☆☆四星级☆☆Economist Debates阅读写作分析-----Mass intelligence

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Featured guest

Dumbing down began in Britain a while before it was identified and named, or people really noticed what was happening. The 1980s were not,generally, supposed to be a good decade for culture; but, in retrospect, it increasingly seems like an almost utopian era for British television. An Indian student in London early in that decade,generally miseable, I remember the wonder of discovering some of the great works of Indian art-house cinema on BBC2 on a Saturday afternoon—films I hadn't seen even in India—and the classics of popular Hindi cinema (the tyrannical generic definition "Bollywood" was still rare) in the mornings. This, like the programmes on Channel 4,constituted one of the first responses to the transformation that multiculturalism was bringing about in Britain, and when it was still being established as a social and political concept; and long before it had become a well-worn, jaded idea. The fact that television made space, in this instance, for Indian art-house cinema is interesting in hindsight; the fact that India is not synonymous with bhangraor popular culture alone (however vital these may be), that high cultures were not, in the 20th century, just a Western occurrence, but a worldwide one, were intimations that glimmered and disappeared by the1990s, just as we were on the brink of understanding them.Multiculturalism itself was given a pretty orthodox interpretation, and became an ongoing celebration. Dumbing down is about being upbeat, and being upbeat leads to simplification.

This is not to say that dumbing down is about an assault on high culture alone. As Ian Sinclair provocatively sums up one aspect of the present: "Main stream TV is pretty defunct." The problem is not just to do with the disappearance of high culture; it is to do with an impossibly orthodox view of the popular, a deliberate ironing out of its idiosyncrasy and unexpectedness. It is also to do with corporatisation: not only of politics, but of the media, and of publishing. This means, for instance, that the Labour and Conservative parties are essentially interchangeable with one another; but also that BBC1 and Channel 4 are today more or less indistinguishable; that there is little discernible difference between Secker and Warburg and Faber and Faber. Yet we inhabit a language that continues to inform us that these institution srepresent distinct, even oppositional values, as they once used to; the primary problem of globalisation is not dumbing down, but the formulation of a language that might express the disjunction we feel every day. Language itself is a problem, and often needs to be resisted; globalisation is accompanied by what I have elsewhere called a "rhetoric of plenty" —"more and more people are reading"; "freedomand democracy are spreading round the world". A cursory examination of these claims causes them to disintegrate.

This is not to say that globalisation does not present us with certain opportunities; it does, on an unprecedented and subversive scale. As the novelist TomMcCarthy points out: "It's a great time to be a writer; it's just an awful time to be published." Globalisation is a leap into intelligence,if intelligence means an engagement with the present, provided we map the present with a mixture of caution and open-mindedness, as foreigners would a culture that has some resemblance to their own, and which they are only beginning to understand

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The notion of progress—the idea that things, gradually, get better as the sum of human knowledge increases—is the battleground over which the progressives and the conservatives fight. Progressives believe in the human capacity for innovation and change. They look to the future with optimism and have great faith in humanity's capacity to shape its existence. Conservatives are not great believers in progress. They prefer to look backwards to a happy future, seeing in tradition and convention the template for future living. As a teacher, I am always struck by the conservatives' belief in the teaching of grammar which,if they are to be believed, will bring back public order, respect for one's elders and world peace. If only it were that simple...

开头表明自己对这个问题的认识----
the battleground over which the progressives and the conservatives fight.下面展开，基本就是一段一段递进承接。

You may have divined, from my opening paragraph, that, in this debate I am firmly on the side of the progressives. I believe that with each new generation comes a greater capacity
for generating knowledge and developing skills（好句子~）. It is undeniably true that the intelligence of each generation increases. What has been added to the mix, now at the start of the 21st century, is the power of the internet to make knowledge available to all who can access its power.

I am continually amazed by the capacity of the young to use technology to access sources of information, to communicate and, most
potently, to transform what is known for their own ends. The young make connections and shape knowledge through their use of IT. I was away over Christmas and NewYear with two teenagers. During this period, in quiet moments of respite from social networking on Facebook and downloading dance music,they learned the rules of bridge and proceeded there after, on several occasions, to thrash their elders and betters. As we were in Cyprus they also took the opportunity to investigate, through the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, the origin and development of the conflict between the Turkish and Greek Cypriots which led to the Turkish annexation of northern Cyprus, and proceeded to give their elders a concise and illuminating history lesson on this issue.

But the young are interested in culture in its widest manifestations. They are,effortlessly, expert in popular culture, as well as the vintage pop ofthe 1970s and 1980s. They are able to download images on to the computer and transform them. Rather tired holiday snaps were drained of colour and dramatically retinted to produce startling and dramatic images which enhanced the stark beauty of the Cypriot beaches and the deserted inland villages (all this after a night of clubbing—the young are not only intelligent, they also have stamina!).

And because young people have these skills and abilities, we have to start thinking much more seriously and carefully about how we educate them. A school curriculum based on facts to be learned will not do the job（多次见到这个短语，意思同work） because with access to the internet comes the accretion of far too many facts. The National Curriculum is not fit for purpose, if the purpose is preparing youngsters for their future as adults in a fast-moving,changing, technological society. Nor is it fit for purpose for their future as healthy human beings. In school, at present, children spend far too little time learning how to use their bodies, from exercise of all kinds to using their hands. Whatever futurologists tell us, doing and making is part of the essence of humanity, and all our youngsters need to spend more time doing and making. All our youngsters need to spend more time understanding and practising getting on with other people（现在的课程设置不仅不能满足teenagers将处的未来多变高科技的社会，而且lack makind&doing which is part of the essence of humanity）. Politicians should cut their obsession with reading and writing and realise that sophisticated oral skills are even more important in our world. All our youngsters need to have more opportunities to express themselves creatively, whether by writing or in arts and crafts. And all our youngsters need time to think through questions of right and wrong, and with the current state of the world, they have plenty of moral and ethical issues to get their teeth into. We have a responsibility, as a society, to give the next generation the educationit wants and needs.（太精彩了，太精彩了，不背下天理难容啊）

So I agree wholeheartedly with the proposition. I want the elders to have more faith in and to give more support to the youngsters. After all, they are the future and it is they who will inherit all the profound problems we have so richly laid in store for them. The least we can do, it seems to me, is to have faith in their abilities and ensure that our education system gives them the skills which they need as adults. We need, also, to be generous with our empathy; we must understand the roots and sources of this generation's discontent with the present because this is the source of their desire for a better future, upon which the notion of progress is, fundamentally, based.

这篇文的支持角度很特别，把这个问题定位到一个progressives and the conservatives fight的问题上来，然后经展开，发展到谈我们对future generation的教育与信任问题上来。语言一级棒，写得很精彩，文章结构也很紧凑，太赞了，太赞了

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The plunge downmarket in any sector creates an aspirational desire, a need for more high-end（高档的） product, and that then informs the market movement in its turn. Culture is a half-step ahead of food retail. We're all organic now.

When we survey our Hay Festival1
audience—and this holds true in Latin America and Europe just as much, if not more so than in Britain—one of the things that comes over most strongly is the desire for more considered, long-form thinking and writing, and that is in part due to a dissatisfaction with instantaneous media reaction（媒体即时反应）,rolling news having rolled wrongly on before rendering an intimate,personal story. It also asks more as well as asking for more than the formulaic nature of much television drama and documentary.（句式很精彩）

Fact ain't truer than fiction.

Media expectation is all about momentum. The heroically populist sports and events channels on Sky triumph by bringing their energy to Sky Arts and increase their market share, brand value and revenues. Meanwhile the world's greatest arts patron, the BBC, ghettoes off its culture into an unwatched BBC4, and grievously wounds the national treasure of BBC2. Go figure.

Gadgetry, as played with by our children, is more demanding than it was. Kids take digital technology for granted, and its very ubiquity and ease of use means that the onus is on content providers to engage their customers more powerfully. That inevitably means hooking them with story. Sensation just won't wash if you want more than ten minutes' attention. The gaming industry is hammering movies and TV competition because it's smarter.

The iPod has revolutionised the perception of musical taste. The Napster-Moment2 revolutionised consumption even more than production at the point at which file-exchange became subversive and cool. One of the unexpected benefits of the playlist culture is the way it encourages plurality among peer groups（同年龄群体）. Genre loyalty now sounds nerdy and narrow rather than specialist and deep. We are no longer just being educated by the radio. In a post-John Peel3 world we have all stepped up.

ManUtd's4 internationals are the best players in the world today, much,much better than any 11 Englishmen. Same goes for Cambridge/London/BBC(delete as wished) scientists, writers and thinkers. Factor into this the species-defining heritage of Darwin and Shakespeare and Britain sits arrogantly across the anglophone, Common wealth and European alliances. In intellectual, cultural and football contexts that makes us world leaders. Economics and politics must surely follow.

We know now as never before that there are no simple truths. In this year that jubilees（周年纪念） the Fall of the Wall, Darwin's birth and the first Wall Street 5crash, it is clearer than ever that all political and religious doctrine discredits itself daily. Six billion people have survived with wildly differing—and wholly contradictory—beliefs, knowledge and experience. What more proof is needed that there is no one true way?What works, of course, is enquiry, negotiation, adaptability: wising up

1The Hay Festival of Literature & Arts is an annual literature festival held in Hay-on-Wye, Wales for ten days from May to June. Devised by Peter Florence in 1988, the festival was described by Bill Clinton in 2001 as "The Woodstock of the mind".[1] Since its inception, the festival was held at a variety of venues around Hay until 2005 when it moved to a central location just outside of the town.[2] The Guardian has been the main sponsor of the festival since 2002, succeeding The Sunday Times.

The festival has expanded in recent years and now includes musical performances and film previews. A children's festival, "Hay Fever", runs alongside the main festival. It has also expanded internationally and sister festivals take place in Cartagena and Segovia.

2Napster was an online music file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning while he was attending Northeastern University in Boston and operating between June 1999 and July 2001[1]. Its technology allowed people to easily copy and distribute MP3 files among each other, bypassing the established market for such songs and thus leading to the music industry's accusations of massive copyright violations. Although the original service was shut down by court order, it paved the way for decentralized peer-to-peer file-distribution programs, which have been much harder to control. The service was named Napster after Fanning's hairstyle-based nickname.

3John Robert Parker Ravenscroft, OBE (30 August 1939 – 25 October 2004), known professionally as John Peel, was an English disc jockey, radio presenter and journalist.

Known for his eclectic taste in music and his honest and warm broadcasting style, John Peel was a popular and respected DJ and broadcaster. He was one of the first to play American psychedelic rock, reggae and punk on British radio, and his significant promotion of performers ranging from alternative rock, pop, death metal, British hip hop and dance music is widely acknowledged.

He was the longest-serving of the original BBC Radio 1 DJs, broadcasting regularly from 1967 until his death in 2004.

4Manchester United Football Club is an English football club, based at Old Trafford in Trafford, Greater Manchester, and is one of the most popular football clubs in the world. The club was a founding member of the Premier League in 1992, and has played in the top division of English football since 1938, with the exception of the 1974–75 season. Average attendances at the club have been higher than any other team in English football for all but six seasons since 1964–65.[3]

5
The Wall Street Crash of 1929,[1][2] also known as the Great Crash or the Stock Market Crash of 1929, was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout.[3]

Three phrases—Black Thursday, Black Monday, and Black Tuesday—are commonly used to describe this collapse of stock values. All three are appropriate, for the crash was not a one-day affair. The initial crash occurred on Thursday, October 24, 1929, but the catastrophic downturn of Monday, October 28 and Tuesday, October 29 precipitated widespread alarm and the onset of an unprecedented and long-lasting economic depression for the United States and the world. This stock market collapse continued for a month.

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CLOSING

The moderator's closing remarks

OUR two clever and impassioned debaters and the hundreds of comments that were posted from the floor brought a richness to this discussion that few of us could have foreseen at the outset, and for that I would like to thank you all.
A debate that began with arguments about reading and museum attendance quickly came to focus on the issue of greatest interest: the effect of the internet. One or two people hate it; many see it as just a tool. But most, and here I count myself, are fascinated by it. It hasn't been around terribly long and we don't know what the full effect of it will be. Three commentators raised points that offer important pointers, some of them uncomfortable but all of them invigorating.（这个句式很好，简洁）

A 20-year-old student from the American WestCoast took the view that the younger generation is being tempted, in large part because of the internet, to take the easy road: to like Vivaldi
1but not listen to any pieces beyond "The Four Seasons"; to go to the Louvre（罗浮宫）, which the original article identified as being more popular than the Tour Eiffel, and see the "Mona Lisa" while completely ignoring the beautiful Delacroix2
that hang just nearby and the Veroneseon3 the opposite wall.

With the advent of technology, this student said, people can claim to be producers of culture through Flickr,Youtube, Myspace, etc. But the fact remains that if they are not discerning consumers of existing culture, they can never be great producers.

Amit Chaudhuri, one of our erudite featured guests,who lives between India and Britain, points out the "impossibly orthodox view of the popular", and, egged on by corporatisation, "a deliberate ironing out of its idiosyncrasy and unexpectedness". So political parties, media groups and publishers are become more and more interchangeable. Such easy, shallow grazing does not point to a very rich future.

And yet there is richness out there. Mary Bousted,another featured guest, reports that she is "continually amazed by the capacity of the young to use technology to access sources of information, to communicate, and most potently, to transform what is know for their own ends." For Ms Bousted, this points to a crucial issue: that we have to start thinking much more seriously and carefully about how we educate our children. A school curriculum based on facts to be learned will not do the job because with access to the internet comes the accretion of far too many facts. In school, at present, she adds, children spend far too little time learning how to use their bodies. Doing and making is part of the essence of man's ability to create culture. Our youngsters need to spend more time understanding and practising getting on with other people, for sophisticated oral skills are ever more important. They need to have more opportunities to express themselves creatively, whether by writing or in arts and crafts. And they need time to think through questions of right and wrong. Emotional intelligence and a deep sense of curiosity lie at the root of thoughtful living, of understanding cultures that are not our own—and at the root of wising up.

