The Teeming Brain

And it’s Trevor Zajac, who came in a close second in the first Daemonyx contest. This time he managed to beat out the competition by sending me the correct answer within just a few minutes of my posting the contest announcement. The challenge was to listen to the song “Daimonica” at Daemonyx’s MySpace page and identify the source of the movie sound clip that occupies a 45 second chunk of the central section. Trevor correctly identified the movie as Network, the character as Howard Beale, and the actor as Peter Finch. For his prize he has chosen a trade paperback copy of editor David G. Hartwell’s anthology Foundations of Fear. Nice going, Trevor!

As for the song I centered the contest around, in “Daimonica” I try to convey in musical form the sense of daimonic obsessiveness that has overcome me with increasing intensity as I have grown older. Especially in the past decade, I have come to feel more and more vividly that I live in the grip of a driving force that determines the fundamental tenor of my thoughts, emotions, outlook, and actions. Maybe it hasn’t really grown stronger with time. Maybe it’s just that I’ve grown progressively more self-aware and am therefore more cognizant of it. But whatever the truth of it, it’s an inescapable subjective reality that has emerged from and dovetailed with my longtime interests in philosophy, religion, and supernatural horror. The initial inspiration for “Daimonica” came to me over 18 months ago when I was noodling around on a Yamaha digital piano with arpeggiated chords and began to mentally synchronize various lines of movie dialogue with the music. It all happened rather spontaneously. The mental movie clips all dealt with issues of obsession, possession, and mystical rapture. The music represented an emotional mixture of coolness and dread and a stylistic mixture of goth and electronica. I soon realized I had a workable project on my hands.

I ended up devoting three months of my life to the song, plus an additional couple of weeks this past summer when I returned to revise, rerecord, and remix significant portions of it. In case you’re wondering, the dialogue clips that saturate “Daimonica” come from The Exorcist, Frailty, Zardzoz, Network, Mr. Frost, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), and an unknown movie featuring Christopher Lee (I found the sound clip on line with no mention of its origin). Taken together, I think all of these clips add up to an obscure but definite statement. I’ve reprinted them below for your reading pleasure. Make of them what you will.

And congratulations again to Trevor.

Oh — and before I finish this post, I’ll mention that it looks like I’m going to be interviewed at some point in the near future by the editor of a popular website devoted to ambient, experimental, gothic, and related types of music. I’ll provide more details when it becomes a reality.

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The “lyrics” to “Daimonica” by Daemonyx:

Is there someone inside you?
Is there someone inside you?
There are demons among us
There are demons among us
I am the puppet master

Demons

It is not a breakdown
I’ve never felt more orderly in my life
A shocking eruption of great electrical energy
Demons
I want, I must

I am imbued with some special spirit
It’s not a religious feeling at all
It’s a shocking eruption of great electrical energy
I feel vivid and flashing as if suddenly
I’d been plugged into some great electromagnetic field
Into some great, unseen, living force
What I think the Hindus call prana
It is a shattering a beautiful sensation
It is the exalted flow of the spacetime continuum
Save that it is spaceless and timeless and
Of such loveliness
I feel on the verge of some great ultimate truth

A shocking eruption of great electrical
Demons
The power of darkness is more than just a superstition
It’s a big conspiracy
It is a living force

Is there someone inside you?
Demons are taking over the world
It is not a breakdown

I am the puppet master
Electrical energy
The power of darkness
It’s a big conspiracy
I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see

Yes, it’s that time once again. The hour has rolled around when I encourage people — including you — to listen to the work of my personal musical project, Daemonyx, by bribing you with free stuff. At stake this time are two DVDs and two excellent horror anthologies. Visit the contest page for details about how to play.

On an entirely unrelated note, and by way of previewing future blog entries, I can tell you that next week I hope to post an interview I recently conducted with British horror writer Mark Samuels, whose star has been rising precipitously for several years now. So stick around!

Apologies to all for missing my normal Saturday update; I’m typing these words right now on a Monday morning. Most of Saturday was a bit busy and then late that afternoon, when I might have otherwise had a chance to sit down at the computer, a mild thunderstorm rolled in (delivering some much-needed rain to our drought-stricken southwest Missouri), which prompted me to shut down and unplug the computer for the rest of the evening in order to avoid damage from a possible lightning strike like the one that fried my motherboard five years ago. Then yesterday (Sunday) was typically busy as well. So as it turns out, I think Monday is going to work best from here on out for my regular weekly updates to The Teeming Brain. That will be the new schedule, effective immediately. I think I can even predict a (probable) time of day by which my posts will (probably) appear: no later than 4:00 p.m. Central Standard Time.

