Intellectuallenza: The Collapse of Knowledge in America

Intellectuallenza: The Collapse of Knowledge in America

In an increasingly global society, Americans are increasingly ignorant of the rest of the world's history and culture - even as they claim otherwise.

My grandmother is now almost 90 years old. In her life, she has been a teacher, a soldier's wife, a mother to both a lawyer and an alcoholic, a young widow, and a caring grandparent.

One of my favorite parts of sitting down to talk with her is that no matter what topic I seem to bring up, she has input. A story to tell, perhaps. Or knowledge to bestow. Nowhere is this more apparent than our discussions about foreign countries.

News in Turkey? She will go on and on about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a bit before her time, and the ensuing Young Turks who took over. China? She can go at length about the personality of the Chinese and how their culture influenced their diversion from Soviet-type communism.

Riots in France? She can tell me at length about how DeGaulle used to handle riots in the streets back in the 50's. 

Some of this knowledge can be attributed to age. After all, as we move through life we tend to absorb knowledge along the way.

However, there is another element to her knowledge, and this element is one that seems to be missing from today's intellectuals. 

IT'S ABOUT WHO YOU KNOW, NOT WHAT YOU KNOW

I have tried to have conversations with my peers similar to those with my grandmother. It falls on ears that are not only disinterested, but often actively repulsed. Younger circles (and not JUST Millennials), even those who consider themselves "intellectuals", simply do not have the same level of historical knowledge as the generations before us. And those of us who do are looked at as know-it-alls or condescending. As though somehow this level of knowledge is aberrant or unnecessary.

From anecdotal evidence, with my teacher in Freshman Year of High School not understanding that an exchange student from Georgia was coming from the country, not the State, to actual statistical evidence of Americans simply not knowing the world around them, it is very clear that there is a brain drain - even as more Americans than ever go to college.

My grandmother was by no means an intellectual. She was a woman who went to college - Douglass College for Women, now part of Rutgers University - which was much rarer back then. But she was not a professional. She didn't remain in academia. She was a stay at home mother of two, dealing with an alcoholic father and son, and a husband who was sick with hemachromatosis.

"Make no mistake, we are producing a highly skilled labor force. We just aren't producing a highly knowledgeable one."

Nonetheless, she has knowledge. It is an old type of knowledge - one that has existed since the beginnings of human civilization - but one that seems to be dying quickly. It goes deeper than just understanding history, or understanding what is going on in other parts of the world.

It is the knowledge of people. The journey of people all around the world from our starting point all the way to where she finds herself now. The full story - the only story - of our legacy on this planet. 

It is a knowledge that doesn't discriminate. It doesn't see a country as unimportant, or a race as un-qualifying. It doesn't see Islam or Christianity or America or Asia with any biases, it simply sees all of these elements and follows them through the ages. 

For all of the faults of the "Greatest Generation" and those prior, they understood their fellow man and woman around the world because they understood where they had come from. 

WHAT IS "OLD KNOWLEDGE"

When we follow a modern saga - say, Star Wars - it isn't a story just of the galaxy and politics (and the movies that tried to be only that were arguably the worst of the group). It was a story about people, a family, love, lust, loss and hate, and their impact on the galaxy as a whole. Understanding these people and how they feel about their surroundings is our eye into the story as a whole.

We seem to have forgotten that history was written by people with their own stories and biases. We have sterilized history of all of the personality, suffocating interest. You don't understand a culture by simply understanding how it's borders changed, or what group of countries it was allied to in WWII. You understand a culture by understanding its people and their experiences.

This is what is so vital about this old type of knowledge. My grandmother's stories were filled with people - either that she met, that she read from, that she knew, that she heard about on the news. It wasn't just for flavor. This is how she learned her history, and about other cultures. 

A textbook can teach you about events. It can't teach you emotion.

There are stories this interesting scattered all throughout our history, sprinkled here and there in matter-of-fact Wikipedia articles for flavor. 

There was a time when these stories were how history moved forward. In fact, up until relatively modern times, telling stories was the primary means of relaying knowledge to the next generation.

As you can imagine, these stories were filled with anecdote and emotion. With people.

So why then today, in a time where we are more connected with the rest of the world than ever before, are Americans so ignorant of it? Why are the cultures of other people being so lost to us, even while we can interact with them at any time?

EDUCATION TODAY IS FOCUSED ON SKILLS, NOT KNOWLEDGE

As much as we like to pride ourselves in the first world that we are sending so many people to college to get an education, I have some bad news for you: we are still sending our kids to school simply to learn a skill or trade. That skill or trade just happens to be different than what it used to be.

While people used to apprentice to be a mason, they now go for 8+ years to school to be a Doctor, coming out "educated" in our eyes but in reality just extremely skilled in one specific sector of our economy.

This is the nature of a capitalist economy. There is nothing wrong with this system, simply how we view it.

Make no mistake, we are producing a highly skilled labor force. We just aren't producing a highly knowledgeable one.

Older generations went to school for trades, but since college wasn't part of the equation, they didn't have any illusions of intellectualism from it. Those who wanted to be educated - to understand the rest of the world - had to seek it out. Many, like my Grandmother, did so.

Today, the pseudo-intellectuals of the nation don't think they need anything else. After all, they are highly educated, right? That is what they spent all of that money for.

I call it "Intellectualenza" - the over-emphasis of higher education as the "ending point", leading to an entire generation of Americans who cal call themselves "higher educated" while not possessing even a third of the knowledge of the generations before them.

CULTURE IS AS CULTURE DOES

Our inter-connectivity to other cultures belies our lack of knowledge of them.

Iran today is a Muslim theocracy. Many people know this. It isn't hard to get in touch with an Iranian either at home or abroad and understand their current perspective.

Few people even know that "Persia" and "Iran" are the same thing, and fewer still can go back and know that Islam wasn't the religion there for a majority of the country's history.

Throughout history, it has been an Ancient Zoroastrian Empire, a Secular Dictatorship, one of the wealthiest parts of the world and also one of the most powerful.

These sorts of marks on a country's history don't simply disappear. The people carry it with them. This type of knowledge helps us in negotiations, in interactions, in empathizing and sympathizing.

Our generation claims to be the harbingers of a new multicultural society - of a global paradise where we can live in harmony. Yet, in the most simplistic test of understanding another culture - knowing it's past - we consistently fall flat.

Those who don't know history are bound to repeat it. Unfortunately for us, I don't think many people even know what it is we are repeating.
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