1 Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (March 4, 1678 – July 28, 1741),[1] nicknamed il Prete Rosso ("The Red Priest"), was a Baroque composer and Venetian priest, as well as a famous virtuoso violinist, born and raised in the Republic of Venice. The Four Seasons, a series of four violin
concerti, is his best-known work and a highly popular Baroque piece.

2
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.[1] Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

3
Paolo Veronese (1528 – April 19, 1588) was an Italian painter of the Renaissance in Venice, famous for paintings such as The Wedding at Cana and The Feast in the House of Levi. He adopted the name Paolo Cagliari or Paolo Caliari,[1] and became known as "Veronese" from his birthplace in Verona.

Veronese, Titian, and Tintoretto constitute the triumvirate of pre-eminent Venetian painters of the late Renaissance (1500s). Veronese is known as a supreme colorist, and for his illusionistic decorations in both fresco and oil. His most famous works are elaborate narrative cycles, executed in a dramatic and colorful Mannerist style, full of majestic architectural settings and glittering pageantry. His large paintings of biblical feasts executed for the refectories of monasteries in Venice and Verona are especially notable. His brief testimony with the Inquisition is often quoted for its insight into contemporary painting technique.

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The proposer's closing remarks

As the days have passed, this debate has come down to a single point, like a pencil being sharpened. We on Intelligent Life magazine are saying that, while there is certainly such a thing as dumbing down, there is also such a thing as wising up. For us,intellectual standards are a road with heavy traffic on both sides. Our opponents are saying that there is just dumbing down. For them,intellectual standards are a river, flowing one way only, and always downhill.（比喻用的很精准）

Susan Jacoby, my very learned friend, has complained of a lack of evidence for the motion. The moderator, meanwhile, has said we presented "a mass of evidence". Whether massive or missing, that evidence is worth recapping:
•    museums are booming
•    literary festivals are booming
•   classical music on the radio is booming (and if you find Classic FM too middlebrow, bear in mind that its highbrow rival, BBC Radio 3, has attracted more listeners since Classic FM came along)
•    opera and ballet are reaching more people through broadcasts to cinemas, which are proving highly popular
•   lectures and debates are playing to packed houses, the prime example being Intelligence Squared, which began in London and is now opening branches in New York and Sydney
•    audio books are doing well, including the 22-CD version of "Ulysses"
•    the growth of the web, enabling debates like this one
•    the choices we make online: we read serious newspapers more than we read trashy ones, and The Guardian1now has millions of readers in America
•    Higher education is booming: roughly twice as many people go to university as a generation ago

There are other pointers. The Economist sells four times as many copies as it did 25 years ago, and it hasn't dumbed down at all.People do better in IQ tests than their parents or grandparents did.The reasons for this are disputed, but the most persuasive theory I've seen is that the sort of intelligence we are growing today is the sort of intelligence that does well in those tests: adept, visual, quick on the uptake. Nobody is suggesting video games are as intellectually rewarding as books (although of course in both fields there is good and bad, the smart and the dumb). But they do nurture certain skills and abilities: quick wits, problem-solving, hand-eye co-ordination. The opposition points out that young American men spend three hours a day playing these games, but it doesn't seem to have thought about what those three hours would otherwise have been spent doing. My guess is that the answer is watching television: the sort of television youngmen like to watch. Not such a great loss.

"If higher education were doing a proper job," Ms Jacoby argues, "young people with university degrees ought to be more knowledgeable than their elders."This is nonsense. We go on gathering knowledge throughout our lives, at least until we succumb to dementia(痴呆). So the comparison, if there has to be one, should be with what their elders knew at the same age. And in any case it's not knowledge that is the key here, although it helps.It's intelligence. Education has moved away from cramming facts into young heads, and towards giving them mental tools. You could argue that this process has gone too far; but you could also look at today's students and see that there are both gains and losses from the change.

The kids I see tend to know less than their parents did about English grammar, Latin vocabulary, the dates of British kings and queens, the Book of Common Prayerand the career records of the great cricketers. But they tend to know more about human relationships, all the major religions other than Christianity, how sports actually work and how to behave on the street.Where their parents sat with glazed expressions in front of so-so middlebrow comedy shows and awful-but-addictive soaps like "Dynasty"2,the kids tend to watch "Friends" (which is smart), "The Simpsons"3(verysmart) and "Doctor Who" 4(much smarter than it used to be).

Television is a good example of what we are talking about here. Sure, There is plenty of dumb stuff, from dismal reality shows to laminated news anchors whose thick make-up seems to have entered their brains. But there is also lots of clever stuff. In Britain, clever people like Simon Schama5 and Andrew Marr6 and Niall Ferguson7 are given documentary series in which to expound their theories about history. In America,the past few years have been a golden age of upmarket television drama:"The Sopranos"8, "West Wing"9, "Mad Men"10. And the arrival of DVD has helped. When we shell out for a DVD box set, our brow seems to rise. We don't buy a box set of "American Idol"11: we buy one of "The Wire"12.

MsJacoby is right when she says that there is an alarming ignorance of foreign affairs in America, but that's another story. Led by anill-informed president (where was he educated?), a swathe of Americahas turned in on itself in the past few years. But of course there has also been a healthy reaction against all that, which we can see in the enthusiasm for Barack Obama. The idea that young people cannot read a map would be greeted with some bafflement in Europe, where the under-30s jump on and off EasyJet planes and Eurostar trains, and dream of going to New Zealand to jump off hills.

Ms Jacoby is almost right to draw a parallel with food. Yes, the diet of many people in the Anglo-American world has clearly got worse (not just cheeseburgers but fructose, fizzy drinks, crisps, chocaholism). At the same time, the diet of many has got better (more fruit, more veg, less meat, more nutsand seeds, more juice, more water). To each action, there is a reaction—not necessarily equal, but unmistakably there.
Reader, you face a clear choice. If you think our minds are half-empty, vote against the motion. If you think they are half-full,vote for it. And thank you for taking part. There doesn't seem to be much wrong with your attention span

1.The Guardian (until 1959, The Manchester Guardian) is a British
newspaper owned by the Guardian Media Group. It is published Monday to Saturday in the Berliner format from its London and Manchester headquarters.

The Guardian Weekly, which circulates worldwide, provides a compact digest of four newspapers. It contains articles from The Guardian and its Sunday, sister paper The Observer, as well as reports, features and book reviews from The Washington Post and articles translated from France's Le Monde.

The Guardian had a certified average daily circulation of 358,844 copies in January 2009 – a drop of 5.17% on January 2008, as compared to sales of 842,912 for The Daily Telegraph, 617,483 for The Times, and 215,504 for The Independent.[3]

2Dynasty is an American
prime time television soap opera that aired on ABC from January 12, 1981 to May 11, 1989. The series revolved around the Carringtons, a wealthy oil family living in Denver, Colorado.[2]

3The Simpsons is an American animated television sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its eponymous family, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. The show is set in the fictional town of Springfield, and lampoons American culture, society and television, and many aspects of the human condition.

4Doctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the adventures of a mysterious alien time-traveller known as "the Doctor" who travels in his space and time-ship, the TARDIS, which normally appears from the exterior to be a blue 1950s police box. With his companions, he explores time and space, solving problems, facing monsters and righting wrongs.

5 Simon Michael Schama, CBE (born 13 February 1945) is an English professor of history and art history at Columbia University[1]. His many works on history and art include Landscape and Memory, Dead Certainties, Rembrandt's Eyes[2], and his history of the French Revolution, Citizens[1]. He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain. He was an art and cultural critic for The New Yorker[

6Andrew William Stevenson Marr (born 31 July 1959) is a Scottish
journalist and political commentator. He edited The Independent for two years, until May 1998, and was the political editor for the BBC from 2000 until 2005. He then began hosting a political programme called Sunday AM (now The Andrew Marr Show) on Sunday mornings on BBC One from September 2005 onwards. In 2007 he presented a political history of post-war Britain on BBC Two, Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain.

7Niall Ferguson (born April 18, 1964, in Glasgow) is a British historian. He specialises in financial and economic history as well as the history of empire. He is the Laurence A. Tisch
Professor of History at Harvard University and the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He was educated at the famous independent school The Glasgow Academy in Scotland, and at Magdalen College, Oxford.

He is best known outside academia for his revisionist views rehabilitating imperialism and colonialism; within academia, his championing of counterfactual history is a subject of some considerable controversy. In 2008, Allen Lane published his most recent book, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World[1] which he also presented as a Channel 4 television series.

8The Sopranos was an American television drama series created and produced by David Chase. It premiered on the premium cable network HBO in the United States on January 10, 1999 and ended its original run of six seasons and 86 episodes on June 10, 2007. The show has also been broadcast on A&E in the United States and internationally. Set in New Jersey, where it also was produced, the series revolves around mobster Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and the difficulties he faces as he tries to balance the often conflicting requirements of his home life and the criminal organization he heads.

A major commercial and critical success, The Sopranos is the most financially successful cable series in the history of television[1] and has frequently been described by critics as one of the greatest television series of all time. The series is noted for its high level of quality in all aspects of production and has been particularly recognized for its writing and the performances of its lead actors.[2] The show has been credited for bringing a greater level of artistry to the television medium and paving the way for many successful drama series that followed.[3][4] It has also won numerous awards, including twenty-one Emmys and five Golden Globes.

9The show received positive reviews from critics, political science professors, and former White House staffers. In total, The West Wing won three Golden Globe Awards and 27 Emmy Awards, including four straight awards for Outstanding Drama Series (2000–2003). The show's ratings waned in later years, following the departure of series creator Aaron Sorkin (who wrote or co-wrote 85 of the first 88 episodes) after the fourth season, yet it remained popular among high-income viewers, a key demographic for the show and its advertisers.[2]

10Set in New York City, Mad Men begins in the early 1960s at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency on New York City's Madison Avenue. The show centers on Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a high-level advertising creative director, and the people in his life in and out of the office. It also depicts the changing social mores of 1960s America.

Mad Men has received widespread critical acclaim, particularly for its historical authenticity and visual style, and has won numerous awards, including three Golden Globes, a BAFTA and six Emmys. It is the second cable series to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series and the first basic cable series to do so.

11
The program seeks to discover the best singer in the country through a series of nation-wide auditions. The American public decides the outcomes of the later stages through phone voting.

12
Each season of The Wire focuses on a different facet of the city of Baltimore. They are, in order: the drug trade, the port, the city government and bureaucracy, the school system, and the print news media. The large cast consists mainly of character actors who are little known for their other roles. Simon has said that despite its presentation as a crime drama, the show is "really about the American city, and about how we live together. It's about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how whether you're a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you've committed to."[1]

Despite never seeing large commercial success or winning any major television awards,[2] The Wire has frequently been described by critics as one of the greatest television series of all time.[3][4][5][6] The show is recognized for its realistic portrayal of urban life, artistic ambitions, and uncommonly deep exploration of sociopolitical themes

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The opposition's closing remarks

If you doubt that worship of the internet has replaced theism as the most common form of idolatry in Western culture, look no further than my opponent's assertion that email "has made writers of almost everyone with a computer". This observation is yet another example of the magical thinking underlying the proposition that our current cultural obsessions must embody some form of wisdom because...well, just because. I would argue, acknowledging my debt to Georges Clemenceau,that email writing is to writing as military justice is to justice.

I once hoped that click-and-send ease would encourage people who had abandoned discursive personal letters to resume something resembling genuine correspondence which, along with conversation and reading, used to form the foundation of serious intellectual life. Instead, email dealt the death blow to the art of letter writing. Future biographers and historians will look in vain for correspondence that used to illuminate ordinary and extraordinary lives, because for most of us email is a strictly utilitarian and distracting form of communication designed to be disposed of—on the reading as well as the writing end—as quickly as possible.

"To write about your life is to make sense of it," Tim de Lisle contends. "It's one of the most creative,reflective, cultured things you can do. And millions of people...are now writing every day—some better than others, for sure, but most better than they used to write before." Why, then, does everye valuation of writing skills conducted in the United States and the UK during the past two decades, the period when computers have become ubiquitous in middle-class homes, show a decline in young people's command of written language? Why is much of the content of email inboxes and blogs—the thoughtful comments on this debate are the exceptions that prove the rule—couched in a semiliterate form that would never make it through the vetting of a letters-to-the-editor column in a print edition of a newspaper?（插入语和反问）

The volume of email,like the number of hits on a particular article on a newspaper website,signifies only a general interest, not a willingness to follow through.As every recent study of newspaper websites indicates, readers are much less likely to finish an article online than in a print edition. That is why online newspapers have failed to attract enough advertising to make them profitable.

One of the most pathetic phenomena in Anglo-American culture today is the eagerness of so many intellectuals,terrified of being labelled fuddy-duddy（唠叨的人，守旧者） elitists, to denigrate the critical importance of carefully crafted sentences. Don't worry if kids ignore books or write grammatically unintelligible compositions, as long as they are capable of culling information they need for a term paper from quick hits on various websites and of texting or tweeting every mundane thought（正话反说很犀利）. ("My teeth look too yellow in this light" was one cultured, reflective gem recently reported to me by a young friend at university.)

The moderator of this discussion raises an important point when, in the context of her 11-year-old daughter's unwillingness to practise music, she asks whether culture necessarily requires effort. The answer is yes. Kids playing drums with the aid of XBoxes, minus（这里是minus的非正式用法，相当于without）
any effort to read music or seek the counsel of teachers and accomplished musicians, are not investing the effort needed to become musically educated.

