Jeremiad In The Morning; or, The Vagueries of Ignorance

      Hard as it is for me to admit this, but Margaret Wente and I are actually in agreement with one another for once. The most frustrating thing about this article is that Wente doesn't quite acknowledge the depth and degree of the problems that she identifies. As tempted as I am to go off on a rant here, I won't. Suffice it to say, though, that we've created a culture in Canada in which verbal precision is seen a bonus rather than a necessity, and in which knowledge itself is less important than "having a vague idea of a thing" and substantiating the notion that degrees and diplomas are rights guaranteed by the payment of tuition or the enrolment in schools. Yes, the situation is very much the same in the university and college environments as it is in the secondary- and probably elementary-schools. Let's face it, the system has been dumbing itself down for decades, demanding less from its students and so getting less, and bending over backwards to justify a namby-pamby post-modern idealism that encourages intellectual mediocrity and pressures instructors and disciplines to lower their standards in the name of "other concerns." We've created a culture that desperately wants to think that everything, and I mean everything, is only a matter of context, if we can only find a way to create a context which justifies saying that something is actually satisfactory when, in fact, it is not.

      No wonder we live in a culture that resists calling Dubya a moron, despite his fundamental inability to articulate himself without the aid of rote-rehearsals and thumping phrases. No wonder our politicians, of any stripe, never answer the questions they are asked, preferring to return to their talking points like frightened children to their security blankets. No wonder our newspapers, television shows, and the like are rife with redundacy and pedestrian explanations of the obvious. (After all, every reality show could demonstrate its content in 10 minutes, but instead drags it out over 45 minutes.) No wonder clarity, nuance, detail, and precision are all as rare as unicorn horns. No wonder we perform mental gymnastics trying to argue that someone's opinion is valid, just because it's his or her opinion, and that it doesn't need to be substantiated coherently or specifically. No wonder the "humanist" academy desperately tries to assuage itself that there is no such thing as an idiocy, and that there's no such thing as an incompetent. No wonder we've created a defensive, self-legitimating culture of soft-mindedness. No wonder we've created a blameless society in which twinkies and mommies and McDonald's are to blame for our actions, because we've gone so far into the realm of minimal expectation and perpetual justification. No wonder we've created a culture in which people talk incessantly without genuinely listening to a damned thing anyone else has to say.

      And no wonder we've created a culture so hostile to poetry, a culture that does not raise itself to the rigors and demands of engaging language and content, a culture in which literacy and thought are used as sporks rather than as scalpels or even as chopsticks. It'll do, we tell ourselves, that Jimmy can read a headline but not the rest of the article; it'll do, we tell ourseves, that Joanie can put words together that look like a sentence but which make no grammatical sense; it'll do, we tell ourselves, if Jerry says that Shakespeare was an anti-Semite because he knows there's a Jewish villain in the The Merchant of Venus. It'll do, we tell ourselves, in that last example, that Jerry knows the words we want to hear and there's a legitimate argument to be made for such an assessment, but it hardly matters that Jerry could never make that argument persuasively himself. Yes, this is what we're creating, what we've created. And if this makes me a conservative for lamenting that we're now stuck in such a position, so bloody be it.

      So much for not getting off on a rant. But, it's okay. Doctor J is tired, and only partially awake, and even though he's not being systematic in his thoughts, people can get his general meaning. That'll do, Doctor J, one can almost hear James Cromwell saying. Oink, oink. But that's okay, he's just alternately intelligent....

      Okay, now where is that darned spork of mine????