So many things
Young people are caught in a media mudslide that destroys intellectual depth.
Steve Brown/The New York TimesPeople of my age often say "Kids are so much smarter these days than we were. They know so many things that we didn’t."
They do know more “things,” just because they have the new media. But that sort of knowledge is all breadth, with no depth.
Imagine trying to see one thing closely with lights strobing and flashbulbs popping in every square inch of the visual field.
Imagine trying to hear one thing clearly with a brass band, a symphony orchestra, a gong, an industrial metal crusher, a pack of barking dogs, and half dozen dueling drum soloists all making sound at one time.
Imagine trying to take a clean breath in a mudslide.
God help them, it’s like that for them all the time.
Young people in the mudslide are slower at reading, and they lose interest more quickly when they do put their hands to a book. They are less well equipped to evaluate their own opinions, and more likely to conform to the attitudes of their immediate social group. They display less ability to follow a logical argument, and they are less inclined to think that arguments matter in the first place.
They do have an enormous intellectual capacity – unformed, of course, as in every generation. The great thing is to form it, not to shatter it.
J. Budziszewski is a Professor in the Departments of Government and Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin. This article has been republished with permission from his blog, The Underground Thomist.
The trailer for Professor Budziszewski's book, Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Law, is here. The book is now out in paperback.
Subscribe to Underground Thomist.
Bill and Melinda Gates seem like nice, fun people to me, and they are doing good work with vaccination and nutrition programmes in the poorest countries. But it is disappointing that they are using their muscle as leading philanthropists to advance the birth control agenda in the developing world. There's so much else they do more of that would improve the safety of childbirth for women, newborn survival, education -- and then fertility issues would look after themselves.
Anyway, don't they read Demography Is Destiny, where, just today, Marcus Roberts reminds us again that the world needs some really fertile nations, if only to ensure there are workers for those tired old countries that are ageing and shrinking?
Hi Bill and Melinda -- subscribe to our updates and see the world as it really is.
Carolyn Moynihan
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So many things
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