Upon first acquaintance, we drink in the fruits of culture, but making sense of what we are experiencing requires exertion. I was raised in a home with no exposure to visual arts, and I well remember being ambushed by beauty when I actually encountered my first great work of art, Ghiberti's "Gates of Paradise",then adorning the Baptistery in Florence. So this was what Keats was talking about! But what would that eureka moment have meant in the long run had I not gone on to read about art history and fill in a good deal of what my earlier education had left blank? I was looking at those doors with an instinctive appreciation of beauty but with none of the background and education that turn moments of intensity into a rich and sustaining culture. Visual intelligence, like all forms of intelligence, is fully realised only if we are able to connect what we perceive in an instant with the contents of a prepared mind.

When The Age of American Unreason was published last winter, I was prepared for vituperative emails,because the book has a good deal to say about the malign influence of religious fundamentalism on American culture. Much to my surprise, the crudest emails came from people who objected to my argument that the computer was only a tool rather than a God-like source of knowledge.For this ever-expanding group, faith in the automatic uplifting influence of technology had become a new form of cultural fundamentalism.

"When we rise from the sofa, turn off the TV, and go to our computers," Mr de Lisle writes, "our brow rises too." What codswallop!(开始
不淡定了。。。。。。。) (I admit it: I love this archaic word and was looking for achance to use it.) The cultural effect of turning from television to a computer depends entirely on what one was watching on television and what one is planning to do on the computer. Rising from the sofa means nothing if it is followed by tweeting about teeth or clicking endless lyon celebrity websites.

Let me say this once more for the benefit of those who scream "Luddite" at anyone who refuses to buy into computer worship: the computer is a great tool, as long as we treat it as a servant and not a master and use it as an addition to, not asubstitute for, older ways of learning that encourage us to concentrate instead of fragmenting our attention.

"Zero narrative", by the way, is not my phrase but was coined（To devise (a new word or phrase). by a professor of education in California who thinks that literature has been overemphasised because only "zero narrative" reading is required for work. It is an intellectual tragedy that so many who have been exposed to the best of traditional education—and therefore ought to know better—are congratulating themselves for going along to get along. But such rationalisations are entirely understandable, because all of us are much more comfortable if we pretend that our distracted for aging on the web can replace the sustained intellectual effort required to assimilate any demanding cultural narrative. It is so soothing to tell ourselves that however we are spending our time, we are automatically"wising up". Dr Pangloss would love this proposition.

米饭袜子UID：2532172

GUEST

The number of text messages sent and received daily exceeds the total population of the planet. This excludes emails, mobile and landline calls and the more traditional form of communicating, letters: all these words, 540,000 of them in English currently, five times the amount that were around at the time of Shakespeare. But what are we actually saying to one another? If, as Wittgenstein1 contested, language defines our world, what are we saying about it? How do we effectively disseminate all this information? How well equipped will we and future generations be to differentiate between chatter, facts, knowledge and wisdom?

What role does education play in our dumbing up or down?Given its importance, should it be left to the state to administer an injection of knowledge to be dissected, and then regurgitated in the examination system? Or should education be something more subtle and potent? If so, how best should we educate and by whom?

Recently,a headmistress in Sheffield, UK banned the word "school" as it has negative connotations and declared that henceforth she worked in a"place of learning" and teachers were to be defined as "navigators of knowledge". At first glimpse this seems a
risible farce. However, a further look begs deeper enquiry.

No one is dumbing down; it is that we are still dumb enough to be teaching in the same old way.Why do we insist that scratching on a piece of paper within a certain time frame is any indication of any academic prowess or indeed any suitability to perform certain roles in the workforce? Incidentally, itis predicted that future generations will have had between ten and 14jobs by the time they are 38 years old and technology is advancing at such a pace that by the time a student studying a four-year technical degree reaches his or her third year it will be outdated.

So why do we define intelligence so narrowly? We abhor spatial, emotional and practical intelligence so much that with inverted snobbery（反面势利眼的行为或态度） we still on the whole refuse to stream, insisting that to be treated equally means to treat all children the same, which is blatant nonsense. If you have ten children and five are good at sports and the other five are wonderful mathematicians, what is the sense of making all ten playsports?

There is no longer any excuse for being or playing dumb.We live in a time of clicking culture. The desire for knowledge is like never before; on the now acclaimed search engine, Google, there are 31billion searches a month. I believe we will not allow all this knowledge to slip through our fingers (just one week of the New York Times has more information than an individual could amass in an entire lifetime in the 18th century).

Our experience on this planet is changing at a phenomenal pace, thanks to technology and science, and we need to make sure that education complements these changes, which at present it doesn't. Now that is foolish.

1
was an Austrian-British
philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.[1]

Described by Bertrand Russell as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating",[2] Wittgenstein is considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.[3] He helped inspire two of the century's principal philosophical movements: the Vienna Circle and Oxford ordinary language philosophy. According to an end of the century poll, professional philosophers in Canada and the U.S. rank both his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) and Philosophical Investigations among the top five most important books in twentieth-century philosophy, the latter standing out as "...the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations".[4] Wittgenstein's influence has been felt in nearly every field of the humanities and social sciences, yet there are widely diverging interpretations of his thought.

米饭袜子UID：2532172

Winner announcement

The evolution of this debate has been clear, and also rather surprising. The early exchanges, under the leadership of our two debaters pitting the ayes（赞成票） against the nays（反对票）, gave way to a debate about the effect of the internet. In the past two or three days it has veered course again, to a discussion of how our very thinking is changing.

Our commentators have offered evidence that we are both wising up and dumbing down at once. As desplena puts it, our mania for entertainment, the fixation with Hollywood, the abandonment of classical studies and the “loss of fundamental education”, at least in the West, is evident for everyone to see, and certainly not proof that we are wising up. Quite the opposite. At the same time, as Peter Sellers wrote, “there is more [information] out there and more tools with which to reach it than at any time before in history. Culture is no longer the exclusive preserve of the aristocracy and nobility as it once was. Technology has made it possible for millions of people to get what they want, when they want it.”

There is no question that the internet allows us to be more easily informed on the subjects that we want to take the time to get to know. But, as jaygem points out, “taking time is the key because traditional ‘smarts’, which you are lamenting the loss of, takes a lot of time and effort. Taking‘time and effort’ is history. We now live in a fast world and we are never going back.”

Another commentator, Jim, pointed to the same conclusion. When he first started writing papers in school, he had to write a draft, cut it into pieces to reorganise his points,rewrite the drafts until satisfied, then type it up. By the time he had finished a paper, he had read his work from beginning to end several times. The process changed with the advent of the internet. He and his classmates would use the internet to find citations and background, and then enter the material into word processors to cut and paste paragraphs around effortlessly. After reading the papers the professor would admonish the students to please read their papers before turning them in. Whole sections were unintelligible because they had been chopped in half or not edited（可用事例
）. The computer had made it much easier to write a paper, but it didn't always help Jim and his fellow students say what they meant to say. “To say the right thing still requires discipline and effort.”

Perhaps today’s thinkers, Jim suggests, are becoming better “sprint” thinkers, while the older technologies trained “marathon” thinkers. Is this bad? Does “sprint”thinking automatically mean dumbing down?

The final vote is very evenly balanced. As the debate draws to a close, it has become increasingly clear that the most important aspect of the duel has not been winning, but participating. From day to day, the vote would move one percentage point in this direction and then, perhaps, one percentage point in the other; but still the comments kept pouring in.I found myself logging on to my computer day and night just to read the latest missives from the floor. I’m not allowed to say what I would vote. But, in a world where we are said to be increasingly time-poor, I have been heartened how few (very few) of the comments were grouchy and how many people have been prepared to devote considerable time to putting forth their views intelligently and with passion. Engagement,clearly, is the new victory.

米饭袜子UID：2532172

COMMENTS

jason h wrote:

Dear Madam,
The very poor are breeding at an alarming rate compared to the educated counties. I live and work through out Latin America and there are 2 distinct cultures separated by education and money!(mayge素材)
These people vote! The absolutly do not care for anything except what makes the next hour better for them.
Education is the key the children the only hope!
Thanx
J

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sawlty_showers wrote:

Dear Madam,

I agree that a diet ofelectronic media warps the way one's brain works. I am a software engineer by trade and was an avid reader before I began writing code. Now I cannot stand to read anything for more than a few minutes. I am accustomed to scanning text very quickly looking for precise patterns and skipping that which does not fit. My brain just can't stand to slow down and move at the speed of reading anymore.（可以由此推广做素材：先进传媒vs传统阅读）

There are upsides - my analytical powers have increased since I started coding. I suppose if I concentrated on a text I would be a better "close reader" than before, but probably in exchange for being more myopic.

Was it Aristotle who talked of reflexive actions? You become what you do? I would agree, and it is my opinion that reading literature makes you more human while writing code makes you less.

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Sunil Eshwar wrote:

Dear Ms. Rocco,

I am reminded of a profound statement that seems to apply to the way the world has been fundctioning and the way the world will continue to function : "Things always fall in place, always;and nothing matters, almost always". Just as fashion designs change once every few years (applies also to musics, genre movies, books etc.) with the wheels coming full cirlce, every action of mankind tends to come full circle（这个观点收了）. In layman speak, the moment I get bored of facebook, I would tend to begin re-living my interest in culture, or what I presume is supposed to be culture. That said,(尽管如此) while it might sound anathema, I see the paradigm of culture itself changing; no thanks in small measure to the leaps and bounds innovation and the internet have brought to our door-step.
My world (or the world I see) is definitely wising up to culture; but, a culture which seems to have a broader definition and a different paradigm.

Thanks,
Sunil Eshwar

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Jose Abelardo wrote:

Dear Madam,

I am a college student in New York City, and when I was a child, I used to devour books. I used to be able to read for long hours without feeling as if I was wasting my time.

Now, I feel an intangible pressure to read only that which makes me more knowledgeable in relation to other people（可以代表一部分人，素材读书的意义）. Because of this, my time is taken up a lot more by reading short tidbits of information online than by reading actual books, which after all, contain unnecessarily detailed explanations (nonfiction...why read a whole book about World War II if I can look it up on wikipedia and absorb everything I need to know about it in order to to sound smart in a conversation?) or no actual information at all (fiction...why read about Moby Dick if it does not tell me anything about the behavior of whales in the real world?)

(这两句疑问也很能代表一部分人的观点，可做素材)

This is something I choose to struggle with, especially when I sit down and force myself to read books, trying to feel as I did when I was younger and did not have frequent access to a computer as I do now, and trying to dispel my sisters' accusation that my laptop is my best friend.

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R. S. Harrison wrote:

Dear Madam,
Alexander the Great, while on his campaign throughout Asia, would keep his Companions sharp by playing a deceptively simple game. One person would stand up and produce an argument either for or against something. When he was finished, he would then have to argue the opposite with equal facility. The poor man was afterwards gauged on how equally he treated both sides of the argument. I cannot help but think that this game was a gift from Aristotle, and if so, I have every reason both to hope, and fear, such a game. My hope is that this gift can be wielded by someone less than Aristotle or Alexander, and my fear is that any attempt by myself pales so in comparison to its progenitors as to warrant no credence whatsoever. By heeding both my hope and my fear, perhaps I can yet steer a middle road through this argument.

Both proposition and opposition are fairly equal here. Optimism and pessimism are carefully presented against each other, as they often are. All that truly remains is to understand how they are two sides of the same coin. Any new understanding of this problem will occur at the point where we see the truth of both sides to coexist, and then we will have a new perspective. I am not so bold as to think that I can tell you the answer. Wiser men than I have claimed to have no answers at all, but only endless questions. The task, then, is to find our way towards a better question. Therefore, my aim is to provide here some information that may steer us towards such a question, and one, I hope, that is sufficiently elevated for us to peer down from its heights to perceive a greater piece of the puzzle.

Ms. Jacoby's fears are quite real. The times that have produced Shakespeare, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Hugo, and Dickens were times that employed educations that are almost unimaginable to even the richest countries of today. The memorization of Latin, the learning of verse, and instruction in mathematics were forced onto children in profound doses. Often there are reports of these lessons being no less than beaten into those children. However, their minds bore the instruction. There were children who grew into literary, or scientific, giants. The human mind was indeed a sponge that could absorb far more than the aptitude tests of today indicate. Going back further, we may read Plato and wonder at the thoughtfulness of both the teacher and his students. How many students today react with such eloquence as the students of Socrates? How many students today have the truly awesome capacity for memory that the classics teach us that people once had? It is very difficult for the average adult these days to even imagine being able to memorize the entire length of Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey. Romans could often read a letter once and recall its exact contents well into old age. I can scarcely remember the contents of my last e-mail.

R. S. Harrison wrote:

Dear Madam,
Some of us have come across a book that Victor Hugo wrote, entitled “Notre-Dame of Paris”. Many more of us know it by another title, “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame”. This book has an importance that has been obscured by the latter title. Hugo’s intention was to focus the reader on the cathedral, rather than its hunchbacked inhabitant. A British publisher no doubt had it in mind to sell the human drama, rather than an old church, but the irony is that he sold the lesser human drama out from under the greater. For the narrative is most persuasive when it is actually an essay describing architecture as the first literature of mankind. Our earliest societies carved their history and learning into stone. They lived in monuments to themselves and to their god(s). They created rituals that interacted with these monuments, and in being passed down through generations became a part of those monuments. They bestowed upon these edifices a kind of meaning that we are still struggling to decipher because we recognize that there is meaning throughout them, and that we are not producing such works of stone today. The modern age has brought us an architecture of aesthetics, but little or no meaning. Would we be as impressed with Shakespeare if his verses were all form and no content? Would we remember him at all?

