No geographic area, nor any faith, not even atheism, has a monopoly on willful ignorance. It is the case, though, that willful stupidity occasioned by blind faith is generally more harmful to innocent bystanders than pure ignorance of the less passionate, godless, kind.
In fact, it's been an interesting week for 'ironic shares': that is to say, instances of my sharing links to articles that I largely agree with, only to find that they lead to websites whose declared, purported or implied agendas are deeply antithetical to my own aesthetic or political tastes. (Or so I have long imagined: I'd like to think I'm eclectic and tolerant; maybe I'm a closet religious conservative in denial. Others must judge). For just before I shared the Wacko Waco post, I had enjoyed and recommended with some enthusiasm an amusing and accurate swipe at post-modernist discourse; and just after that, I shared—or was minded to, at least—an piece on China and the US, which was deeply critical of wealth disparity and human development in the latter country, and which balanced a lot of adverse criticism of social, political, and economic development in China with some sober reflection and interesting data. I liked both articles, and by sharing them, gave endorsement to the websites on which they appeared. Yet the first came to me via http://www.paperthinhymn.com, whose author is a (n articulate) fundamentalist Christian, while the author of the second is Ron Unz, one time republican candidate for the governorship of California, and former editor of the American Conservative, whose views on language policy are not immediately congenial.
There's nowt so queer as folk.
However, this is largely a prologue to the main point of this piece, which is that I'm deeply worried about what, if anything, my children—and their generation—are learning. On Wednesday, in my introductory seminar at Konan, I re-ran a listening comprehension exercise called Light and Dark 1, by means of which my first year students were supposed to develop some skills in adjective usage {optimistic, pessimistic, uplifting, gloomy, miserable, wondrous, awesome, ironic, etc}, and critical thinking, through a comparison of Trent Reznor's dystopian song Right Where it Belongs, with Louis Armstrong's emblematic version of It's a Wonderful World. My own hunch is that Reznor is right on the money, even if I don't share his matrix-like paranoia—life is to a large extent an elaborate illusion (nowhere does this seem more true than in the lives of my students). I also think that the Louis Armstrong piece is a hopeless piece of schmalz. Of course, this judgment only reveals what a miserable so-and-so I am...
Yet, it isn't the NIN song that has stayed with me since Tuesday evening, but the following too optimistic lines from the last verse of Wonderful World:
I hear babies cryin'. I watch them grow
They'll learn much more than I'll ever know.
Probably, when these lines were written, this was true for most children in the developed world: they did learn much more than their parents. But my concern—which I think goes beyond a grumpy old man/Golden Age rant—is that it is simply no longer the case, for my children at least. And I'm not talking about Justin, who among the three actually learns (internalizes) the most, perhaps: his very lack of language forces him to observe his local environment for cues, to make sense of where he really is, to learn to live through imitation of real people in the real world. He has nowhere else to make sense of (things), nor any easy conduit to a world beyond the here-and-now. As I watch Sean grow, however, as I monitor his homework and his syllabus, as I observe how he and his friends spend their time, I see massive exposure to information, but very little learning. He is bombarded by, swimming in, drowning—pick your metaphor—in raw information (data points), much of it virtual. He copes with this assault on his senses so much better than I ever will. But he—like others of his generation—have stopped internalizing data: there is no obvious accretion of knowledge. Instead, he has almost completely outsourced his declarative memory to Google. His knowledge-base is not even on his hard drive, it's cloud-based...
Even though it was becoming unfashionable when I was at school, there was still a lot of rote learning involved in school education. Some of it—perhaps most of what I learned in school or in music classes—was not useful in any brute functionalist way, but it gave me a treasury of cultural knowledge that I still possess, whether it be a piece by Debussy, or the song lyrics of every LP I ever purchased. Take away my computer, I can still play or recite by heart those things I have learned. Thanks to memorization and rehearsal, I have a (modest) cultural store that I can carry anywhere, without a baggage allowance. Without it, I don't think I could go on living as an alienated illiterate in Japan. Take away Sean's wi-fi relay to his memory, and I fear that a good part of his knowledge and lived experience is disconnected from his central nervous system. As a parent, it is as distressing as it is fascinating to me as a middle-aged man—to realize that children are increasingly distributed entities, living partly in this world, confined and identified by their physicality, living partly in an immaterial, barely-2.5D sketch world of Facebook likes, and Minecraft avatars. In our household, we are only a few seconds away—a room away—from William Gibson's science fiction.
Whether in social science research, or in the class room, or at home, access to limitless information does not equate to knowledge. We don't need more data, anymore than we need more toys, we don't even need 'better data'; we need better knowledge, and a better analysis of the data we have already amassed. Of course, knowledge does not equate to learning either, but it stems from it.
The dubious achievement of developed countries is to have created a generation that has so seized on a misunderstanding of "carpe diem" that its members have no individual past, and care too little about the future. Perhaps it is time for a new slogan: "carpe diem, sed ne obliviscaris"[1, 2]. A tad unwieldy, but it at least draws attention to something important: that in order to forget something, you need to have learned it first. Like Latin, for instance.
That's all for today, and I still haven't got around to the betta.
1. Campbell College motto.
2. Or even, Horace's original 'Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero' which means something quite different.
Location: Gokodori 7-Chōme,Chuo-Ku, Kobe,Japan
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