Moving on to today’s topic, in the past couple of weeks I’ve found myself engaged in a number of online, book-related conversations. One of them was about Ayn Rand and her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. Another was about Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and the spate of clone-books inspired by Brown’s publishing success. Since these conversations elicited some of my strongly held thoughts, I decided I’d share them here.

First, regarding The Da Vinci Code, a friend wrote in an email that she has recently been enjoying some of the books written in an apparent attempt to cash in on the success of Brown’s best-seller, such as The Last Templar and The Secret Supper — “all the ones,” she wrote, “that all the right-wing religious types are having fits over.” She speculated that if these right-wingers were secure in their own faith, then they would surely just “pooh-pooh” such books instead of getting so worked up about them.

My response was and is to concur. I haven’t read any of the Da Vinci Code clones, nor have I read any of the evangelical and fundamentalist Christian responses to them. But I have browsed a few of them in order to get their general gist, and in addition to noting that I think a good category name for this burgeoning literary subgenre would be “The Da Vinci Crud,” I’ll enter my agreement that the mainstream Christian theological outcry against the whole movement bespeaks a certain insecurity. Of course, Brown’s theologically orthodox opponents would frame their deconstructions of his book and its clone wannabes not as frantic expressions of insecurity, but as noble Defenses of the Faith in the tradition of many historical Christian classics. However, this cannot obscure the fact that not only these contemporary writers but also much of the very historical Christian theological tradition that they refer to has always been driven by a deep-seated attitude of reactionary defensiveness. Dogmatic Christians have traditionally been hostile to authentic literary, spiritual, theological, political, social, and historical questioning, since such questioning inevitably leads to unexpected answers that tend to upset the established social and political orders, and a cardinal rule of dogmatism is that the Way Things Are – politically, religiously, socially – is the Way They Ought to Be.

Then there’s the additional fact that on a personal level, this kind of Christian can only find his or her spiritual comfort zone in a world of pat, prefabricated answers to ultimate questions. For such people, the point of religion is to settle everything once and for all, to do away with all doubts, questions, and speculations. They think truth and moral righteousness are to be found in cerebral and verbal adherence to creeds and theological systems that are set in stone. Questions are allowable only as long as they don’t point outside the preapproved intellectual box. Such people want the word “God” to refer to the ultimate Answer that does away, once and for all, with the need for individual thought and reflection, whereas for a great many other people – including me – the same word refers not to the ultimate Answer but to the ultimate Mystery. For this second type of person, the term “God” finds its grandeur in the very fact of its absolute open-endedness, its evocation of the ultimate unknown, which calls us to reject all pat answers and recognize the inherent, irreducible mysteriousness of everything. But this attitude and worldview are anathema to the dogmatic Christian, and also, for that matter, to dogmatists of all kinds. Christians are certainly not the only ones who are guilty of perpetuating this sort of thing.

Next, moving on to Ayn Rand, someone posted a note to a message board earlier this week to announce that he had just discovered Atlas Shrugged and was reveling in it. He asked whether anybody else knew and liked this book. I responded by saying that I have enjoyed a number of Ms. Rand’s writings over the years, including The Fountainhead, Anthem, and several of her philosophical essays. I also visit the website for the Ayn Rand Institute fairly often, where I enjoy reading the op eds produced by staff members. As for Atlas Shrugged, I’ve been reading it off and on for about seven years. I enjoy returning to it occasionally since I enjoy novels of ideas, and also since I find that this one possesses a power to sweep me up into the various shadings of anger, exaltation, and philosophical excitement that Rand wanted to elicit.

Regarding her famous philosophy of Objectivism, my general reaction is to find it strangely attractive even though I disagree with much of it. Her view of money as a noble and necessary material symbol of personal achievement is enticing, and might be worth adopting if it weren’t for the fact that in the real world it’s all too often the users, the ignoble robber-baron types, who pursue, receive, and enjoy most of the money, as opposed to the noble romantic heroes of her novels. Those heroes take the philosophical view that the earning of money should be linked directly — and exclusively — to personal excellence, which is a great idea in principle but which I think is impossible to achieve in actual practice.

As an aside, in addition to Rand’s writings I have enjoyed returning occasionally to the book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, which was written by Ms. Rand’s officially appointed literary and philosophical heir, Leonard Peikoff. It’s rather engaging, especially in the opening chapters where Peikoff offers one of the most brilliantly precise and clear explanations I’ve ever encountered of what axioms are and why the careful delineation of them is crucial to the development of a coherent philosophy. In the course of this discussion, he offers a powerful presentation of the fundamental starting points for Objectivism, which, while they may be open to debate (although he wouldn’t think so himself), are at least out in the open for anyone to see and deal with.