Hugo postulated that the printing press stole the content away. It democratized information in a way that the radio did in the 1930’s, and the internet is doing today. Hugo lamented the waning of architecture’s meaning, and today we fret endlessly over whether the book will wane as well in the presence of the internet. Personally, I believe the confrontation between architecture and the printing press was far more epic than either the radio or the internet. A book, a radio show, and wikipedia have far more in common than any of them had with the endless symbols of architecture. Our monuments were enriched and informed by a seemingly infinite number of letters and phrases, because the boundaries of art and fact were so blurred as to be indistinguishable. Our archeologists and anthropologists try to catalogue every ounce of meaning, but there is hardly a monument that we have figured out definitively. All still produce wonder. All of them still teach us. However, the greatest books do precisely the same. The Bible and the Qur'an are obviously still informing us of all kinds of things. Every rereading leads to another insight. The same can be said of Shakespeare. No matter how many times you read a play by the Bard, you always learn something new - either about the play, or yourself. This is the true definition of a “work of genius”.

Overall, the transition from architecture to books is encouraging. Something was surely lost, but the gains speak for themselves. We appear to adapt to new mediums. Perhaps George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are but heralds for the film medium. Perhaps a new Shakespeare awaits us, who will forever dominate that medium. There are plenty of reasons to hope. Digital cameras are quickly becoming as beautiful as 35mm film, and for a much lower price. The Apple computers that we are currently bringing home from the store are the same computers that are making such breathtaking films as we see in theaters. It is not unreasonable to allow that the next great film-artist will be as unknown as William Shakespeare is to us today.

We are quick to fear that by democratizing a medium, we will dilute it. In the case of architecture, the fear appears to be justified. In the case of the written word, however, there are examples that point to the contrary. Dr. Samuel Johnson was possibly the greatest literary critic of all time. His analysis was so penetrating that literary critics today often emulate him, such as Yale’s Harold Bloom. Yet the contemporaries he reviewed are essentially nobodies to us. The Harry Potter’s of his day did not survive, and Johnson, to his credit as a critic, knew so. All kinds of books were being published that nobody would ever remember, but we know that it was not the death of literature. Hugo, Dumas, Conrad, Emerson, and Twain were all yet to arrive on the scene. It seems that great stories, no matter the medium, take a great deal of time to construct, and the right person to construct it.

R. S. Harrison wrote:

Dear Madam,
The trend of recorded history has an interesting beginning. The first history was composed by Herodotus some 2,500 years ago and covered the wars between ancient Greece and Persia (where we get the story of the 300 Spartans). This narrative featured an incredible synthesis of stories, facts, culture, rumors, travels, and anecdotes. At one moment you are receiving anthropological data, and the next is sociological or philosophical. Science had not yet intervened to categorize everything. Even Aristotle, a great categorizer, saw the usefulness of such a text, especially in the hands of his young pupil, Alexander. Soon after Herodotus composed his history, another historian arrived, Thucydides. This time a later war would be recorded, and it would be meticulously made up of facts. Historians tended towards Thucydides. Science liked facts, too. Over the centuries we bore down hard on collecting and organizing facts, but the facts never added up to fulfillment. Instead of finding answers, no matter where we look, we still just find more questions. Today, historians have categorized so much away from history, that we have lost much of our ability to find anything to understand beyond the basic facts, which is why we are starting to edge back toward Herodotus by synthesizing the different categories back together.

Natural synthesizers have always been storytelling, myth, and spirituality. They are modes that abstract facts into something tangible we can feel. Empirical fact turns out to be not as sturdy as we had once hoped. Thus, on our mission to expand Science, we have occasionally been required to take a step back, collate the data, and reestablish our feelings by refreshing or re-imaging our religions, or stories, or myths. In order to be human, we cannot be all facts, nor can we be all emotions. We live in a combination of both.

Today in Science, we are chasing particulars and facts infinitely small and infinitely large. By starting in the middle, our facts have led us to the subatomic and quantum theory. The further out we go in either direction, the more our effort begins to look like we are chasing fractals (designs that are just as complex in either micro or macro).

With so many facts and categories, what are our real aims with education? Our life-spans do not permit us to learn it all. But educations today are typically trying to distill so many of these pursuits at once that kids only get quick smatterings of each, and then we are surprised when our children have short attention spans, and even then we sooner blame it on television than the education itself.（嗯，很少有人质疑教育本身的问题，这个观点可留用） Not one of us has a clue how to best make as much information as possible available to children through education. Except that the internet seems to think that it has a solution. Search engines track clusters of interests, and thus anyone can take a starting point, and begin tracking the things that they would likely be interested in. However, they might not encounter some things that would be good to round out their thinking. This goes back to Socrates when we choose to do things that we want to do, but not necessarily what is good for us. Socrates saw himself has reminding the people of Athens of things that were good for them that they were not choosing because they did not think they wanted them. But surely, if they understood better, they would prefer what was good for them, right?

See how quickly we have reached a veritable quicksand of ideas?

R. S. Harrison wrote:

Dear Madam,
Michel de Montaigne was the first great essayist. He intended (and to many, achieved) for his essays, taken together, to map out his complete person. By recording his reactions to a myriad of topics, we have a literary equivalent of the human genome project. Like the genome project, Montaigne’s study was based primarily on one individual, but our learning was of the whole of mankind. Montaigne is considered to be almost as universal as Shakespeare, as if anyone who reads the essays could find their inner Montaigne, or a reading of the Henriad could relate one to Falstaff. But for all his learning he mistrusted professors. He claimed the best teacher he ever had was himself. Yet, somehow, for all his modesty, his advice was heeded by even the kings of his day.

On the other side of the coin is Vitruvius, a Roman architect. He writes:

“I am very much obliged and infinitely grateful to my parents... for having taken care that I should be taught an art, and that of a sort which cannot be brought to perfection without learning and a liberal education in all branches of instruction. Thanks, therefore, to the attention of my parents and the instruction given by my teachers, I obtained a wide range of knowledge, and by the pleasure which I take in literary and artistic subjects, and in the writing of treatises, I have acquired intellectual possessions whose chief fruits are these thoughts: that superfluity is useless, and that not to feel the want of anything is true riches.”


So these are ideas that came to my mind while thinking of the debate. But I have no degree from any college. I manage a coffee shop in Austin, Texas and I am only 25 years old. Yet, I have used the internet and a library card to pretty good effect. I own over a thousand books. I have traveled to every country, state, and province on this continent, largely by my wits alone. I have wandered England and Greece as well. Everywhere I go, I meet hundreds more like me. We are everywhere, and you’ve probably never heard of most of us. Well, we are busy finding meaning in our own lives. In America, we got an appreciative nod for helping elect Obama, because we were the invisible youth vote. With a little more time, and a little more experience under our belts, we’ll show you that there was nothing to worry about it. We are a beginning, not an end.

But some of you will continue to doubt, just as some of you will continue to hope. For us. For each other. For the future. For the past. For traditions. For change. Either way, we will try to carve out the best existence we can for ourselves, and most importantly, for each other.

“For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.” (-Arthur O’Shaugnessy)

（额米看懂。。。>。<

感觉太晦涩了。。。呃呃呃呃。。。。。。。）

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high-cheese wrote:

Dear Madam,

I feel that the proposition's proponet is drawing an inaccurate conclusion from the presented data. In my opinion, the suggested resurgence of high-culture activities is merely an unconscious popular uprising against the inevitable dilution and subsequent "dumbing down" of the human experience. That media and technology are providing ever greater distraction to the masses, by providing ever smaller bites to be processed by ever smaller attention-spans, is simply a function of supply and demand. Humans are demanding simpler information, because taken as a whole, humanities' processing ability is eroding. I believe the Darwin was right. And Mendel.

And, sadly, Robert Malthus as well.

To have children is a natural, instinctual drive that must either be satisfied, or else its disappointment must be heavily rationalized, often at great cost to the individual. To NOT have children is the path of greater resistance - a challenge more often subdued by those of greater intellect.

Therefor, as the world's population surges, its average intelligence must wane, and with it, the very ability to foster, recognize, empathize with, and ultimately to embrace creative genius...which I feel to be the foundation of higher culture（.
把文化的衰落归结为人口质量的下降）

Respectfully,
Kirk A. Ryan CLS-NCA

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Carlo wrote:

Dear Madam,

Depending on which side one takes on the proposition, the "information age" is either a cultural nirvana or an oxymoron.

In my view the modern world is wising up culturally. The access to education around the world is significantly better than it ever has been in the history of humankind. It is providing an ever-inceasing percentage of the world's population with the tools to not only understand and participate in the enjoyment of human culture, but more importantly it is providing so many more people with the opportunity to contribute to the cultural "store".（人多力量大）

One can now create music, literature and art in ever more imaginative ways and be able to deliver that creation to the world. Not all that is created will be the work of the quality of Dante, Mozart or Michelangelo, however, it will contribute to what it means to be human and provide us with the opportunity to appreciate it.

The information age has brought the museum,the library, the gallery and (more importantly) the participants and audience to my home. None of this has created an "appetite". The mere membership of the human race provides us with that appetite. What this has done is provided us with a means of satiating that appetite in a manner that best suits us, rather than in a manner that others believe should suit us.

If it is this act of cultural self-determination that is defined as dumbing down then I respectfully disagree. Individuals will all participate differently in the human experience and they should be as free as possible to choose those elements that are most relevant to them: whether they be passive consumers or creative contributors（用human nature.来分析，观点收了）

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kultcha wrote:

Dear Madam,

How rather than whether lies at the centre. Why risk purchasing a tome when there is so much competing for your eyeballs at home... for free?

Sure I've been known to buy an author's book or video from a store after they've peaked my interest. Usually distracted online, interacting. I've even subscribed to an RSS feed from a blog.

Opera, Classic FM, cinema or youtube? Access in my opinion is improving (unless you live on that farm in Africa); stuffiness in retreat (unless someone is censoring your internet content).

Just don't forget your crap detectors, no matter where your culture comes from. It's all part of 'wising up'.

（这应该是大众的大众的代表，很实际，不看书为了省钱）

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Micael CD wrote:

Dear Madam, I feel that the time frame of culture in modern english language can be said to have around five hundred years. Five hundred years is a terribly small amount of time. Recent changes include not only mass culture but also the increase the population of the world from around 2,5 billion to 6 billion in 500 years, and from 310 million in 1000ACE. The rise of the television and entertainment media is criticized for constituting a "dumbing down" but even Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has sexual innuendo that only some catch. In a way it is like a type of "The Simpsons". It must also be stressed that there was a great difference between the educational level of the masses and that of the intellectual elite five hundred years ago, today it is only more noticeable and accentuated as more technology and culture are available.

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这篇是陈述弃权理由的，就那也挺resonable

Federal Farmer wrote:

Dear Madam,

I am staggered by the breadth of the proposition. How in the world can we get our minds around the idea of culture in such a way as to be able to gauge whether the world, let alone a nation or even smaller locality, is wising up or dumbing down? Susan Jacoby, Tim de Lisle, and you, our moderator, valiantly attempt to gain some perch on the subject by raising myriad disparate factors.

Is it museum attendance? Is it reading good books? Is it education? Is it public policy pertaining to education? Is it how you vote and who you voted for, as one comment from the floor seems to imply? Is it a narrative of some sort or just any sort?

And once all these points have been raised, how in the world, and who in the world, is going to judge its quality? A refined post-modern of the west? An old-school high Church Tory? A professionally trained bureaucrat from the Board of Education? A learned Imam? A Buddhist monk? A devout Sikh follower of the ten Gurus? All are deeply imbedded in some cultural narrative, but who is to judge the quality of global culture? Would any of them want someone learned of another culture to evaluate his/her own narrative?

As some have noted, great accomplishments were had in ancient times, but these were usually the result of select and limited patronage. Elite achievements and accomplishments are still with us, but the masses of the not-so-distant past typically found their culture from the circumstances of their birth and condition. Literacy may well have been high in certain parts of the world, such as in colonial New England, but such was very often severely limited to sacred texts. Such literacy might eventually break out to embrace more, but to proclaim "wising up" or "dumbing down" of the world would require us to ask, of whom and where?

On this one, at this time, I must decline a vote either way

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Kate wrote:

Dear Madam,

The proposition does indeed say the world. No matter how disappointing the dumbing down of mainstream educated people in anglo-saxon cultures may be, there is a clear and huge rise in both appetite and acquisition of knowledge (and culture) around the world as access to information, education and opportunity has exploded through, for example, globalisation and the internet revolution.

What would be interesting to hear more about from both debaters would be how they define 'culture' and what comprises 'wising up（这个观点感觉很好，从定义上来讲）'. If we take an evolutionary view, we have certainly wised up since our days in the caves, and since one might argue that at its core human nature is relatively consistent, would it not follow that we continue - as a world wide population - to wise up (despite what stupid things we do!)

Finally, I would very much like to hear about the phenomenon of momentum in our wising up/dumbing down. If we as individuals are wising up, why is it we cannot effect real change on significant global issues - like the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the reign of terror of Robert Mugabe - perhaps we are wising up at an individual level, but are we dumbing down in our collective action? Are the whims - or unilateral decisions - of a few overriding the collective intelligence or desires of many? Are we wising up at this collective level?

Thank you.

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UncleRo wrote:

Dear Madam,when one speaks of mass intelligence one must focus on which areas of intelligence you are addressing. Specifically when it comes to basic intelligence, political intelligence, current events, history, analitical thinking, etc the intelligence of the masses varies dramatically.（定义问题）
As America has increasingly shifted towards socialism and liberalism our overall standard of intelligence has dropped dramatically. Increases in attendance at cultural events events has more of a feel good effect on the uneducated than it does on their abilities to cope, understan, or contribute to the world in a meraningful way. The fact that fewere and fewer people read books, news, orcurrent events leaves the masses in two major categories: those who know and those who don't know, and for those who don't know their perceptions becomes their realities and the unscrupelous take advantage of them by planting false preceptions to form the unwitting's realities. This most recent national election in America is certain proof of that.

