Sam Smith, 1992 -After more than a half dozen primary debates, several months of cable
grazing, and assiduous reading of every political story I could get my hands
on, I fear my concerns about global dumbing are more valid than I had initially
realized.
Global dumbing, according to the thesis I have been considering
lately, involves the virtually imperceptible but steady deterioration of the
aggregate human mind -- as well as of
its institutions -- much as the temperature of the earth is apparently rising
at a rate so minuscule that scientists will be still be debating its
escalation even as the waters of the
Atlantic Ocean lap at the potted plants in the lobby of the Trump Plaza.
In fact, global warming and global dumbing are intimately
connected. Without the latter, something actually might be done before that
portion of Washington below the fall line of the Potomac is totally submerged.
And like global warming, global dumbing concerns itself with losses incurred by
energy transfers and nature's ceaseless quest for the random equilibrium of
chaos. It is, in short, the entropy of the human spirit and of the systems it
has created.
In physics, entropy is a measure of unavailable energy. In the
natural world, entropy is reflected in the pollution from your car and the
radioactive tailings from Seabrook. If the world were perfect, energy would do
just what it was supposed to do and not go wandering off like some groupie of
that cosmic band, The Second Law of Thermodynamics. As it is, much of it is
wasted and thus when you bake something, your kitchen as well as your oven gets
warm. Such phenomena led the German
physicist Ruldolf Clausius to propose in 1865 that we were losing energy
everywhere and that we call this sorry state of affairs entropy. It's been
downhill ever since.
Allow entropy go on long enough and you could theoretically have
all energy transferred from where it is to a great hyper-heated toxic dump in
the sky, with the result that the whole universe would just burn up.
Fortunately, there is still debate about this.
Entropy causes enough problems as it is, such as the tendency in
nature for things to move towards an equilibrium of disorder and towards a
simple, inert state. Thus while we can
easily burn wood in our fireplaces, no one has figured out how to take the
ashes and turn them into a tree limb again, let alone recreate a whole rain
forest. Information theorists say entropy goes on in communications as well.
The repeated transfer of information results not in knowledge, they argue, but
noise and static as the information degrades in its repetition, much as a fifth
generation photocopy of a fax becomes unreadable.
Cultures lose energy, too. Which is why the Egyptians don't
build pyramids any more, and why Guatemalans have to import digital watches
rather than just checking their Mayan calendars. The creation of a great
civilization or a great world power wastes a enormous amount of energy. As
Barry Commoner put it, in nature there is no free lunch.
In earlier times, it was possible to avoid cultural entropy by
stealing energy from somewhere else. This, of course, was the foundation of
slave trade, the British Empire and various new world orders of the first half
of 20th century. While it still goes on,
energy theft has become more difficult as the world has steadily lost its
cultural, political, environmental and economic differentiation, not to mention
the creation of OPEC and the appearance of nuclear bomb factories in various
third world countries.
The global human mind faces a similar problem, thanks to such
factors as the ubiquity of American film and television, excessively frequent
summits of world leaders, international conferences on every conceivable
subject, multinational corporations and other well meaning efforts that bring
the world closer together but in so doing leaves no corner of it immune from
human energy loss. If there is, in fact, a entropic collapse of the earth, the
last sound may well be that of Larry King telling a caller from Bali to hold on
a minute for a word from our sponsor . . .
Unfortunately, entropy has increased as much in the media as in
politics. As in nature, the entropy of these institutions has led to a
breakdown of the complex in search of a simpler form . . . Dumbing has become
so dominant that it is considered a good thing. Hence the expression
"dumbing down" for simplifying an article to the presumed
intelligence of the readership. The
Washington Post is particularly fond of this practice, even to the extent that
in one story it explained to its readers what a truck axle was . . .
Almost alone among his colleagues, John Tierney of the New York
Times has at least broached the entropy issue. In his story on ABC's attempt to
get the candidates to agree to spend 20 minutes of their debate actually
debating and discussing the issues with one another without media intervention,
Tierney recorded the reaction:
"Conduct a debate? Press each other for answers? But this
meant they would actually have to listen to other humans and ask questions.
These skills tend to atrophy in powerful politicians. By the time they become
presidential candidates they have been pontificating for so long to so many
captive audiences that they have lost the ability to carry on a polite
conversation." . . .
Nor is this entropy limited to the more public pursuits. Indeed, a cursory examination of American
business suggests that its major product is wasted energy. Compute all the
energy loss created by corporate lawyers, Washington lobbyists, marketing
consultants, CEO benefits, advertising agencies, leadership seminars, human
resource supervisors, strategic planners and industry conventions and it is
amazing that this country has any manufacturing base at all.
We have created an economy based not on actually doing anything,
but on facilitating, supervising, planning, managing, analyzing, tax advising,
marketing, consulting or defending in court what might be done if we had time
to do it. The few remaining truly productive companies become immediate targets
for another entropic activity, the leveraged buyout.
Things have degenerated so far that we even cite entropy as an
indication of our economic progress, as when we add the cost of cleaning up the
Valdez oil spill to our gross national product.
I am convinced that this is no small part of the foreign
competition problem, for in countries where business entropy has not progressed
so far, a higher percentage of commercial energy is spent doing something.
