For years I’ve been lamenting the trend of purportedly intelligent people attempting to debate topics based on knowledge that extends little beyond trending tweets.
I remember well in the late 1990s when, oddly enough, people wanted to appear both hip and intelligent. It seemed de rigueur back then to rave about the brilliance and insightfulness of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.
Yet, whenever I asked people to elaborate on what made this book so compelling, I was invariably met with the kind of doe-eyed stutter one gets from a child trying to explain that it wasn’t him who ate the cookies … with his mouth full.
(“Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Laureate and Political Journalist, Is Dead,” The iPINIONS Journal, April 19, 2014)
This is why I was somewhat heartened by a July 3 report in the Wall Street Journal, which at least offered a quasi-scientific justification for my lamentation. Here’s how the London Daily Mail then elaborated in a July 8 report:
Despite all the hype surrounding this year’s high-brow best-seller, Capital In The 21st Century by Left-wing French economist Thomas Piketty, a survey has revealed that more than a quarter of those who picked up the 685-page tome never got past page 26, and only just over 2 per cent of readers finished it.
Hillary Clinton’s memoir scored even lower, according to U.S. Professor Jordan Ellenberg, who conducted an analysis of Kindle ebooks using a method of calculation he called The Hawking Index — named after Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History Of Time, which has been called the most unread book of all time.
Of course, this trend is hardly surprising in this it’s-all-about-showing-off age, when people would rather sacrifice a distinguished reputation that took 24 years to build, for a snarky tweet that goes viral for 24 hours then disappears into complete irrelevance.
Now, lest you think I’m being a self-righteous snob, here’s the humbling way no less a person than “Bill Gates’s guru,” Vaclav Smil, dismisses what has been my attempt to facilitate informed public debate over the past 10 years:
I never blog. I just write my books. The world these days seems afflicted with graphomania — the obsession for self-expression through writing — telling everyone what you know or pretend to know. There are half a billion people today blogging regularly! I am happy to take 12-15 months to write my books. I just don’t have something new to say every afternoon.
(Huffington Post, July 14, 2014)
Ouch!
My only defense is that, like my vices, I pursue my virtues in moderation. Not to mention that what a social critic like me writes on topics of the day would be even more irrelevant than yesterday’s tweets if we take 12-15 months to write it.
But it might interest you to know that Smil is a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba who boasts of not owning a cell phone, as if that is every bit as virtuous as living a chaste life.
Mind you, the way Apple and other tech companies manufacture needs, which compel millions of people to buy new cell phones every two years, is an abomination. But this notion, that owning any cell phone is no less an abomination, is positively Luddite.
Related commentaries:
Gabriel…
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Wednesday, at 5:11 pm