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J.Sparrow wrote:

Dear Madam,

The main problem of this debate is that the issue has been formulated very ambiguously. It is really difficult (if not impossible) to 'measure' how far the modern society has dumbed down or got wiser in comparison to that fifty or one hundred years ago. This fact is aggravated by the fundamental changes that occured in modern cultural dimension: globalization trend and emergence of World Wide Web, to name just a few. Thus, I would like to make a hypothesis that cultural background is not going to become 'better' or 'worse', it will be different.

We should also take into account the economic prerequisites for cultural shifts. The evident peaks in the cultural development of human civilization were caused partially by substantial decrease in working hours of an average individual. The thriving cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome were supported by free labour of slaves. The Renaissance emerged when rich merchants were willing to pay for them. The Industrial Revolution not only encouraged significant breakthrough in science and technology but also provided ordinary people with more time to enjoy and create pieces of art and literature. It seems to me that our Digital Age can become the next stage of cultural development as more and more people around the world will gain free access to worldwide pool of information. In fact, the availability of media content (including copies of impressionism paintings or recordings of Mozart) may encourage many people to learn classic arts. They might not have to go to a museum or opera house any more, but will bring them to their homes instead. （这段分析物质发展对文化的正面影响，虽然观点不很新但感觉不错，很完整很全面）

Many business analysts claim that developed economies are going to rely on new ideas in creating goods and services. However, the development of those ideas is impossible without learning the basics of an area the person works in: be it architecture or advertising.（这段对论证作者的观点好像没太大作用，但idea不错----没有基础就没有创新，收了）

And last but not least, modern world gives many people in developed countries an excellent opportunity to discover other cultures with the means of travel or distant communication. This might create a new phenomenon of 'fringe subcultures', where two a more national cultures produce fresh works in literature or music.（还是说发展带来的好处：方便文化交流，额，不过还是和本论题没太大关系，anyway，目前为止这篇算是比较完整的论述了）

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yrguard wrote:

Dear Madam, I believe there is both an absolute increase in wising up and dumbing down although relatively speaking general critical thinking has decreased vis-a-vis pure appetite or emotional gut appeal of the masses.

The result of the election for President of the United States is an obvious example of the uncritical tendency of the democratic masses and the conduct of the mass media, at least in the United States（美国大选作为例子可用的地方）

Perhaps the increased availability of higher level education will improve the wising up process although the impact of higher education professors who are generally dumbed down ideologues unable to apply critical thinking are a negative force against the wising up of the people. Nonetheless, even during the dark ages there were always brilliant minds preserving human culture and wisdom, surging anew in a reactionary cyclical manner. So I am optimistic that this relative dumbing down of the masses is just a temporary phenomenon.

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bloodypenname wrote:

Dear Madam,

It is incredible that someone UncleRo is able to state,
"As America has increasingly shifted towards socialism and liberalism our overall standard of intelligence has dropped dramatically".!!!!

That alone is a good indicator of the quality of this debate!

（老米要内讧了~~笑~~）

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Fordham University Freshman wrote:

Dear Madam,
I would like to point out that this debate is itself being posted and read on the internet; therefore, while the aggregate quality of information on the internet may be questioned, the internet obviously contains certian individual sources of high quality, "non-garbage" infomation. （网络有利有弊）

I do agee that the amount of people reading classics and other books of literary merit is on the decline, but I do not belive that has anything to do with the decline of peoples reading tangible books. I would not care whether children read knowledgeable things within computer "e-books," websites, or tangible books; I only care that they read those knowledgeble things.（只要是knowledgable，不必拘于形式）

It should be pointed out that the aggregate quality of information contined in all tangible books may actually be fairly comparable to that of the poor aggregate quality of internet sources--the Harry Potter novels, for instance, which are not of particularly high literary merit. It should not be debated whether more people are reading the Economist on-line or in print, but whether more people are reading the Economist to begin with（这个观点不错，但不切题啊）.

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Random Scientist wrote:

Dear Madam,

Opposition seems partially to cling to the outdated vision of culture.

Many thoughts of classic writers became so publicised and common that they are not considered any original or revealing thought at all. They are basics of modern knowledge, which children encounter in pre-school time. Youth don't read classics because they absorbed it all before.

Intellectual discussion and writing migrated to the internet. Intellectual websites, blogs, galleries and forums are just as high-quality places to exchange thoughts as 19. century galleries and cafes. I don't understand why somebody can still believe that internet is something second-class. If anything, the best internet forums and blogs are better than paper books or magazines.（依然是网络的利弊问题）

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E.P.F. Gregory wrote:

Dear Madam,

It depends on what is meant by "the world". With polarization between rich and poor in most parts of the world growing sharper all the time, the majority of the world's population faces an everyday struggle to make ends meet. Neither they nor those who have to make do my the meager pittances many of the so called "welfare states" allow them have much opportunity to take part in most forms of cultural life. So an ever wealthier minority is wising up by enjoying many forms of high culture, while the majority feeds on the crumbs of cheap mass entertainment（首次看到定义world，感觉不错，有启发，但the poor也不一定就duming down了，the rich也不一定wising up，这个可以在分析深挖，留用）.

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Doug Pascover wrote:

Dear Madam,

The trouble with the opposition's case is that she is right about culture being a process rather than a product. If she is correct, the wisdom of culture depends less on the object of the appetite than the digestion. For example, the fact that someone can be found to claim that zero narrative may be the right amount does not mean that we live in a culture of zero narrative. I'm sure I can find a contemporary to state the opposite on Wikipedia.

（不太懂）

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Lost Artist wrote:

Dear Mada

A bell curve（钟型曲线） will always be a bell curve. The highest point on the X axis（x轴） is moving further to the left, meaning our capacity for knowledge continues to increase and that the smartest people are continually getting smarter（传说中的正态分布？？不过后面作者都以这个钟型曲线分析，挺生动的，学习）. But I don't think that this means that the the world as a whole or even just the Anglo/Western world is wising up. We must also note that due to expanding populations, that bell curve is expanding not only left & right but also up & down. What it comes down to is our definition of what constitutes intelligence. Is intelligence static, meaning that as long as the bell curve continues to shift left, everyone is becoming more intelligent? Or is intelligence dynamic, meaning that people of average intelligence get smarter, technically speaking, but are still only of average intelligence when compared to the group as a whole? I think that intelligence should be seen as the latter, as something that exists relationally.
Essentially though, this supports Mr. de Lisle, in that the human race, regardless of region, does gets smarter over time. However, I find it interesting that we are gauging intelligence by the popularity of high culture. The high culture discussed here is relatively static on the bell curve, in that the classical music, literature and art we speak of here are not recent innovations. This would explain why average intelligence is catching up to it. If high culture and intelligence are both dynamic, the high culture will only get higher, as intelligence also increases. In kind, the average intelligence of the population and popular culture will also increase, but they will still only be average.（有个观点可用，就是intelligence不应以high culture为标准）

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SmileyMan wrote:

Dear Madam,
Culture defines intelligence? Define culture! "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." "One man's trash is another man's treasure." Is a school teacher with a passion for classic literature more intelligent than the neurosurgeon who prefers to spend his leisure time engrossed in exotic cars?（这个例子很生活很有力） How can the internet, the most powerful distributor of information ever, be anything but a contributor to intelligence? With the literacy rate in the US going from barely 35% in 1900 to well over 60% or higher today, how are we not getting more intelligent? I do not see how the level of interest or activity around classical culture, whether it be art, literature or music can define our intelligence!
What I do believe is that the evolution of information and how we manage it, individually and collectively, is accelerating. This is a great challenge for mankind, and it will not be a smooth ride. The internet is certainly littered with garbage, but so have bookshelves for the last 200 years.
Literacy is foundational. Without literacy intelligence(and man) is likely headed towards extinction.
Collaborating on best practices of how to live while embracing differences and individuality will be one way we can truly show how intelligent our species is. How we are able to manage the limited resources of our shrinking globe in the face of rising populations while also increasing the standard of living AND helping every citizen of the planet reach their fullest potential may be the greatest measure of all for our intelligence. Great culture and science will be meaningless if we don't continue to shape our global society to be more efficient, peaceful and just.（对intelligence更深层的解释，感觉很好）
I have seen the Mona Lisa - the painter was clearly a very talented fellow. I have read Shakespeare and found it incredibly irrelevant and almost impossible to read. The Bible has inspired me with great wisdom while leaving me confused and even disenchanted with anything deistic. I adore Mozart and Nickel Creek (a contemporary blue grass band). I hate most popular US culture yet have become quite fond of American Idol, even as I loath the notion of any pop star being idolized for ANY reason. But my intelligence seems to be most apparent in how I APPLY what I know to create positive outcomes in the people and world around me.（这种一直以I开头的结构让人感觉很真实，很有力，其实自己有时是最好的例子） This is the GENIUS of our human existence - that we are so profoundly able to harness the information we access and apply it productively, whether through science, culture or the myriad of other ways we can make the world a better place to live. All the culture in the world won't make me more intelligent if I experience it but do nothing with it.（这段联系自身对Intellegence的定义进行阐述，很有说服力）

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R. L. Marshall wrote:

Dear Madam,

Reading is a skill that should never be lost, lest we become uneducated. Going to musuems, listening to classical music, and attending literary festivals are all good for wising up, but so is reading. We should all being doing all of this, especially in Western Societies where it is readily accessible. The thought of people being proud of never reading a book is very scary to me and a move towards dumbing down. Replacing reading with musuems, music, and festivals is purely a lazy way out, and I fear is becoming more prevalent.

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Santa Barbara wrote:

Dear Madam,

Using attendance at cultural events as a gauge of upward intellectual mobility is a poor measure. Access to and interest in certain cultural events is likely as not related to socio-economics, and that while related to education is not synonymous. There are far many more ways to gauge humankind's cognitive improvement.

Our current modes of accessing information are certainly changing. Who can say that exposure to more varied ideas, even if presented more as sound bites than complete thoughts, won't in itself lift us all up in a way that cannot yet be seen.（句式观点都不错）

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米饭袜子UID：2532172

DayTime wrote:

Dear Madam, Oxford's Concise definition of wise in this context is "having or showing experience, knowledge, and good judgement;"（观点同LSSS） only an "appetite" for culture that achieves these noble aims can be deemed of any true value. Nevertheless, if the pursuit of the higher arts does nothing more than keep a culture's idle mind from creating chaos, temporal value should not be discounted. Without concrete data on the increasing numbers seeking higher education in the developed world it is hard to be dogmatic about whether society's diminishing attention span has any validity; however, it would seem that if Amazon.com is an anecdote of the USA's passion for books, then there does seem to be a hard core culture of committed collectors of knowledge. My guess is that, similar to America's divorce statistics, it is the same people repeating the same behavior over and over again. Those in passionate about creating value out of every cerebral neuron will continue to do so, while those who never showed interest will at best obtain all of their "facts" from Wikipedia, never venturing beyond the surface, not even to verify their minimal effort with even one other source. A good analogy in America is the dedicated population of home athletes, committed to intense physical fitness and good health, compared to the other 80% who will never develop such good habits. So in answer to the question from a cultural viewpoint in the USA, the hard core will remain hard but very much a minority, while the rest will continue to slide through their world with as little effort and depth as possible. This brings us back to the definition of "wise," so that those of us with a voracious appetite for culture may ask of ourselves "are we using what we learn through books, arts, and experiences to live in a more creative, meaningful, and mature society with good judgement? or is it only a vain pursuit to use as wrapping paper over an empty box? And how does society decide upon and hold on to its values?

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R. S. Harrison wrote:

Dear Madam,
As a secondary concern, there is a great deal of knowledge in regularly published journals and periodicals that are bought and collected by Universities. Here in Austin, the University of Texas has an impressive database of journals that would enrich the lives of many independent scholars. However, only students or professors are allowed access to this database. The only way to attend the school is by being in the top 10% of your high school class, which has unfortunately eliminated many worthy transfer students or even students who excelled in particular subjects. The University claims to have avenues for non-students to obtain access, but these permissions are always denied unless the mayor or governor puts pressure on the University to allow access. My point here is that there is a great deal of enriching cultural, literary, historical data that is still unavailable on the internet or in public libraries. So our institutions of education are trying to enrich the lucky few who are admitted, but regularly deny access to resources when it would be at no extra cost to the school（关于教育不公平的观点留用）. This makes sense as a privilege of attendance, but why should we wonder if the intellectual average is starved? Of course, the schools have to safeguard the price of their education. Their claim is that education cannot be free. We accept this, in America, as a matter of course. But when the economy tanks, how can we expect grades not to suffer? Are we perhaps blaming young men and women for not having enough money to access the cutting edge of knowledge? There is much that can be done on one's own, as I have earlier demonstrated, but the question of whether we are wising up or not must be weighed against what kind of resources we have provided people to make themselves wiser.

One might well wonder if globalization and multiculturalism are returning us to a reexamination of the fundamental principles of knowledge and wisdom discussed in ancient Athens so long ago. Perhaps that is what we are doing now. And by doing so, will we gain some insight into how to better utilize our modern mediums?

