Anyway, human social systems encourage intelligence and knowledge, a little bit more than they discourage them. Some human social systems encourage them more than others. Those closest to nature--and closest to the edge of survival--may well encourage them more than societies that are pleased with themselves and how things are. Or those that are afraid of the changes around them, and those they see coming.
I don't mean entire societies as such. It's a matter of emphasis, but it can be pervasive in terms of what people feel they can do or be. The character of a society can be dominated by powerful groups. The rich in positions of power are the most obvious. Those who control the dominant dialogue through whatever communications media exist: the pulpit, newspapers, television.
Oppressed groups know that the powerful maintain control by keeping them ignorant. That's one reason that literacy was so important to African American slaves, and to be educated and well-spoken was to be admired. But that cultural value seems weaker now in all groups, in the society as a whole.
Our society has been systematically evolving ignorance more than it has been encouraging intelligence. While not always deliberate, it is often intentional--though often it's a step towards another ultimate purpose.
In this post, I'm just going to suggest some ways this is done. I hope to flesh them out later.
Societies, cultures, and their social systems can encourage or discourage behaviors based on what they value, reward and honor, and what they don't value but dismiss, ignore, discourage and penalize. Our society has a love/fear relationship with science and scientists, and to other kinds of knowledge, as well as the intelligence of art. That's a dynamic, and the love or the fear gets emphasized in different circumstances, different cases, at different times.But the balance gets thrown off in various ways. We're seeing it happen now in the political dialogue, where ignorance in the form of no respect for truthfulness or knowledge is common. We're seeing it happen in education, with schools starved for support, cutting back on content and rigor. We're seeing it in the global culture, which is most influenced by American commercial culture.
Here's one example that may seem trivial, but I believe it has been powerful, especially in combination with other cultural and political forces. Our society is saturated with advertising. Billboards, store window displays, newspaper ads and giveaways go back a couple of centuries. But with radio and television--with hundreds of channels of television--advertising became pervasive. Advertising information--words, images, texts and especially subtexts--comprise a major proportion of the information we take in every day.
In the past generation or two, the coordinated advertising campaign--often led by TV commercials but including other forms using the same theme and key images--has used various psychological devices to entice buying, and above all to define the public to itself. Thousands of hours of beer commercials for example have defined men as fundamentally stupid, interested only in drinking beer, and proud of it. In fact, that's become the definition of masculinity.
Commercials in general portray both males and females as dull-minded, incurious, stupid people interested only in fashionable products and images. I believe this came about partly because advertisers realized that only idiots could believe their claims, so why not make idiocy the cultural ideal? Advertising only works on people who can be easily swayed, by personal and fashion anxiety, and identification with those happy sappy idiots they see in the commercials. For what advertising is about is mostly getting people to switch from one brand to another.
A super-heated consumer society needs to define itself through what it buys, not what it knows. People are smart enough to know this is pretty stupid, but commercials make them feel really comfortable with being stupid.
The most interesting example I've seen lately is the evolving campaign for SuddenLink, the cable TV company that operates mostly in smaller markets across the country. Depending on where you are, you may or may not have seen these commercials. We started getting them here when SuddenLink bought our cable franchise.
The first set of commercials we saw featured a young man, late twenties perhaps. Verging on overweight, he had a friendly smile and a vapid face. He didn't look very smart, and he didn't act it. But he was seen to convince friends and relatives that cable (rather than satellite) was better, even as he did dumb things, like playing touch football in his mother's living room.
The next set of SuddenLink commercials contrasted things that are hard ("Indoor cattle herding is hard") and things that are easy when you have cable (telephone ID shown on your TV screen.) These were also humorous ads, and made the conceptual jump to say that simple (like their simple-minded former spokesman) is actually smarter. The latest group of ads has pushed this into more dangerous territory, showing these "smarter" jocks bullying a nerdish satellite dish installer. It's the cable jock as Tea Party bully.
To make the point that cable is simple (and not complicated scary technology) and that choosing something simple that works is smarter, these commercials use the imagery that suggests the longstanding tradition of making fun of smart people. But the real power of it is in the saturation of this cultural ideal: the happily ignorant.
I've seen this evolve in my lifetime, but it became a more obvious change across the culture in the Reagan 80s. That realization is in books written in the decade, like Martin Amis' The Moronic Inferno, and in songs by the likes of Joni Mitchell, the Eagles, Jackson Browne as "The Pretender":
"I'll be a happy idiot
and struggle for the legal tender..."
This is the Social Darwinism imposed by the commercial culture, resulting in the continuing evolution of ignorance.
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