Should it take umpteen paragraphs — to get to a usually poorly stated point? — a blurb about increasing "stupidness"

© 2018 Peter Free

 

25 July 2018

 

 

Caveat

 

Today's is a curmudgeon's post.

 

But it makes an arguably legitimate point.

 

 

We live in an increasingly mentally deficient culture

 

Have you noticed how much of what is written or said these days:

 

 

meanders for seemingly "ever"

 

without

 

getting to a succinctly stated

 

and

 

adequately supported point?

 

 

Perhaps I have brain damage or ADHD, but the overwhelming majority of what I try to read sees me abandoning it within 3 to 10 paragraphs.

 

Abandonment occurs because I am too impatient to indulge a communicator's presumption that I want to stumble around on Blathering Boulevard or Stupidity Lane, while my already aged life leaks away.

 

 

Mainstream media lead this mental efficiency decline by example

 

Journalism in the modern era appears to make it a point to write as chronologically and topically un-cogently as possible. In essence, we have already stupid people making the rest of us even dumber than we started.

 

I was put in mind of this phenomenon recently by comparing World War II era journalist-writer-historian William Shirer's concisely delivered pages (and well-presented points) with those of his professional descendants.

 

Shirer is not alone in demonstrating this superiority. As a once-historian, I frequently have occasion to compare the intellectual content of older writings with those that we vomit up today. The intellectual comparison preponderantly winds up the same way. Past communications are intellectually tighter.

 

 

Which brings me to the non-politically correct point that . . .

 

We may literally be "stupider" than our ancestors.

 

This is a favorite subject at The Unz Review. Unz.com is a contrarian website filled with what politically correct people will call bigots, racists, traitors, monarchists, communists, social Darwinists, anti-semites — and whatever other herd of hypothetically unpleasant folk one can think of.

 

I like Unz.com for those reasons. It delivers perspectives that are missing almost everywhere else. Quite a lot of the Review's thumb-in-your-eye cultural abrasiveness turns out to be intellectually defensible, even if unpalatable.

 

One of these politically incorrect holdings is that intelligence tests continue to show national declines in IQ pretty much across the board. Even in the "rich" (read white supremacist) cultures that arguably generated the allegedly biased tests.

 

I do not reject these findings as out of hand. Hypothetically speaking, modernity's reduced pressure on survivally "fit" genetic selection — in the developed world — would favor retention of a higher proportion of less mentally quick and adept people.

 

With saber-toothed cats gone — presumably killed by the cleverest among us — what's to keep our substantial populations of slug-equivalents in check?

 

Admittedly, this is a vicious (even vacuous) metaphor. But you get its kernel of potentially reasonable truth.

 

 

The moral? — Has modernity killed cogence — because we are "stupider" and have lower intellectual standards?

 

Today's narcissists don't even have to sound smart to gain the attention. Just look at the high proportion of idiotic posts in social media that our population takes seriously.

 

Perhaps this is progress. Everyone gets to cavort in the sun. Like stampeding ants with websites, Facebook and Twitter.