One more concern: globalization will blend many cultures together. Many elements will feel lost, and we will properly feel nostalgia for them. However, the blending will likely do more good than harm. Look at the cultures currently crashing together in the Middle East. If they become one culture, instead of two opposed ones, will their will to war be bolstered or diminished? Russia, China, Japan - these are all countries that have been westernizing for centuries. Have they lost valuable cultural elements? Surely. Do we coexist better, on the whole, for the change? Most of us think so. But we certainly have not learned to deal with the transition. The vital force created by the clash of conservatives and liberals would be absent if we were good at the transition from more cultures to fewer. Liberals often run the danger of thinking we do not need some elements of culture that we still in fact need. Conservatives run the danger of clinging to elements that we have clearly outgrown. This is why our political system is set up the way it is. To process and control precisely the concern of this debate..........

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p-h.m wrote:

Dear Madam,

Past culture cannot be assessed but through the distortion of selective preservation. Only items and artefacts of some value to the custodians are retained for future generations, who in turn select according to their own values. Imagine if all the artefacts ever devised by humanity were suddenly restored, what proportion would be considered to be of value? Would it be the same fraction that has survived the sometimes arbitrary pruning and selection that had been meted out on the total product of humanity? The difference today compared to any historical period is that a vast proportion of artefacts produced today are easily made visible to a very large mob of contemporary people, and we judge it subjectively, and possibly correctly, to be mostly worthless. I believe that the proportion of junk produced is the same as it ever was throughout all history. Only the old stuff has had some form of critical razor to repeatedly cut through it all.

The pervasive dissemination of popular culture today is even more volatile than it ever was. There is scarce physical representation of cultural product that does not require power to make it tangible to human observers. Pull the plug, and music, theatre, and many other forms of performance will vanish. After half a century has elapsed there exists magnetic computer tapes that cannot be examined, there exists no working machinery to read them, the tapes themselves are degraded, the knowledge is lost forever. Much of what we produce has no staying power, because it requires a constant supply of power and maintenance for them to remain in existence. A hundred years from now, we might look back at the 21st century and consider it the New Dark Age, were culture ceased to exist at all. Does that mean that it would also be the Dumbed Down Age too?（这个观点挺新的，对dumb down的又一种理解）

The virtualisation of media has also given us all huge creative tools. Unbounded from physical shackles, creativity and expression are only limited by what a person can imagine and describe. It is a much smaller leap from the seed of an idea to the realisation of potential, now that tools and information are widely and easily accessible. This ease of abstract creation cuts in all directions, things of profound beauty that elevate the mind and spirit are to be found a click away from the grotesque and shockingly tasteless, even things that rub our noses in the faeces of our base subconscious urges, the side of humanity we deprecate and wish to not even to be aware of（这段写得好深刻，感觉很不错，再多多体会）

Maybe we are pervasively dumb, and neither swelled up nor diminished in our mass intelligence or stupidity for millennia. But now we cannot avoid but be confronted with the broad spectrum of human creativity, from the sublime to the revolting, and realise that all of this is what we are.

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Spatula wrote:

Dear Madam,

Never have so many had access to so much data so easily. My children can get information on any subject in seconds, without having to travel to get it. Unfortunately, due to increasing global competition, we have increasingly less time to spend understanding things (even if we are willing). The net effect is that the world is settling on a common denominator. The world is wising up, but at a continuously slower rate. At some point the biological hardware we inherited will max out and then the cyborgs will take over, permanently dumbing down the rest of us.

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buck farmer wrote:

Dear Madam,

"Culture" as implicitly defined here serves as a poor proxy for the tremendous expansion both of human knowledge and human intelligence in the past century. Instead of selecting a few holy relics in opera houses, museums, and at literary festivals to stand-in for intelligence and knowledge, do the hard work of selecting more objective and impartially measurable criteria.

When we recognize the complexity and intricacy of modern culture, we will see that the terms of this debate are laughably petty and irrelevant. Madam, I am disappointed that the debaters could not select more meaningful proxies for the "wising up" or "dumbing down" of society. Analysis from these poor proxies would never past muster in any reputable journal.

The advance of human knowledge and intelligence can be seen in one our most mainstream forms of culture--television. Examine the number and complexity of simultaneous plotlines in a television show from the 1950s then compare it to an episode of HBO's "The Sopranos." Now compare it to any play by the Bard. The television of today demands far better memory, mental agility, and dare-I-say narrative understanding than most of the works performed in Elizabethan England. Some might point to the dross of poorly thought out reality television shows that currently fills much of the airwaves, but if we are to compare apples to apples, then the best of yesterday's cultural production should be compared to the best of today's not the median（有道理，应该平行比较）. Further, "The Sopranos" or any number of similarly excellent, deep, and complex modern shows has a far wider viewership cutting across socio-economic barriers than the finest work of French Grand Opera as well as arguably more meaningful plots and characters.

Now regarding the decline of reading: I read a great many books as a child and still read books while on the subway to-and-from work; however, as a worker in a developed Western country all of my time and mental resources are demanded for the continued increase of productivity(大部分workers in developed Western country的代表，素材). During my few leisure hours I socialize with friends which often involves engaged and earnest explorations of intellectual issues both current and ancient. Modern times demands that we be smarter. Greater returns are paid to the ability to synthesize information and to create new knowledge than to the pure memorization and acquisition of it.

We do not "hoover" information from the internet. A vacuum is indiscriminate both in its intake and its storage. We modern browsers are far more selective and thoughtful. There are excellent sites run by individuals devoted to the task of debunking myths, hoaxes, and other falsehoods on the interwebs. As a test, I suggest you insert a patent falsehood into a high-traffic Wikipedia page and see how long it takes to be rectified. Compare this time to the duration which published falsehoods can persist.

I hope that as the debate continues both the defenders and opponents of the proposition abandon the implicit definition of culture and intelligence they have chosen and instead choose one that is worthy of an intelligent debate. I take their failure to do so as evidence that we're all being "dumbed down."

（看到这儿发现
很多人都说过这个intelligence和culture的定义问题，不过这篇好像只是开头结尾提了这个问题，然后body部分都是在反驳发言人。。。不过中间一些观点还是可留用
的）

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mulgajim wrote:

Dear Madam,
Although I voted 'no'I feel that both are true. We are all dumbing down in terms of engaging in cultural activities, but moving up in the realm of receiving culture（case by case了，不过说得很浅）. When I was small we had mi-usical evening. Dad played the score and we all sang Gilbert & Sullivan or traditional songs.We wouod go on for hours like this. Now we sit and watch all kinds of wonderful professional concerts from any country.

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irenaeus77 wrote:

Dear Madam,
In my understanding the word culture refers to a kind of formative power, whether for good or evil. It is the ability to influence and guide the society, to implant a central motive which defines the populace（这个对culture的定义挺好的）. As such, culture is not a "commodity", it is the creative powers of the individual and the group, and the reflective response to those offerings. With the democratization of the means of production, more books, more "publishing" is happening than ever before. This is itself formative. although it does not always produce the best work.

The current climate is one of information overflow, but with that comes the dispositional sifting of information, according to the needs and desires of the human heart. The bad will seek out the bad, but the good now have more available to them than ever before. This can only be for the best.

Besides, people read without tooting their horns about it. The great novels are still devoured, even if there is no data on it.

I will stop there. Cheers.

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ssylve1445 wrote:

Dear Madam, the basic irony of the debate is that you can use Facebook to invite others to parttake. I believe that the evolution of Myspace, facebook etc has accelerated the attack on culture. Everything now passes for （被误认为是）being cultured and any objection is viewed as being culturally insensitive and inappropriate. One can only image what will pass as cultured when the 20somethings are 70somethings.

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Aaron wrote:

Dear Madam,

Whilst i agree with de Lisle's comments on the plurality and democratic nature of culture today - the receding stuffiness for presumably a more open, welcoming culture - i cannot help but side with Jacoby and her distrust of a 'garbage in, garbage out' culture where individuals occupy a state of nervous distraction.

I agree that reading, outside of what one's life requires, is becoming a privilege for those 'elite' and even then, of those many who do read, might we question the quality of what is being read! It is not good enough to say: as long as people are reading, we need not worry.

I feel we're living in a culture which bridles at（轻视，瞧不起） any suggestion of inherent value in certain things, preferring to assume value can be equally spread or taken from numerous sources with no question of quality.

Any appetite for information is simply the effect of faster internet services which insist that we have a right to any information in the quickest possible time（有点片面，不过是一个方面，留用）.

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sonaflex wrote:

Dear Madam,

I would like to strongly argue that appetite for culture has nothing to do with mass intelligence as well as an individual intelligence. Anyone who is greedy for better nutrition do not get stronger without any proper workout（这个比喻很形象，很切合作者观点，其实由此可以得到启示：举例子真的不一定是名人名事啥的，就是这种很普通的比方有时候就很有说服力）. Likewise, one cannot augment his or her intelligence without proper and exerting mental or intellectual workout. （呃。。。。。这个对Intelligence的理解有点狭隘）
In summary, cultural appetite is a passive one while stronger intelligence requires us to participate in more active training. Of course the appetite itself could a trigger for a active intellectual workout, but that's just a necessary condition.嗯，curture只是反应Intelligence的一个方面

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Moshe Ben Avraham wrote:

Dear Madam,
I fundamental disagree with both positions, but yours moreso. Culture is neither product nor process but purpose. It fascinates me that innovative work of anthropologist and sociologist Dr. Paul Ray and his groundbreaking work in documenting the cultural creatives and the wisdom culture. In this Anglo-African-Asian-Latin expanding West, not the pornography of Lady Chatterly's Lover or the Russian philosophy that states, "chips will fly if we chop wood". In the face of the our uniquely American, western intelligence that a flawed criminal justice system that allowed 9 guilty men to go free to avoid punishing one innocent bespeaks the greater good, or better angels of our nature, our intellect at work. Former United States Secretary of Education William J. Bennett had it at least half right. Education does not live in the crusted pages of books of knowledge or a museums musty halls. Education. True intelligence is not verse and verve. It is Values and Virtues. On African farms, Oklahoma fields and Middle Eastern Deserts. Indeed, human beings appetite for culture, culture being defined as purpose continues to provoke, promote and promulgate the cultural creatives and the wisdom culture. President-Elect Barack Obama, case-in-point.

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Lucifer Box wrote:

Dear Madam,

I do believe that the world as a whole is "eating up" more culture these days than ever in the past. More people at musuems, galleries et similia. If then this results in a wiser world, I don't know. Wising up is not an immediate consequence of a higher exposure to culture. The link among the two things is undeniable, but it's not necessarily always true.
At the same time, reading less books/papers does not mean dumbing down. Digital information, when exposed with accuracy and intelligence, can be more satisfying and comprehensive than its paper counterpart. Think about a 5,000 word article and a 8 minute video（这点儿让我想起那个影像vs文字的一休） which, other than reporting the facts exposed in the article, also makes use of graphs, charts and maps... Being able to create well structured digital information is actually a step ahead to crete standard information, as it implies the use of new approaches to satisfy new needs...this is wising up to me!

As of now, the case for a dumbing down world does not convince me. I look forward to reading additional opinions supporting it.

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Mensoelrey wrote:

Dear Madam,

I do not see how we can reach an agreement on this issue, or even vote, when everyone has a different view of culture, wisdom, intelligence and even media.（这个总结得好，把上面所有都概括了。。。。。）

If you take the bus, you are likely to think people are dumber and less considerate than ever. The bus is full of people patting themselves on the back because they are listening to classical music--their cellphone ringtone.

And yet, how many more people are reading the encyclopedia because it is more easily accessible? How many more people are reading more newspapers, rather than just one? More cultured people can do more cultural things, and there may be some kind of trickle down to those whose grandparents never read anything other than the bible.

My problem is that almost no one has much of an understanding of culture. It has little to do with how often we go to museums (de Lisle's argument) or how much of a book we read (Jacoby's), and should not be measured thus. It is more about the assumptions and beliefs of a group that make it different from other groups. And as anthropologist Wade Davis says, “The measure of a society is not only what it does but also the quality of its aspirations.”（思路很清晰，观点也挺好）
Judging a culture's progress toward wise or dumb is futile. Instead, encourage access to all media and let people make intelligent choices.

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anju chandel wrote

Dear Madam, if we see 'more' people at literary festivals etc., it is simply because of the increase in population. The actual percentage of people really interested in 'cultural' issues etc. are decreasing gradually as can be seen in blase attitude of the younger generation in everything which is not 'materialistic'. Yes, the interest in things like cell phones, i-pods etc. is sure on the rise inspite of the economic meltdown! ... In short, the world is actually dumbing down.

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koouts wrote:

Dear Madam,I would like to express you my agreement in the part of the less read books.But in comparison of the decates or centuries,it is more than obvious that people of all over the world are getting much more educated,with more knowledges,better allocation of their existence,and perhaps more clever than their .The quality is another issue but after all the most important here is the today's opportunity for everyone to read a book or a site or a video to watch,and not the actually reading!（确实）

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Vigorniensis wrote:

Dear Madam,
My memory goes back to life in a working class environment in the period 1937 onwards. I have absolutely no feeling that my contemporaries in those days were more cultured than their descendants are today. It might be possible to confirm this by examining the popular BBC programmes of the nineteen forties. My impression remains that culture, for us in those days, was defined by the ability to answer certain frequently repeated quiz questions about history, literature and music and that hardly anyone actually read the collected volumes which stood in some of their bookcases.
M C Powell

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joski65 wrote:

Dear Madam,
Wising up or dumbing down could be less of a cultural issue and more of a personal one. Any individual who believes he/she is better (more knowledgeable, better informed…) than other people, believes he/she knows it all and is rigid about his/her view will begin to see every interaction as 'dumbing down'.
Similarly, an individual who believes there are lots yet to learn, will find every individual, every art form, and every interaction informative and enriching.
Interestingly in India at many of our local heritage sites, my own countrymen scribble graffiti and destroy priceless art forms, while foreign tourists from all across the world marvel at them and open our eyes to all the wonder we were lucky to inherit but unable to appreciate.（这个现象不只在印度，这是个可以深挖思考的地方）

米饭袜子UID：2532172

Sirajul Islam wrote:

Dear Madam,I beg to differ that the world is wising up. Yes, many people are visiting museums, joining cultural festivals, listening to classical music etc, but they're a few in comparison to total population. The same group of people are reading books, newspapers, or using Internet for education or research or for other positive purposes. While a bulk of the world populace can't afford such kind of behaviour, majority of the 'educated' never practice such things, I can tell you from what we're experiencing. Actually, I don't have any data at hand, so I can't be precise. But I see more people are going to clubs, even the sex gyms than to the museums, or libraries. More people are getting addict to nonsense TV programmes or soaps than to watch educational enrichment programmes, or watching documentaries or news stories. Internet? Just forget. An overwhelming majority of Internet users are addict to chat nonsense or watching just porns. I don't think, we're advancing. Just like the obesity, we're dumbing down ever more than before!（前面的大部分感觉都很一休，这篇很浓重的阿狗啊。。。。驳得好~句式也不花但很有力）

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Melanie Avita wrote:

Dear Madam,
First off, thank you for opening up such a debate. The mere fact that we are considering our societies collective intelligence demonstrates our capacity for wising up.

