The Cult of Ignorance

Last week, millions of my braincells turned up their toes and died, my IQ fell by about 50% and I could actually feel my intelligence oozing away and all because I watched a TV programme. The programme in question was The Only Way Is Essex (TOWIE to those people for whom The Only Way Is Essex contains too many syllables).

The only reason for me watching TOWIE was that the particular episode was filmed in part at Eastminster Riding school, which is where my elder daughter rides on a Saturday afternoon and I thought that it would be interesting to see somewhere I'm familiar with on TV. Of course to get to the part of the programme filmed at Eastminster, I had to wade through the rest of the programme (since I didn't record the programme I was watching it on ITV Player which doesn't appear to have the facility to fast forward). Anyway, at first it was quite interesting, in a ghoulish, car crash TV sort of way, but after about 15 minutes it became by turns sad and also a little bit scary.

TOWIE is one of those programmes that isn't a soap opera, nor is it a fly on the wall documentary, rather it's pretending to be one while masquerading as the other. The people are real, the dialogue is real (sort of) but the situations are manufactured to some degree. Manufactured it appears, with the twin aims of generating conflict and proving how vain and sometimes stupid the participants are. So, in the episode that I watched, we had a discussion take place in the hairdressers about Tintin's hairstyle which confused the boy detective with the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, while another character confessed almost with pride, that his GCSE grades were a D and an E.

Fortunately perhaps, TOWIE's star appears to be in decline. Viewing figures, which peaked in 2011 at an average of 1.72 million had declined to about 834,000 in October 2012. At the show's peak, it won an Audience Award at the BAFTA's. Quite what other BAFTA winners that year like Colin Firth, Natalie Portman and Geoffrey Rush thought about being mentioned in the same breath as the cast of TOWIE is anyone's guess.

Perhaps I shouldn't be too harsh on the cast of TOWIE, they cannot be the only examples of what is a general dumbing down of society, it's just that being on TV they are more visible. Come Dine With Me is another programme in which the contestants, particularly the younger ones, exhibit some spectacularly ignorant misconceptions about food, history and well, just about everything else.

The cult of celebrity, the promotion of people who are famous merely for being famous is nothing new. Channel Four's Big Brother, which when it began was advertised as a social experiment, had that myth exposed in later series which became progressively more voyeuristic and confrontational. If the dumbing down of society in general and TV in particular had already started, it was Big Brother that accelerated the trend; it gave any wannabe the opportunity to become a celebrity and spawned more and more similar programmes that have made more and more people famous, not because they have any talent but simply because they appear on the telly.

Taken to its logical extreme, will we end up with a society not unlike that described in the film Idiocracy? For those of you who haven't seen or heard of it, Idiocracy begins with an experiment to place a US Army librarian and a prostitute in suspended animation for a year. The project is canned and they remain in suspended animation for 500 years; when they wake they find that civilisation has dumbed down to the extent that average IQ is in the low 20's and they are the most intelligent people on the planet. This has resulted from the fact that,as a generalisation, the intelligent put off having a family to the point where it is too late, whereas the dumber elements of the population are doing the only thing they can do well, which is reproduce. The most popular TV programme by this time is "Ow! My Balls!" a sort of exaggerated version of You've Been Framed. The fact that "Ow! My Balls" has a contemporary reference point is one of the scary aspects of Idiocracy. Indeed I'd go so far as to say that Idiocracy is one of the scariest films ever made, not in the horror movie sense, not like The Omen or The Exorcist, but scary in the sense that it is prophetic, it paints an all too plausible picture of what civilisation could become; how much dumber, how much more shallow and superficial.

TV is not solely to blame for the general dumbing down we see around us. In part we can blame technology. The general availability of pocket calculators began the trend. No longer did we need to do long division or use log tables, but as with anything the answers that came out of a calculator were only as good as the information entered. Years ago at work I can recall checking calculations that were spectacularly incorrect because the person who made them trusted what came out of the machine without any sanity check; garbage went in, garbage came out.

Nowadays spell checkers in word processing applications have made the ability to spell redundant. Text messaging, with its abbreviations and acronyms positively encourages bad spelling. To some degree it is valid to say that this is merely the evolution of language, that just as English is now radically different from that spoken or written in Chaucer or Shakespeare's day, so it will continue to develop and that this is not a bad thing. I'd agree if language were enriched and evolving in a way that improves communication and understanding but my fear is that language is instead changing in a way that is debased and devaluing.

Google, a tool that has become so powerful and so all embracing that it has actually become a verb and a generic noun, enables us to access information on almost any subject with just a few key strokes. There is no doubt that the internet and Google are fabulous tools, but by making the acquisition of knowledge so simple they have devalued the process itself. We are creating a generation that knows nothing except how to find things out. This to my mind is a bad thing because the actual process of acquiring knowledge is a gift in itself, learning and remembering facts and figures, language and art, are infinitely more valuable than the ability to type a phrase into a search engine and copy and paste the result into something else.

The internet itself holds two dangers which propagate the dumbing down we see around us. Firstly, how much of what you read on the internet can you trust? If, to quote Mark Twain, "A lie can run around the world six times while the truth is still trying to put on its pants," think how much more quickly falsehoods or simple inaccuracies can spread thanks to the worldwide web. Verifying facts in days of yore might mean referring to an encyclopaedia or two, now people are only too willing to take as gospel what they read on the 'net, particularly if two independent sites quote the same information, even if one may have plagiarised the other. Thus there can be a tendency for the careless or less discerning user to be either unable to find the information they want or to trust the first thing they see, making them vulnerable to ignorance, mistakes, half-truths and falsehoods, or more dangerously to con tricks and scams.

Secondly, the internet encourages superficial reading and the tendency to hop from one link to another, moving from an article on a news website about the political situation in the Middle East to pictures of cute dogs in three clicks. Research has shown that a consequence of the internet has been that concentration levels and the ability to read anything other than bite sized pieces of text have been seriously compromised in recent years.

I suppose to some extent I have found myself in the same position that every generation does eventually, being sceptical of the intelligence of the younger generation. Over thirty years ago, in 1980 (which I confess seems positively recent) Isaac Asimov wrote that “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

Prophetic words; I cannot imagine what Asimov would have made of TOWIE.