Here we have the meritocratic delusion most in need of smashing: the notion that the people who make up our elite are especially smart. They are not—and I do not mean that in the feel-good democratic sense that we are all smart in our own ways, the homely-wise farmer no less than the scholar. I mean that the majority of meritocrats are, on their own chosen scale of intelligence, pretty dumb. Grade inflation first hit the Ivies in the late 1960s for a reason. Yale professor David Gelernter has noticed it in his students: “They are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. It’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, conversable, interested, doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Looking back at the history of the twentieth century, just sees a fog.” Camille Paglia once assigned the spiritual “Go Down, Moses” to an English seminar, only to discover to her horror that “of a class of twenty-five students, only two seemed to recognize the name ‘Moses’.… They did not know who he was.”
– Helen Andrews, from “The New Ruling Class”
This is a pretty good exemplar of a particular claim that you hear a lot. “People these days don’t know anything about anything!” “No high school senior in the country today could hope to pass the 1800 Harvard admissions exam!” etc.
Unlike some, I’m not inclined to dismiss this lament as stupid on its face. I do think that having a well-stocked mental encyclopedia is important even in the age of Google. I often find myself with the sense that the (elite, intelligent) people around me are just hopelessly ignorant about crucially important things, and I know that they often think the same thing about me.
Whenever I try to think it through, though, I find my mind spiraling around one question:
How many Pokemon can you name?
Which is, of course, a silly shorthand way to say: We have crammed the world way more full of information than it ever was before, there are so many things that a person can dedicate himself to knowing, and while our brains aren’t any smaller than they used to be they aren’t any larger either. And we don’t have a canon, an agreed-upon prioritization mechanism for that information. It’s reasonable to expect any member of the intelligentsia to be able to cite the core texts chapter-and-verse if we all understand that we’re talking about the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer, and Virgil. It’s less reasonable if you multiply that number of texts by ten, or a hundred, or a thousand. Less reasonable still if you also expect your intelligentsia to be keeping up with a dizzying whirl of pop culture texts, which, let’s face it, is totally a key expectation under which all our reasoning classes labor.
[shrug] I don’t really know where I’m going with this. Just…we all know lots of stuff, and it’s mostly not the same stuff, and it’s mostly not stuff that we can easily and comfortably label as “important to know.”
Yeah, I shared the article for the parts I quoted, and other parts I definitely disagreed with, worst of all this quote here. Like most of it is a thoughtful treatise on the nature of structure and how “people selected for their smartness” still eventually resembles a stagnant closed network and what even is smartness anyway - but this was one digression into taking easy pot shots and felt very off.
I’m sorry Camille Paglia provided easy quips, but no, do not delude yourself that the students at Harvard don’t know who Moses is. If half the kids say they aren’t smart it’s because they don’t feel smart relative to their classmates who themselves are scarily well-read.
(And “grade inflation” is equally stupid. Most competitive employers or programs demand something like a 3.5 GPA. So Harvard decided it is poorly serving its students if what would get an A at OSU gets a C at Harvard - because the CIA or whoever won’t take that C.)
I’m sorry Camille Paglia provided easy quips, but no, do not delude yourself that the students at Harvard don’t know who Moses is. If half the kids say they aren’t smart it’s because they don’t feel smart relative to their classmates who themselves are scarily well-read.
No, I’m actually not bagging on Paglia types here and I’m not sure they’re wrong.
This is a generation or so down the line, but…my wife teaches at a school that caters heavily to the children of NY’s Best and Brightest. I’ve met with some of her students, worked with them in after-school programs, etc.; we’re talking about some seriously intelligent, accomplished, and well-prepared kids here. And it turned out a couple of years ago that, yeah, most of them had never heard of Adam and Eve. Surprising? Maybe. I dunno. But there are a lot of things that a bright child can be learning these days, and there’s no especial reason to expect that everyone in that demographic is going to be fed Bible stories, or even bits of the Western canon that make reference to the Bible stories.
And, as I said, I often find myself responding to my friends with “you don’t know / haven’t read what???” And I know they think the same thing with regard to me.