Now, I voted that I agree, but I do feel that the issue is more nuanced than a yes or no vote can determine. Although I can't resist delighting in how our cultural and literary consumption is used as a measuring stick, I feel that what begs for closer examination is how those aspects of human expression affects the newer forms of cultural expression. I'm talking about TV, film, internet and (gasp) video games. When discussing culture, these forms are often left out because they are seen to lack the sophistication of what we know as High Art or Fine Art and in their infancy（初期） they certainly did. However, today these forms have increased in sophistication（观点很好，但只举了个TV的例子，其实想看看其他几个的例子，回来想想）. Television has a history of "dumbed down" content and I'm not saying that such programming does not exist. Unintelligent content always has and always will exist. However it can't be denied that there is an increase in popularity of programs that involve a higher level of mental commitment than in the past. It could even be argued that some reality television is just a form of voyeurism are actually teaching people how to better relate to each other by demonstrating the effects of bad behavior, like a mirror on society.
Of course, this increase in new media's sophistication can be seen as a result of our societies cultural education. Consider the Lord of the Rings and the feasibility of that film being created 10 years earlier. Would they have had the movie going audience for this kind of literature? Enough to break even on such an expensive endeavor?
Another thing that I need to point out is that, in your selection of debaters, you chose Tim who is based in the UK and Susan who is based in the US.（这个观点首次看到，不错） To me, it is natural that they would reach the conclusions that they have. But I acknowledge both points of view as valid. Perhaps it is based on my experience of growing up as a cultural outsider in the Southern United States and having been educated in London. Susan is not wrong in her assertions, but this is only the case in segments of American society, a clear result of our under funded arts. The UK, however, is an entirely different argument.

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openeyed wrote:

Dear Madam Moderator,

I think it may be appropriate to set these discussions within a common frame of understanding of words like global culture, wising up and wise（定义太太太太太重要了）
Global culture may be defined as the appreciation and understanding of arts, literature and music of multi-regions and peoples.
Wise – having or showing soundness of judgement
Wising up – informing or becoming aware, a step or two prior to wisdom.

It seems to me that both the Proposition and the Opposition have one thing in common in that they both view that the knowledge of the arts, literature and music is the end goal of culture. Where they differ is in the medium of transmission used and their corresponding labels, be it mass or elitist.

Hence if the end goal of culture is only to increase people’s awareness then I would agree that culture is being wised up.

However I believe the purpose of culture ranges from an uplifting from the mundane through resonating with the beauty within the individual and society towards making us more cultured. This would imply tolerance, understanding, soundness of judgement and bringing out the good and decent within us, living in harmony with our fellow-beings and environment（观点留用）.

I have voted dumbing down not because of the arguments put forth by the Opposition, but because when I look around me I find that while we are wised up through all the data, the horror and perpetuation of wars and crimes against humanity and nature confirms that we are not culturally wiser on the contrary only culturally dumber.

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graham wrote:

Dear Madam,

Due to recent advances in technology an increasing proportion of the world’s population have access to information and learning than ever before. An ever larger proportion also has access to the means of contributing to the sum total of culture. In that case the world is certainly wising up.

What bothers me, and I suspect others, is the quality of the output of this increased access. I think this is the premise of the current debate. The most accessible products of modern culture are often banal and/or pornographic. Reality TV might provide insight, but little wisdom. Pornography is rife. Islamic education, with access increasing rapidly but lacking enlightenment, seems to abhor debate. Propaganda proliferates. Lack of discipline, or a lack of the desire or need to concentrate, leads punters to consume pre-packaged “culture” without an ability to criticise or balance ideas. We see huge movements of little worth based on false premises. Our cultural output is usually shallow, often ugly and worthless or worse. However, at the same time our scientists and thinkers lead us towards an understanding of the very basis of thought and ideas. Not just ideas, but the very nature of how ideas are formed and used. It’s impossible to measure the worth of modern advances in our culture, but it must stand alongside the advances and insights of earlier ages.

As I walk around the streets of Edinburgh, visit galleries, watch films, consume books and internet accessed news and views, and join in global internet debates, I marvel at how the enlightenment provided us with the tools to tackle almost everything rationally and I also worry that we, as a group, are not using those tools, but are discarding them in favour of giving PC (politically correct) driven credence to crap thinking and ill-thought out ideas. That suggests a dumbing down.

However, some address this dumbing down issue and others read and listen to and watch their work. Maybe the world is a lot brighter and more cultured than I, and I suspect others, give it credit for. Either way we’ll live with the output and history will record a vast blooming of culture, diversity, and thinking, much of it crap, in our time.

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tony.fike wrote:

Dear Madam,

The availability of information via the internet, libraries and bookstores as well as how crowded they all appear indicates a great thirst for information. One of my favorite haunts is bookstores; old and new, google, yahoo and the answer bar from gnu software. Interesting that the web now allows us to assess the accuracy and validity of books and quotes within books in almost real time and even real time if you are reading an eBook. The opportunity to wise up has always been there, but it is even easier now to acquire a fair and balanced view by using the internet. When an iPhone application allows us to capture two or three bars of a piece of music and determine the composer or performer our ability to wise up and become more knowledgebale about many things. Wireless phones offer the greatest potential for sharing knowledge, money and in general leveling the information playing fields. Potentially Madoff could have been exposed earlier had victims been more open about their lossers and shared that information via the internet. The biggest barrier to wising up is not technological but cultural and sociological. If one's wealth depends upon another's ignorance or asymetric availability of information then that information may not be shared.

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philodoc wrote:

Dear Madam,
The proposition introduces an invalid concept, namely, the idea that "the world" can be thought of as an entity or a personality. I follow Professor Gray's view that what goes on in the world is nothing but the result of a wide range of random actions, often with deadly consequences.

In that sense we, homo sapiens sapiens, have not progressed one iota in several thousand years. However it is apparent here in UK that democracy has dumbed down during my lifetime, and the media is and active participant.

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Skysails wrote:

Dear Madam,
The very fact we are having such a sustained conversation on the issue is damning. The costliness of education in the US and other similar states is a denial, zest for learning is missing and we are trying to replace it glitz. The educational equivalent of the drug TMZ

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Brian Tabone wrote:

Dear Madam,

To make a meaningful measure of wisdom we must observe peoples behaviors. We must judge whether or not those behaviors indicate a sense of understanding which would indirectly measure intellect. I am in the United States so I judge from that perspective. Looking at the last 8 years or so of my fellow citizen's choices as an aggregate, I do not sense that my world is wising up. The latest economic news is proof of the broad scale of poor decision making on all sides. The advent of the internet and the increased availability of information has done nothing to improve the discernment of my fellow man. Visiting museums or consuming a certain type of music or media is no indication of the overall wisdom of the citizen. Having said that, I'm not sure my world is being dumbed down either. Humans have been inconsistent and foolish throughout history. It's just easier to see the foolishness today with the increased efficiency of the flow of information. Historically discernment has been the domain of the few and that remains true today. That is more a function of how providence has meted out human intellect than the existence of any technology or cultural phenomenon. Foolishness, misjudgment, and willful ignorance are the domain of our species.

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Jordan Jimenez wrote:

Dear Madam,

The idea that today people are getting "dumber" or getting "smarter" is an illusion. We as a human race are still adapting to the Information Age.

Computers have changed the way we have lived. Before to seek information humans had to achieve this goal by the newspaper, books, and their family.

As a civilization we have to find out how we can live our lives within what is accessible to us. Other people's opinions and views is just a point and click away.

Although people may be getting more of their information from the internet versus our books we are becoming more of a social environment. Whose to say this information is not useful. It is simply changing our economic outlook on what people's wants and needs are. The world is adapting.

However countries are advancing in this Information Age faster than others. This could create a larger spread between countries.

Do I agree with Reality shows? American Idol? MTV Cribs? I do not. Networks utilize these shows to create a larger margin of profit. But humans learn to adapt and evolve as they grow. When they continue to want these materials they learn to understand the characteristics of these materials and why they are unable to have them.

We are not dumbing down, nor are we wising up. We are evolving.（啥叫evolving？不是指wising up？）

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peacock feather wrote:

Dear Madam,

There seems to be an assumption that the culture that we consume indicates our intellectual ability.(Science apparently being excluded). From this premise we then go on to divide the cultural world into the 'worthy' (museums, art galleries, literature and classical music) and the 'unworthy'(games,films,TV)（这个观点可留用）. What does the consumption of 'worthy' or 'unworthy' cultural goods say about the person? If we strip away class prejudice it says very little.

I read obscure difficult literature so that I can brag about it to my friends and show off at dinner parties. This says nothing about my intellectual ability it merely shows that I am part of a social circle where 'worthiness' accords one social status. I belong to another circle where knowledge of football is valued and so I have extensive knowledge of the sport. I enjoy classical music but that is because 'I just do'. I also like black metal and I'm interested in the feminist significance of Christina Aguilera.

The issue is not 'what culture do people consume?' but rather 'how do they engage with concepts?'.

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johnzero wrote:

Dear Madam,

Hmm... that was an interesting mistake...

When I first read the proposition, I read "wishing" for "wising".

I agreed - I think the world is wishing up regarding culture.

If I read the long term trends correctly (see Engaging Art, Tepper & Ivey, 2997), what we are seeing is the emergence of a new model for what it means to have a mature cultural life. Two things are contributing to this.

Increasingly, people have the means to curate their own artistic experiences, whether it be selecting and arranging song lists on their music players or arranging their own virtual photographic exhibit on-line sites.

In addition, technology has made it easier for people to PRODUCE art. I have a recording unit that cost me US$1,000. It has far more technical power than the Beatles had to produce Abbey Road, and while I have not recorded "Come Together" yet, it does allow me to multi-track my own songs and send them to friends.

Participating in culture used to mean sitting still while others presented to you their curated collections, or seeing other's finished products. In the emerging future it will mean, in addition, actively creating one's own collections, and producing and distributing one's own work, supported by technological tools.

Some of what will get created is junk to all but the creator. Some will be masterful. It has always been so. But our deepest desire is not to witness art. It is to create, to do ourselves what artists do.

That is what we are wishing up to.

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smm183 wrote:

Dear Madam,
There are people with love for art , history and culture who cannot afford to visit the louvre or the museum of fine arts but will devour any material that comes their way and there are the others who will travel to the petra or the most historic cities in the world and will only be concerned with getting their photographs taken so that they can upload them on facebook.Culture and history as far as most people are concerned have gathered dust

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sammmmmy wrote:

Dear Madam,

Culture, a biodiversity of humanity. Some view it as rigid others as fluid. Culture is a concept which I agree is a process. But in order for people to find meaning or commonality, I guess a "dumbing down" is in order. However, since I'm a young 32, I view the world with more optimistic eyes and defend the proposition, for now, ask it again in 30 years. :)

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vdpousada wrote:

Not only in Britain, but also in Argentina culture is being rediscovered by growing numbers of people, specially young ones.
The meaning of culture itself has broadened (it is more than just attending to a theater play or a museum exhibition), its accesibility has increased (cultural activities are being held in open places, in the street, all over the city), and it is receiving more coverage from the media (mainly web based media, social networks, and so on).
Globalization has allowed us to discover the beauty of every day culture, from culinary to dressing habits, from popular music to dancing, from poetry to debate. And we are not only enjoying foreign culture, but finding a new interest and a new flavour in our dearests traditions.
In Buenos Aires, for instance, we are dancing and singing more tango than ever, old coffees where Borges or Cortazar used to sit and write are being used as meeting places for literary fans, the beauty of the colonial city (San Telmo, Monserrat and other neighbourhoods) is enjoyed by more and more local tourists every weekend.
If you read Spanish, visit the site http://www.buenosairesquerible.gov.ar/ to take a short glimpse at what I am telling.
On the other hand, it should be acknowledged that in Argentina education has severely deteriorated.
School is no longer the "glue" for different social groups or the means to achieve social progress. It is being replaced by the street, the "ciber" (internet coffee stores), the solitary confinement of surfing the web or watching TV at home, or social activism and political manipulation of the masses.
Young people that enter the university have increasing difficulties to articulate their thoughts, to understand the readings and to be able to discuss or criticize an author's idea.
Culture a social product and every social activity is based on communication. If our communication skills are detereorating at a fast pace, how much longer can we support a cultural boom?

nshivar wrote:

Dear Madam,

I disagree with the proposition. Though it is certainly true that there is more culture available, I believe Ms. Jacoby has addressed the key point in the argument that culture is consumed nowadays instead of considered.