One might look to our universities for ways to counteract the
entropy of our society. But one would do so in vain. In fact, one sure clue to
the rate of entropy is relative inflation, for inflation, after all, is a
measure of how much it costs to do the same thing today compared with
yesterday. The difference in inflation rate is a form of entropy and at the top
of the list you'll find academia.
It shouldn't really surprise when you realize that these
campuses have been actually teaching the entropic lifestyle for years. It was
America's business schools that spread the word that management was an
overarching skill that eliminated the need to know anything about the
particular product that was being managed. It was agricultural schools that
fostered entropic farming with its emphasis on pesticides and capital
intensiveness. And it has been our academies of the liberal arts that have so
failed to guard our language that a majority of college graduates seem to think
that having a "process" is the same thing as creating a product.
Scale plays an important role in entropy. Roughly speaking, the
larger a system or institution, the more wasted energy. This applies to
governments, corporate bureaucracies, or the limousines their leaders ride.
Part of this is due to the fact that as a system becomes larger
a proportionately greater amount of energy has to be devoted to keeping the
system alive rather than doing what the system is meant to be doing. Hence the college president who spends 70% of
the work day raising funds instead of raising academic levels, a phenomenon
that can be noted at a mundane level by anyone who has moved from being a
member of a committee to being its chair.
If you think about it, I am sure you can find in your own
experience numerous examples of the increase in human entropy. An easy test is
to write down all the institutions, committees or groups with which you have
some affiliation. Now put a check mark
beside each which is doing a better job now than it was five or ten years ago.
See what I mean? . . .
The problem of entropic systems is further complicated by the
fact that nature didn't intend these systems to exist in the first place. So the bigger and more complex they become
the more unnatural and unstable they become. Just as an ice cube would rather
be water, the Resolution Trust Corporation would much rather be a bunch of
political hacks handing out patronage to their Republican allies. Entropy
drives these systems towards their natural state, resulting in not only
ineffectualness and anarchy, but massive corruption as well.
Since everyone has forgotten what these systems are meant to do,
it is no longer possible to determine clearly what those within them are meant
not to do. Aided by the entropic use of
language, our ethics as well as our productivity become degraded . . .
Entropy is the great hidden issue of this campaign. It is there in the overhead costs of our
crazy health system. It is there in the annual loss of energy equivalent to the
Pentagon budget due to our failure to adopt sound conservation measures. It is
there in the decline of American business. It is there in the massive
corruption of the system, from BCCI to bounced checks on the Hill. It is there in the incredible waste of a
whole generation of young black males whom we would rather lock up than employ
productively. It is there in the broad consensus that nothing seems to work
anymore. It is there in the increasingly childish rhetoric of our campaigns and
in our own passivity in the face of it. And it is there in the increasingly
likely possibility that we will have to choose between a Republican who doesn't
know where he's going and a Democrat who doesn't care where he's going . . .
Fortunately there is no evidence that global dumbing has entered
the human gene pool. Nature, before
people began fiddling with it, handled the problem rather neatly by regularly
killing off the entropic and giving birth to new life and energy. I find
considerable comfort in the fact that I have never seen a small child
facilitate anything nor one enamored of process in any form. Instead, they like
to make things, do things, laugh and sing. Thus I strongly suspect that we have
just taught ourselves to be dumb and, however difficult, it remains possible to
re-educate ourselves, even if it means going back to kindergarten to learn how.
In any case, it is impossible to overestimate the importance of
this issue. If global dumbing is not halted, we may wake up one morning and
find that no one in this country knows how to make anything anymore. We may
discover our dearest friends and relatives in a catatonic state before the TV
and the device won't even be on. When we call for help we may find that 911 has
become an endless loop voice mail system from which one can never disconnect.
We may even, some day, elect a hologram as president -- and
we'll be too dumb to realize it. - Sam
Smith
1 comment:
Entropy? Or purposeful design. Like a marriage made in heaven!
An argument might be made that Trump is what the Republican establishment has work for ever since the early 1980s, or before.
There had been a strong push to get those 'nasty career politicians' out of Politics, and install people from 'Business' into office. Ostensibly because Government wasn't 'making money'? Or maybe that it became almost a necessity to be a Lawyer to survive in Government – and Republicans, particularly, began to promote an anti-'intelligencia' stance. Kinda like the book 1984. No Environmental concerns, No anti-religious stuff like Evolution, No 'liberal' social programs, No government transparency, etc. Nothing that would upset the 'traditional values' applecart.
And corporations want political control.
Anyway, assuming Greed is Trump's greatest attribute, and that Profit is the singular 'ethic' in Business; then we are being led by the epitome of what has been desired by the 'right'. OK, OK, so he isn't exactly “religions”, but he has put on a perfunctory show when it was needed, enough to stay off the Tea Party during the last Presidential Election.
The only “failing” that bothers the Right might be Trump's inability to speak about those less fortunate economically and politically, minorities, the Press, the Intelligence Community, and probably people from other religious groups; without shrouding his comments in a cloak of kind platitudes, technical jargon, or political speak.
We are all busy watching the court jester, while businessmen are 'gettin-er-dun' in Washington.
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