本帖最后由 archaeology 于 2009-5-29 18:09 编辑
The proposer's opening remarks
You have to hand it to "dumbing down". It is a brilliant label: succinct, sticky and hard to peel off. It has a rhythm to it which is so good, we have used it again for "credit crunch".(信用危机) And there is undoubtedly some truth in it. Certain areas of life have dumbed down. If you look at the 21st century and your gaze alights on the exhibitionist nonentities of reality television, or the bestseller lists bulging with celebrity memoirs, or the commuters blankly flicking through Mcnewspapers, you may well deduce that life is becoming dumb and dumber.
Labels, however, can be too good. Dumbing down has become so entrenched that it has closed our minds to what else is happening. It has encouraged us to see intellectual and cultural standards as a river, flowing in one direction only, always downhill. In fact they are more like a road, with heavy traffic on both sides.
At Intelligent Life, The Economist's quarterly sister magazine, we recently commissioned one of The Economist's senior writers, John Parker, to look into what is happening with culture. He found plenty of evidence of the opposite of dumbing down: wising up
Look at the public's appetite for museums. When Art Newspaper drew up a chart for global museum admissions (in February, covering the calendar year 2007), Paris came out top with the Louvre on 8.3m and the Pompidou Centre second with 5.5m, while three of the next six places went to Britain: Tate Modern with 5.2m, the British Museum with 4.8m and the National Gallery with 4.1m. The Arts Council says that admissions to a clump of Britain's leading museums as a whole went up from 24m in 1999-2000 to 40m in 2007-08.
This is partly accounted for by one of Tony Blair's better decisions, to scrap entry charges and replace them with the modern version of the begging bowl, the big perspex ball, in which other people's generosity sits there silently reproaching you. But this cannot be the sole explanation, because some of the biggest draws in those museums have been the special exhibitions, which tend not to be free.
At the British Museum, the Terracotta Army was a roaring success and the Hadrian show was so crowded when I went in October that sweat was pouring down visitors' faces. That annual figure for the British Museum of 4.8m has already shot up to 6m in 2008, which is thought to be a record. For Chinese New Year, which fell during the Terracotta Army's run, the museum added a Chinese food market, a theatre troupe and a trail of specially commissioned lanterns, and it was so inundated that it shut the doors for the first time since the Chartists' uprising in 1848.
Then there is the evidence of literary festivals. In October 2008 alone, according to the Arts Council, there were 43 of them in Britain. At the best-known of all British bookfests, Hay-on-Wye, the number of tickets sold has gone from 2,000 in 1988 to a projected 165,000 in 2009. A cynic I mentioned this to argued that it was another facet of celebrity culture, showing only that people like to see writers in the flesh, not that they are engaging with their ideas.
He was displaying the blinkered, narrow, either-or mentality of the true cultural snob. Yes, there is probably an element of celebrity culture at work here – when Jeremy Clarkson gives a talk at Hay, for instance. But most of the talks at most of the festivals are given by writers who could walk down the street without anyone recognising them. And you can tell from the questions afterwards that the public are engaging with the content of the books.
Mr Parker found plenty more evidence of wising up: the fact that operas are now being screened in cinemas, the popularity of lecture series like Intelligence Squared and the success of Classic FM, which began as a midmarket rival to BBC Radio 3 and has become Britain's most popular commercial radio station. These two stations provide a microcosm of the wider phenomenon of mass intelligence. Radio 3 used to be a monopoly, serious, rigorous, formal and hopeless at preaching to the unconverted. Then along came Classic FM, cosy, approachable, populist and mildly obsessed with projecting classical music as a form of relaxation. Result: far more people now listen to classical music on the radio. More people even listen to Radio 3, which has at last loosened its tie and spotted that a national radio station, funded by the licence fee, has an obligation to reach out to people.
It's not culture that is in retreat here: it's stuffiness.
Behind all these indicators lies a powerful demographic factor. More of us are going to university than ever before.
We may fritter away much of our time while we are there, standing in the students' union bar drinking subsidised beer, but at the very least those years plant a seed of curiosity and a sense of possibility. Twenty-five years on, several of my contemporaries have now gone back to university for more. Kingsley Amis famously said that when higher education expanded, more would mean worse. In fact, more has meant less of the sort of snobbery he was displaying by saying that. Studies have shown that today's graduates are cultural omnivores, able to enjoy high and pop culture alike. Which is where dumbing down gets it wrong. Catchy as it is, the phrase has a certain dumbness built into it. The real story is more complex and more heartening.
橙色的句子反射出作者写作时的逻辑:先让步--再反驳--从三个角度论证--最后得出结论。结构清晰,句式多变,学习! 本楼部分生词释义 peel off--脱落 memoir--回忆录,自传 commission--委托,佣金 reproach--责备,指责 inundated--淹没的 troupe--剧团,戏班 in the flesh--本人,亲自 eg:I have never seen him in the flesh. 我从未见过他本人。 cynic--愤世嫉俗者 blinkered--蒙蔽的,心胸狭窄的 microcosm--小宇宙 “燃烧小宇宙,哈哈” rigorous--严格的 fritter away one's time --浪费时间 omnivores--杂食者 heartening--振奋人心的 |