The Dumbing of America
February18
A great article yesterday about the decline of citizens in the US who can’t think for themselves.
“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today’s very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble — in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.
We are too busy with our great distractions that we don’t take any time anymore to improve ourselves after formal schooling.