Simon Knepper

The editors, both working in the communications department of the university hospital (AMC) in Amsterdam, got a wide range of Dutch public intellectuals to put forward their views on the infantilisation of public debate (read: “dumbing down”). Philosophers, sociologists, historians, political commentators, even a linguist and a psychiatrist, contributed essays. Which already answers the first questions: yes, there are still public intellectuals, and yes, there is (or was, in 2012) still work for them to do. And at least two people (judging by the fact that there were already pencil annotations in the copy I got from the city library) have read the book, so we can also conclude that, yes, their views still matter...

As you would expect, the contributors disagree on whether there is such a thing as “dumbing down”. Several remind us that cultural pessimism and the conviction that the “youth of today” are lazier and less intelligent than previous generations goes back at least to the time of the ancient Greeks. Reality TV and professional sport may be stultifyingly mindless, but at least they are less reprehensible than bear-baiting, gladiatorial combats and public executions. There has always been a high culture reserved for the elite and a low culture enjoyed by the masses, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that high culture is now accessible to a greater part of the population than it ever has been.

Very few of the contributors agree with Frank Furedi that there has been any real decline in cultural values. Nozick’s Experience Machine is invoked a few times, most interestingly by psychiatrist Damiaan Denys, who warns us that we are hard-wired always to select physical pleasure over intellectual stimulation, whatever we might think we would do in the abstract. Brecht was right to say “Erst kommt das Fressen,” but we shouldn’t count on “dann kommt die Moral”. Meanwhile, philosopher and novelist Désanne van Brederode turns the question round and asks us whether our talk of “infantilising” really exposes our inability to recognise children as the future adults they are, and talk to them as such.

Similar arguments apply to political debate, although the contributors have a harder time staying positive here. Politicians aren’t meant to be evidence-based decision machines, it’s their job to weigh scientific facts against emotional, traditional, economic and other arguments and come up with the best solution for the people they are representing. Democracy is the best tool we have for appointing the right people to do this job and changing them when we get fed up with them: at the moment it seems to be hiccuping a bit, the electorate are losing trust in the political class, and some contributors think that needs to be addressed by fine-tuning the democratic process, e.g. by making more posts directly elected.

Quite a few contributors see causes for concern in technological change, the growth of social media, globalisation and the fragmentation of communities along new lines, but none seems to see any reason to despair. Human society is pretty good at adapting to change, seems to be the take-home message. I wonder if they would have come up with the same answers five or six years later...?… (altro)