back to the 3Rs

[miriam_e]

Heard a twerp on the radio the other day rattling on about how we have to return to the 3Rs and how kids today are illiterate and know nothing about their culture. He was citing the example of how few kids know what the term "Achilles' heel" means and where it comes from. I felt like retorting that ancient Greek mythology is far less important now than understanding why carbon dioxide alters our climate, or that over-use of chelates can be lethal, or that DRM means you have to rent your own culture from corporations. I bet this fool didn't understand any of these things, yet here he was, living centuries in the past, and dictating as if he was some kind of knowledgeable authority on the present.

The only reason he had any kind of voice was because our nasty little prime minister agrees with him -- but Howard believes that poor deserve to be poor, that killing people in order to steal their resources is reasonable, that a woman's place is in the kitchen, that guilty till proven innocent is okay, and that it has all been downhill since the 1950s, the two-faced era of the double standard. That Howard agrees with him should have been the death-blow to his opinions. Instead he was broadcast nation-wide. A bad day for Australia.

Comments

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yes, there is a lot of crap on TV, but at the same time there are some real jewels there. The same is true of books, films, comicbooks, music, art, sculpture, science, technology, and so on. It is the same with anything: you don't generally find gold scattered around on the ground -- you have to look for it among the dirt. The ratio of good stuff to bad stuff may be about the same as it always was, though with increasing intelligence of each generation the good stuff may actually be disproportionately increasing. TV executives are far below the average though, so that would have a depressing effect on TV quality.

There is a general effect of "things today are not as good as [I remember that] they were". I'm certain creative genius as a fraction of the population is either a fixed or increasing value. Look at music. I don't know how many times I've heard my peers say that music today is crap, and that it is not as good as the golden age of music when they were younger. When I show them some undeniably brilliant recent pieces they generally grudgingly agree with those selections, but nevertheless continue to believe music has degenerated. The thing is, for every generation it is always the values/music/books/films of their youth that happen by some marvellous coincidence to belong to the golden age.

This says much more about how we are wired up to [mis]remember our past, than about current culture.