“You’re” overreacting.
I saw “Idiocracy,” and thought it was MILDLY amusing. But it was no “Office Space,” and that, more than anything, is probably why it didn’t get a wider release. However good Judge’s point was, Idiocracy’s satire is both overbroad and too narrowly focused at the same time. Everyone who has ever worked in an office (which is everybody) could identify with Office Space. But Idiocracy posits that if you aren’t an idiot, your progeny will ultimately die out. Ha. Ha.
Judge’s wit aside, his movie is in the centuries-long tradition of overreaction to cultural change from below exhibited by cultural elites everywhere. This is especially clear to me now that I’ve spent some time studying Shakespeare and the theater of his time.
Back then the Arts, including theater, engaged in a constant battle for legitimacy with both religious and secular authorities. And comparing the world circa 1500 with our own makes clear that stupidity is hardly genetic. Judge’s movie is set 500 years in the future, and claims that at their current pace things are going to hell. But 500 years in the past disease and slavery were common, women were property, democracy was unknown, literacy was rare, etc. Can anyone really say we’ve gone backwards from that?
What Judge sees as “dumbing down” is really just a natural cultural churn, which has always, without fail, ultimately produced progress. That it also changes the society many of us are used to is inevitable. Fear of this change is natural, but it is not progressive, or useful.
Chris (11:33 am, 12 September 2007)
I think that both Judge and the previous poster labor under the belief that society is meant to have an arc to it, implying some kind of humanistic development model of existence. Personally, I don’t see that bearing out. Society is neither on a constant stream of progress nor a constant downward spiral. Some things are better now than they were five hundred years ago, as Chris well documents. Some things are worse. One need only look at contemporary farming practices to see decay over time.
I look forward to seeing Judge’s movie. I don’t know that people are really getting stupider. I just think that globalization and technology have made it more difficult for us to delude ourselves into thinking that we’re smarter or more progressive than we actually are.
I will try to do my part with the reading and the not drinking Mountain Dew. Can’t promise anything on the reality tv front though. Rock of Love is just too damn funny to miss.
J-Tron (3:38 pm, 12 September 2007)
I can admit I was a bit imprecise in claiming that societal churn “always” produces progress. I meant that comment on a grand scale, as in progress over the course of centuries. There are certainly many examples of times when society underwent such upheaval that it regressed; the Dark Ages, the Black Plague, and the Holocaust, to name just a few.
So, progress is not constant. But it’s pretty clear that a great deal of progress ultimately has taken place. This is not a matter of “belief,” it is demonstrably true, by almost any measure, for most of the world’s population. In fact, just the mere existence of so many people compared to the past is evidence of our ultimate success as a species. And humans on average live longer, healthier, safer lives in every way than they did in the past. Even the example of farming practices regressing is ultimately a bad one. The food to feed billions of people cannot be raised by manual laborers using only wooden implements unless all of those people are to be subsistence farmers themselves. (Not surprisingly, this was the primary occupation of most people worldwide until the late 19th century.) The inequities brought on by the growth of agribusiness are serious political and commercial issues, but in biological terms, mass farming is an unqualified success.
The problem is partly one of perspective. It took centuries to (mostly) do away with something as fundamentally objectionable as slavery. But I call foul on saying “some things are worse” than they were 500 years ago. Name any way of measuring well-being, and I could prove we are better off now than then.
Chris (6:56 pm, 13 September 2007)
Mmmm, global environmental health?
At the risk of sounding weirdly conservative, I don’t think it’s an issue of increasing technology or decreasing intelligence, but the sense of morality that lies beneath all of it (does it sound more liberal if I call it ‘ethics’?).
Also, slavery is still around.
Dennis (7:06 pm, 24 September 2007)
Environmental health is a function of population, and therefore to some extent its degradation is unavoidable. We can see on a micro scale what happens when populations grow exponentially by culturing bacteria in a petri dish. The populations grow and consume their food supply until they begin to choke on their own accumulated wastes. Something very like this is happening in China right now, which is experiencing massive problems with industrial pollution.
People who lived 500 years ago were not environmentalists; there just weren’t enough of them to affect the planet on a large scale, nor had polluting technologies been invented yet. I’d agree that technology could be changed to be more enviro-friendly, but no matter how green we manage to live, human beings will always generate sewage and garbage. And the more people, the more sewage and garbage.
Given the only way to keep environmental degradation low or stable is to keep the human population low or stable, I’d say this particular item has to be considered a trade-off. How many people are volunteering to not have kids in order to help the planet? Not enough, apparently.
I did qualify my statement about slavery, too.
Chris (2:43 pm, 26 September 2007)
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“You’re” overreacting.
