracy - rather I think it's to do with actively pushing it away and embracing childish selfish notions about what we value in life and how to achieve it. Foot stomping and crab-bucket mentality seems to be the order of things.
If we had a meritocracy, we wouldn't have middle management
But I think a lot of people don't realise they're illiterate. They think as long as they get their point across it's fine. But it's corrupting the language; "literally" now has a dictionary definition which is the total opposite of what it should mean, and I see a lot of people using "ignorant" as though it means you ignore people. I know languages evolve and whatever, but this kind of thing is actually hampering communication. If you're well spoken and call somebody who isn't so eloquent "literally ignorant" they might take it as a compliment.
10 years plus easily more
These themes were a thing during George W Bush Era America, my own knoweldge doesn't really go any further back just due to my age... but I remember it well
The Colbert Bush Roast from the Whitehouse Correspondant's dinner you'll find on YouTube pretty much goes into this themes, though jokingly, it was a reflection of the time..
I'd say the fact that you seem so committed to your pure vision of merit as supporting my view that it's the dominant narrative. Like I pointed out, it's a social choice to say that we should reward those with the most prestigious 'natural' gifts - the people that win in the lottery of birth (even if we strip the 'nurture' stuff out) with everything else too. You see this as somehow naturally the right thing to do, but I'm not completely convinced.
You say you "can't win" with dumbed down crap, which is a hard sell in the age of Trump, but these days standing out, getting noticed, attracting views, represents a form of social currency, and for those smart enough to see that the game for old-school status is rigged against them amassing that new kind of currency is a decent strategy. The fact that plenty of folks have derision for the current president or the cast of TOWIE doesn't mean they haven't achieved social wins in the environment that they live in.
I don't think "dumbing down is anything to do with embracing meritocracy" either - you've mistaken my argument. My view is that with a narrative of meritocracy (flawed as it undoubtedly is, but then I don't believe it can ever be pure) adopted by the professional classes and pushed as a social goal, and the fact that these classes have used this narrative to grab all the traditional social rewards, this has diminished social cohesion and left large numbers of people disenfranchised from the whole concept that their own individual merit is actually going to be enough, so fuck merit right in the ear. Those people will work with the social rewards that they have left and not give a damn if that leads to derision from the 'meritocratic' classes.
And it's not the aristocratic elites that push meritocracy. Not in my experience. I'm from a council estate and growing up I was told I could do anything I wanted to do as long as I worked for it - school, parents, society... it wasn't a commandment handed from upon high that represented unobtainium that eventually lead to me throwing in the towel... it was simple comments and feedback designed to give me confidence to climb the social ladder. It actually improved social cohesion and social mobility in my case. And that sounds exactly like 'nurture' does it not???
I actually think nature has much less to do with merit than we assume. People can overcome their nature by virtue of working hard. But when we have a sense that nature matters, or that it's immutable... we often give up, or we just play the part we're dealt. We pussy out and accept our place in the world, basically.
Winning social points ... I think you're onto something there. But it seems to me that it's a short-term reward, and that isn't necessarily going to do anything for anyones sense of self worth. I don't really see it as a 'win' personally because it's so short lived and comes with a ton of baggage.
I read this book a while back:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Snowflake-Effect-Trey-Willis/dp/1499795424
And a lot of it echoes what I experienced as a child and as a teenager. I think what you're talking about actually isn't an argument against meritocratic thinking. It's an argument against a lot of the 'snowflake' stuff. Because kids get brought up with the idea that they don't have to work hard to achieve things, and that simply being is enough. Which makes for a rather rude awakening when they come of age.
Between that, and endless college and university courses that aren't worth the paper they're printed on, add in the fact that now there seems to be a requirement that everyone go to university or they're not worth anything... a lot of those disenfranchised people you speak of never really had a chance.
Fundamentally, I think you're misunderstanding what meritocracy actually is.
But the world doesn't work like that. Coz we all have bills to pay!
Look at Michael Johnson and Usain Bolt - they're both built totally wrong for their chosen sport, yet excel because they found ways around it and worked bloody hard to get to the top.
How many people that tall are also properly fast? He's got the sprint genes and he's got a wider stride than pretty much any other contender. In his prime the only way he was losing is by false start disqualifications
Sure the young could learn plenty from the older generation, but that has always been the case