Maybe People Are Just Dumb
Think Tank #69
So, I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘revisionist history.’ The idea that history has been tampered with by nefarious means for nefarious ends.
At first glance, the evidence seems overwhelming. Look at the way education has been dumbed down, all the way up to the college level. In the 1800s, an undergraduate ‘liberal arts’ education was predominantly concerned with the study of the Classics—the Ancient Greek and Latin languages, and the literature that these ancient civilizations produced. The ideas contained in these works are the foundation upon which we’ve built a free and open society. And now they’re just gone. Faded away in mere generations.
However, just because it happened, that doesn’t mean it was planned.
The Classics weren’t eradicated in one unfortunate swoop. Instead, they were gradually awarded less and less importance. Access to education broadened—a good thing, I would argue—but a byproduct of education no longer being for the ‘elites’ is that the markers of an ‘elite’ education (i.e. proficiency in Latin and Greek) stopped being emphasized. Americans got more practical. College degrees became career-training programs. The meaning of a ‘liberal arts’ altered its meaning.
Of course, despite the intentions, the result is the same. We have a population that is extremely out of touch with our roots. There are some people out there who have studied these texts, yes, but these people are few and far between, and it’s not exactly like they’re rewarded in our culture. This well of knowledge upon which so much else is built is just gone.
And once the foundation is gone, everything that has been built on top of it can be called into question as well. Once that happens, what’s to stop the whole thing from crumbling?
Maybe this isn’t as bad as I’m making it sound. Maybe a future without the Classics won’t be so bad, that we’ll keep the same values, even though the origins of those values are lost.
Who am I kidding? Look around. We’re fucked.
And once we realized we’re fucked, the ‘conspiracy theories’ start coming in. People saying that we were ‘dumbed down’ by design. It often does look like that.
Today, we are so far removed from all of this that it’s easiest to cry foul play. It’s a cop-out. It’s easy to blame some secret cabal of puppeteers. However, reality is more complicated than that. Just how complicated—well, I still don’t know.