I saw “Idiocracy,” and thought it was MILDLY amusing. But it was no “Office Space,” and that, more than anything, is probably why it didn’t get a wider release. However good Judge’s point was, Idiocracy’s satire is both overbroad and too narrowly focused at the same time. Everyone who has ever worked in an office (which is everybody) could identify with Office Space. But Idiocracy posits that if you aren’t an idiot, your progeny will ultimately die out. Ha. Ha.
Judge’s wit aside, his movie is in the centuries-long tradition of overreaction to cultural change from below exhibited by cultural elites everywhere. This is especially clear to me now that I’ve spent some time studying Shakespeare and the theater of his time.
Back then the Arts, including theater, engaged in a constant battle for legitimacy with both religious and secular authorities. And comparing the world circa 1500 with our own makes clear that stupidity is hardly genetic. Judge’s movie is set 500 years in the future, and claims that at their current pace things are going to hell. But 500 years in the past disease and slavery were common, women were property, democracy was unknown, literacy was rare, etc. Can anyone really say we’ve gone backwards from that?
What Judge sees as “dumbing down” is really just a natural cultural churn, which has always, without fail, ultimately produced progress. That it also changes the society many of us are used to is inevitable. Fear of this change is natural, but it is not progressive, or useful.
Chris (11:33 am, 12 September 2007)
I think that both Judge and the previous poster labor under the belief that society is meant to have an arc to it, implying some kind of humanistic development model of existence. Personally, I don’t see that bearing out. Society is neither on a constant stream of progress nor a constant downward spiral. Some things are better now than they were five hundred years ago, as Chris well documents. Some things are worse. One need only look at contemporary farming practices to see decay over time.
I look forward to seeing Judge’s movie. I don’t know that people are really getting stupider. I just think that globalization and technology have made it more difficult for us to delude ourselves into thinking that we’re smarter or more progressive than we actually are.
I will try to do my part with the reading and the not drinking Mountain Dew. Can’t promise anything on the reality tv front though. Rock of Love is just too damn funny to miss.
J-Tron (3:38 pm, 12 September 2007)
I can admit I was a bit imprecise in claiming that societal churn “always” produces progress. I meant that comment on a grand scale, as in progress over the course of centuries. There are certainly many examples of times when society underwent such upheaval that it regressed; the Dark Ages, the Black Plague, and the Holocaust, to name just a few.
So, progress is not constant. But it’s pretty clear that a great deal of progress ultimately has taken place. This is not a matter of “belief,” it is demonstrably true, by almost any measure, for most of the world’s population. In fact, just the mere existence of so many people compared to the past is evidence of our ultimate success as a species. And humans on average live longer, healthier, safer lives in every way than they did in the past. Even the example of farming practices regressing is ultimately a bad one. The food to feed billions of people cannot be raised by manual laborers using only wooden implements unless all of those people are to be subsistence farmers themselves. (Not surprisingly, this was the primary occupation of most people worldwide until the late 19th century.) The inequities brought on by the growth of agribusiness are serious political and commercial issues, but in biological terms, mass farming is an unqualified success.
The problem is partly one of perspective. It took centuries to (mostly) do away with something as fundamentally objectionable as slavery. But I call foul on saying “some things are worse” than they were 500 years ago. Name any way of measuring well-being, and I could prove we are better off now than then.
Chris (6:56 pm, 13 September 2007)
Mmmm, global environmental health?
At the risk of sounding weirdly conservative, I don’t think it’s an issue of increasing technology or decreasing intelligence, but the sense of morality that lies beneath all of it (does it sound more liberal if I call it ‘ethics’?).
Also, slavery is still around.
Dennis (7:06 pm, 24 September 2007)
Environmental health is a function of population, and therefore to some extent its degradation is unavoidable. We can see on a micro scale what happens when populations grow exponentially by culturing bacteria in a petri dish. The populations grow and consume their food supply until they begin to choke on their own accumulated wastes. Something very like this is happening in China right now, which is experiencing massive problems with industrial pollution.
People who lived 500 years ago were not environmentalists; there just weren’t enough of them to affect the planet on a large scale, nor had polluting technologies been invented yet. I’d agree that technology could be changed to be more enviro-friendly, but no matter how green we manage to live, human beings will always generate sewage and garbage. And the more people, the more sewage and garbage.
Given the only way to keep environmental degradation low or stable is to keep the human population low or stable, I’d say this particular item has to be considered a trade-off. How many people are volunteering to not have kids in order to help the planet? Not enough, apparently.
I did qualify my statement about slavery, too.
Chris (2:43 pm, 26 September 2007)