We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture (Gould)
June 23rd, 2007 | Published in Consumerism, Culture, Education, Quotes, Television
We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and its dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information—all in short (and loud) doses of “easy listening.”….
We are a profoundly nonintellectual culture, but we are not committed to this attitude; in fact, we are scarcely committed to anything. We may be the most labile culture in all of history, capable of rapid and massive shifts of prevailing opinions, all imposed from above by concerted media effort. Passivity and nonintellectual judgment are the greater spurs to such lability. Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity—the most precious trait of any adequate analysis—is erased. He wins who looks best or shouts loudest. We are so fearful of making judgments about ourselves that we must wait until the TV commentators have spoken before deciding whether Bush or Dukakis won the debate.
–Stephen Jay Gould, “The Dinosaur Rip-off” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 100-101