I have certainly been guilty of consuming culture instead of considering it. For example, I have consumed a concert of classical music simply for the pleasure and self-identity that comes with going to a classical concert rather than a rock concert. Though I attended a classical concert, I do not think that I am more intelligent in regards to music. I am simply one who wants to be seen as someone who enjoys classical music（嘿嘿，这个虽然是作者的例子，写一休的时候如果可用，套用一下也很好嘛，嘿嘿）.

I believe my experience is common, especially among my peers (mid-twenties). Culture and intelligence is something to be consumed, not created, considered, or developed. This trend is saddening. However, it is up to the individual to recognize the difference and take advantage of the diversity of culture that is available to develop one's intelligence and cultural awareness without stooping to being a vacuum cleaner on the cultural landscape（吸尘器这个比喻被用很多次了）.

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rafiqi wrote:

Dear Madam,

The opposition, despite effectively arguing that the current state of culture in the west is less than satisfactory, has failed to demonstrate that it is significantly worse than yesterday. It is all to easy to idealize the past, however, more people are able to read than ever before and more people are assessing higher education（这个，不甚同意，文盲少了不代表intelligence就提高了啊）. While this is not sufficient to prove the proposition it requires more than a few people taking pride in not reading to oppose it.

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Sean O'Castle wrote:

Dear Madam, It is thrilling to use the Internet to find all the beauty of cultures ancient and modern, and then to watch the TV Program "Dances of the World" and see the exquisite variations of dance from Russia, China, Australia, and on and on, and the heart beating dance of South AFrica exhibited Monday night. If one thinks the world is dumbing down culturally, one needs to remember this wonderful quote from Shakespeare: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves". ... Please forgive the implication.

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米饭袜子UID：2532172

ptu1969 wrote:

Dear Madam,
Intelligence does not equate wisdom. Are we wiser than our ancestors? I think not. We are just more efficient in repeating the same mistakes（待展开）.

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thommie wrote:

Dear Madam,
I concur with your conclusion if I may be presumptuous enough to assume that you are saying that in fact, there is a superficial mimicking of what some "think" is high culture, vis-a-vis the theatre or the opera, but in fact fewer people who have been in this country have attained or retained the ability to speak more than one language, which was a standard part of the curriculum 40 years ago. Of course schools in many cities have cut languages due to budgetary retraints. but in practice that means that some child from the other side of the world, who learns to write on the ground to learn their lessons, is in actuality, of a higher culture because they, in all likelihood would know 4 or 5 languages just from selling to the tourist that come to their country. That then allows them to move between and experience other countries and cultures easier, enabling them to absorb more, thereby adding to and enlarging their worldview.

I believe the 60's and 70' were the last decades where intellectualism was celebrated for its own sake. I was born in 1961, but I remember hearing my older cousins rap, debate all the contemporary issues. Those young people were so well read, because it was mandatory. You could not join any organization without having done your reading and having read widely.

I read alot of old books, in fact my new year's resolution is to read "The Wealth of Nations", by Adam Smith. I must tell you, the intellectuals of
today are so lacking. When you read something like the Federalist Papers, and you hear that brillance, and then you watch C-Span and you see Congress and the people we have voted in to represent us, election after election, I now that the reactionary right-wings plan has worked.

I submit to you that in the sixties, it was the peoples knowledge that liberated them. Because they read widely from people like Mao, Fanon, Castro, they knew about the Congo and Lumumba, and the fights in South Africa, and Algiers and Bobby Sands. They were a international class of intellectuals and sought to make the peoples struggle international. That was dangerous then and its dangerous now. The key then is to controling the masses is to pacify the people, so that they will never try to overthrow the money class again. The plan then was to specialize tasks, and make college a requirement, and reading the classics. Education higher and lower became constrained. Music and art were cut in many schools because of the inherent revolutionary nature of the artist and other intellent people. They want as little independent thought to be used as possible and instead encourage group think. Those who are most likely to uphold the status quo are given better jobs with higher pay, under the guise of being smarter because they attended a certain schools. However, as W. has graciously demonstrated, that does not equate to being the smartest or the best qualified--just more likely to go along to get along.

Finally, not to sound the alarm but Monday as I watched Russia Today Television, I heard a conversation that stated, that the United States is warning that the internet could go black as a result of some type of technical something...I didn't hear the whole thing but it was enough for me to know that this is a plan. It would appear that everyday people are not depending on the traditional means for news anymore, the internet has made that mainframe obsolete. That also means that the means for "the powers that be" to control you thinking is being weakened, and that is a very dangerous.

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EdgyInChina wrote:

Dear Madam,
I am in disagreement to the house position that we are 'wising-up more than we are dumbing down.’
Mr. de Lisle's remarks that he see's the decline of stuffiness, is a very catchy phrase, but I would turn that into what I see as the advance stages of boredom....
People are indeed hungry, and not just for food. Entertainment (and that includes museums, and operas) has to be more than blowing up terrorists and hero's saving the world, or the latest new beauty prancing across the stage to lip-synched music....
So we are visiting museums and opera houses and libraries more.....
That doesn't automatically equate to 'wising-up'....I believe it is more a case of rising boredom, and perhaps the realization of parents that our offspring have already been terribly 'dumbed-down' and we are making every attempt to reverse this trend.

The Proponent also argues: Behind all these indicators lies a powerful demographic factor. More of us are going to university than ever before. What Mr. de Lisle doesn't tell you in this demographic is that while more are attending university, less and less is being learned.... fewer and fewer university students (in the west) are seeking engineering, science and mathematics degrees. My argument would be: if we are not constantly seeking greater knowledge (continuing to rely on current knowledge), are we in fact NOT by default, dumbing-down? If the rest of the world becomes smarter and more knowledgeable, don't we by default become less knowledgeable ?
Any quick look at the statistics of education in the US, will plainly show that many high school graduates cannot read, or even write their own name.... Yet sadly, as Mr. de Lisle points out, they still enter universities at growing rates... How could this possible make us wiser ?

In opposition, many have zeroed in on Ms. Jacoby's quoted remark by the 40 year old stockbroker labeling her an elitist, and how well this makes her point that in fact the society as a whole is 'dumbing-down.' I wonder why Ms. Jacoby didn't ask that same stockbroker when did he start warning his customers about the looming disaster?, and why didn't he speak about it earlier.... If he was in fact something other than just 'informed'.

I believe Ms. Jacoby's best point is her statement: "isolated information is useless unless it is understood within a larger framework of knowledge"...
Samira Shakoura, 40, lives in a Gaza neighborhood. She is defiant about the presence of Hamas. “Listen, I will always open my house to protect the fighters,” she said. “And when Hamas runs in the elections, I’ll vote for them; they have Islam.” While this Gaza citizen is certainly ‘informed,’ whose information does she possess? and why does that source of her information only want her to hear their information. This is certainly a display of a lack of knowledge, and (that lack of knowledge) makes a better case for the 'dumbing-down' argument....

Mr. Kamil's remark that we only "need to read for information' also solidifies the oppositions point very well. If we are to only seek information we need to perform a specified task, we are no better than the silicon chip inside our computers - whose job it is to only seek information to perform an assigned task. Surely as citizens of society we need more than information, we also need knowledge, and understanding.

When people listen to only one source of information, they become puppets to those information specialists who mold their thoughts (also true of Israelis and their thought police). One last example is the Karl Rove school of information that has dumbed-down America for the last eight years. I believe he must have read some books of National Socialist Germany (Nazi's) who said..."If you tell a lie long enough, and yell it loud enough, without a solid voice in dissent, people will soon believe you"....

If we give up on the idea of individual and independent thinking, as Ms. Shakoura, and the stockbroker have, and only accept what people like Karl Rove have told us to do, then while we will be informed - after a fashion - we will most certainly continue to be "dumbed-down", as actual knowledge has and will continue to decline.

（这篇写的感觉比较好，把statements和guest中的一些观点拿出来反对或作证，例子也都很贴切，蓝色部分的几个观点都很好，留用）

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so not mice wrote:

Dear Madam,
If we believe we are wise, we are probably remain ignorant; if we believe we are fools we are likely to seek wisdom. Perhaps we could say that civilisation is built by doubt, and destroyed again by certainty（深奥）

Perhaps we are moving towards a 'wiki' world of indifference to individual knowledge and enthusiasm for collective wisdom. If so, we may soon be as smart (or dumb) as the bees or ants ....

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Marco Di Marco wrote:

Dear Madam,

in my opinion, the solution to the "wising-up" or "dumbing-down" puzzle depends on how we define the terms "world" and "culture" in the opening statement. Moreover, we should have in mind a time frame for the evaluation. My Pro vote for this debate comes under three main conditions/explanations:

(i) by "culture", I mean everything that contributes to the individual awareness that every other human being deserves the same "respect" that any of us would ask for herself/himself in normal circumstances. Please, let me skip an exact and detailed explanation of what I mean by 'normal circumstances' and by 'respect'. This points are actually controversial and I believe they may be explored further in other forthcoming comments to this interesting debate. I may only summarise my thought on these two difficult issues by saying, in short, that I assume that at least some of us can actually and freely understand and decide what kind of respect a human being deserves anyway, including in the term 'respect' whatever is beneficial to a 'good' life. Note incidentally two other controversial issues: I am ruling out entirely the old and controversial 'free-will' problem and I am not, at least for what concerns the definition of 'good', an absolute moral relativist, as I mantain that what is 'good' for all human beings exists (this is a socratic belief) and can be defined in some way, at least progressively (more precisely, I believe that by error and trials we can come closer to the 'good' - another controversial point to be discussed further).

(ii) my second condition concerns the term 'world'. Here, I mean the totality of human lives, not the totality of facts, like Wittgenstein. This distinction is important because I believe that, on balance, a larger proportion of human lives (human thoughts and beliefs included) are nowadays 'enlightened' by the awareness I have already mentioned above, at point(i). Note, by the way, that I believe that such an awareness is a possible (indeed, most likely) by-product of culture, though I know this is controversial, too. I am ready to accept the criticism that, by looking at the totality of facts, we may come to the opposite pessimistic view that humankind is nowadays in a worst position than ever in the past, as a few mighty people can destroy the earth by nuclear weapons (and one may add other 'bad' events at will - mass terrorism, large-scale poverty, pollution etc.).

(iii) The third and final explanation regards time. My optimistic view is mainly related to the main social and political developments occurred after WWII in most countries. It can be correctly objected to me that this improvements have not been experienced by all human beings. I accept the criticism. My only (possibly weak) counterargument is that we may be now in a better position to see what is needed to avoid at least the worst events. For example, I believe we have now a better understanding of how to prevent wars, famine and large-scale social turmoils (another very controversial point, I admit).

Finally, I admit that my optimism cannot be extended to the future without further qualifications. This is the most controversial issue in this debate. Actually, historical evidence tells us that horrible wars and tragedies of all sorts may come even after a prolonged period of cultural growth (whatever we may mean by this vague expression). I can only hope (I do not dare to say 'believe') that the risk of tragedies has been greatly diminished by the recent cultural developments. To sum up, my Pro vote is really much more a guideline for future behaviour than a strong uncontroversial belief. In the end, my guess is that the Pro votes indicate that what is important is to form a widespread consciousness of what we all need to survive and to improve. That's our destiny since the time of caverns. Maybe we have greater risks to cope with than our ancestors, but it seems to me that we are definitely much more equipped than them, after all.

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Antonio-it wrote:

Dear Madam,
“When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun”. This phrase, notoriously attributed to Goering, might express the thoughts of a criminal but it is also emblematic of an instinct to be found in many people: that of suspicion of complexity and beauty. While there is a rapid expansion of that part of the population that considers cultural experiences to be the high point of human experience, even today it is a difficult business to sell culture - or even to give it away. Over the past two thousand years, art and culture have had much influence in evoking wonder and emotions, but only recently have they been able to produce effective contextual learning processes.
Culture lengthens life !!（so interesting）
It's not only a cool slogan, but also the results of a research carried out on a vast statistical group in Sweden. This was undertaken by the Department of Social Health of the University of Ume&aring;, S-901 85 Ume&aring;, and by the Swedish Central Office of Statistics, S-11581 Stockholm. According to the survey, those who assist in at least 80 cultural events in a year (shows, theatre, cinema) are less likely to become ill and, instead, live longer. This is independent of their income or education. An interesting element in this research by the Swedish university into factors that influence people’s survival is that it arrived at its conclusions almost by chance, deluding the doctors who were hoping for more traditional results: sport, food, smoking etc., so much so that the results were not translated into English. The original Swedish text was obtained by us and translated into Italian and German: on http://www.provincia.bz.it/cultura/publ rip/publ getreso.asp?PRES ID=33741

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mikeB wrote:

Dear Madam,
Going to the opera, reading more, are not signs of a culture.The above continued to happen in the Nazi times and even in the concentration camps music was played as the victims went to the gas chambers.Some tabloids focus on and ampilify "base" cultural values whilst denying access to real issues that would make for a decent alert and knowldegeable society.I am frightened to see how some offer "independent" thoughts whose roots are in what the tabloid says.Mr Brown and Obama both got in without the blessings of some tabloids so watch them get a rough ride --ITS as simple as that.

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About this debate

In an age of music videos and video games, of instant gratification and attention deficit disorder, it is easy to assume there is less appetite for high culture today than ever before. Yet museums, opera houses and other bastions of traditional culture report an explosion of consumption. As our universities mint increasing numbers of graduates, is the public truly getting smarter, or are we simply snacking on the sophisticated stuff while feasting on junk?
文中的mint这个词用得很好，恰当地比喻了大学培养大学生已经近乎一种机械化生产，像铸币一样。



本楼部分生词汇总：
gratification--满意      
attention deficit disorder-- 注意力缺乏症      
high culture--高雅文化         
bastion--堡垒