There are plenty out there to choose from.
At the end of my previous post, I tried to offer hope in spite of the situation I was describing. I said there are still “plenty of smart people out there,” suggesting that even though I haven’t figured out a fix, some of them might. I could have named names, but as incredible as it may sound, I was restraining myself with all my might, trying to keep the post from being any longer than the 2,899 words I ended up with.
One of the names I might have mentioned is that of David Brooks. But y’all know I admire that guy’s work; I’ve said so often enough.
I mention him now because of his most recent column, which was blessedly shorter than mine, but eloquently addressed an important aspect of what I was on about. The headline is “Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime.”
You should read the whole thing (after all, his point is that kids — and adults — today need to be reading something. I’ve tried to make it available by using the “share full article” link, but I’m still not sure whether that words for everybody if you post it on a blog, or is only meant for sharing by text or email with one or two friends).
If you can’t (or, being a person of the 21st century, simply won’t) read it all, here’s an excerpt from the top:
You might have seen the various data points suggesting that Americans are losing their ability to reason.
The trend starts with the young. The percentage of fourth graders who score below basic in reading skills on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests is the highest it has been in 20 years. The percentage of eighth graders below basic was the highest in the exam’s three-decade history. A fourth grader who is below basic cannot grasp the sequence of events in a story. An eighth grader can’t grasp the main idea of an essay or identify the different sides of a debate.
Tests by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies tell a similar story, only for older folks. Adult numeracy and literacy skills across the globe have been declining since 2017. Tests from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that test scores in adult literacy have been declining over the past decade…
Later, he quotes from a book by Jim Mattis and Bing West:
If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you…
Amen to that, warrior monk.
He doesn’t get to current news until the end:
What happens when people lose the ability to reason or render good judgments? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Donald Trump’s tariff policy. I’ve covered a lot of policies over the decades, some of which I supported and some of which I opposed. But I have never seen a policy as stupid as this one. It is based on false assumptions. It rests on no coherent argument in its favor. It relies on no empirical evidence. It has almost no experts on its side — from left, right or center. It is jumble-headedness exemplified. Trump himself personifies stupidity’s essential feature — self-satisfaction, an inability to recognize the flaws in your thinking. And of course when the approach led to absolutely predictable mayhem, Trump, lacking any coherent plan, backtracked, flip-flopped, responding impulsively to the pressures of the moment as his team struggled to keep up.
Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence…
But as I say, that comes at the end. As I said in that last post, the larger point isn’t Donald Trump. It’s the rest of us, and our own avoidance of reading, to the point that a majority of us were willing to vote for someone like Trump.
He ends with the words, “Civilization was fun while it lasted.”
Yeah. As I said…
So Brooks is one of those smart people I was talking about, and he’s offered a solution: Go out and read a book. And then read a few hundred more. I would add that they should be history books, but hey, almost anything would be an improvement….
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Wholeheartedly agree! And although I love history and work in the field I would say read in other areas as well. Science, for one. There are a number of books that go light on the math (although I ‘d say read some on math, as well) and still do a good job of describing the science (I like astronomy and paleontology myself). Read in the applied science (engineering can be fascinating), the arts, in economics (not a fave, but I do try to read a bit in it), philosophy, the social sciences (archaeology is a good topic to pair with history), among others. Can even combine these with history, like the history of science (One I’d recommend is _Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science._ by James Poskett) Read the classics, but not like you’re doing an English paper but to see what they have to say about the human condition, and spread you net wide here (yes, there are classics in fantasy, mystery, romance science fiction – don’t be a genre snob!). Definitely read different kinds of history: biography, cultural, immigration, labor, military, political, religious, etc. Read the histories of different countries and groups, including Asian, Blacks, Hispanic, Indigenous as well as women and LGTQIA+, etc. Try to at least occasionally read something the challenges your worldview. And for heaven’s sake, read for fun in whatever genre(s) you enjoy, even if it’s about English gentlemen on a 19th century man-of-war. 🙂
Oh, no! I dropped my “B” in LGBTQIA+; my apologies!