Another participant in the Rand-centered online conversation read my words above and wrote that his take on Atlas Shrugged differed from mine, since he drew from it a message that was less about money per se and more about encouraging the pursuit of personal excellence. I agree, of course, that this was what Rand meant to get at, and whenever I return to read another chapter or two of Atlas Shrugged or reread some of her other stuff, I find it very easy to get swept up in the heady excitement of her vision of human nobility. I do think there’s much of value to be found in this area of her philosophy. But her focus on money stands out front and center to me. I mean, how could it not, when the novel in question is her undisputed magnum opus, and when she chose to conclude it with a scene in which the hero symbolically blesses the earth and reclaims it for use by the noble strain of humankind by reaching out his hand toward a dark mountainous vista and tracing the sign of the dollar in the air? Then there’s also the fact that in her imagined utopia of quality, everybody’s goal is to get rich.

Of course, all of that isn’t quite as crass as it might otherwise sound, because it occurs inside the context of the novel’s narrative world, much of which is built around Rand’s idealistic philosophy of money. But in the end this very fact — that is, the self-contained quality of the novel’s vividly imagined otherworld — may only underscore even more firmly the truth that Rand’s economic vision can never really be implemented except to a limited extent, because human nature will always preclude it. I think her monetary vision would corrupt itself long before it ever reached its zenith. Rand wrote from the perspective of a Russian refugee who absolutely loathed the Soviet brand of communism and saw in it the very essence of evil. The things she criticized about it were very real, but she went too far in the opposite direction when she embraced unconditional laissez faire capitalism as the essence of political, moral, and societal excellence — almost as if it were the Platonic form of the Good itself — and I think her otherwise valid and inspiring vision of high human achievement is seriously marred by this overreach.

For a real-world vision of capitalism unbound, I think we should look not to the pages of Atlas Shrugged but to the world as it has actually evolved under the three-decades long influence of financial globalism, which, as traced by Morris Berman in Dark Ages America, really got off the ground in 1971 when the U.S. abandoned the Bretton Woods agreement with its various controls on international financial relations. Rand, of course, was the type who despised Bretton Woods and its philosophy of a planned economy, even though the agreement’s system of economic controls was a relatively soft one compared to many others that have appeared in history. But “the proof is in the pudding,” and it’s clear that, contra Rand, economic globalism or market fundamentalism or whatever else you want to call it — the Frankensteinian juggernaut that was unleashed upon the world in the 70s and went on to transform us all in ways we couldn’t have imagined even ten or fifteen years ago — has, far from ennobling us, pretty much destroyed all of the highest values of Western civilization by transforming us into McWorld, as Benjamin Barber has memorably dubbed the sad and demented freakshow of contemporary American and Western culture. The unleashing of economic globalism has also brought about an apocalyptic clash of civilizations by inciting epic fear and hatred of the West in the Muslim world, based both on what the West represents and, more significantly, how we have treated the Arab nations in the interest of opening them up as free markets for our economic exploitation.

This may all seem very far removed from the subject of Ayn Rand and her novels, but in fact I think there’s a pretty significant connection, given the enormous influence Atlas Shrugged has exerted both in and upon American culture, and especially American business culture. For example, a famous 1991 poll conducted jointly by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month-Club indicated that the novel is the second most influential book in the English language after the Bible (which factoid then went on to become a famous question on Jeopardy). In keeping with this, the past couple of decades have seen a startling renaissance of Objectivism in the American intellectual world. Previously the philosophy was something of a bastard child, a kind of whipping boy for college and university professors who refused to accord it the status of a true philosophical system and instead characterized it as a kind of comic-book version of same. But nowadays an increasing number of mainstream professors are openly identifying themselves Objectivists. Student Objectivism clubs are thriving on college campuses. And there are other fun and telling facts, such as Alan Greenspan’s famous early association with Rand and her philosophy. In sum, I think the overall American and Western cultural climate has both encouraged and been encouraged by the continued triumph of the global capitalist philosophy, and that Rand’s books have probably played a major part in this. In this suspicion I am supported by a most interesting USA Today article from 2002 titled “Scandals lead execs to ‘Atlas Shrugged,’” in which Del Jones reported that in the immediate aftermath of Enron and all the other high-profile corporate scandals of the early 21st century, many American business leaders began turning to Rand for help in easing their guilty consciences. Jones wrote, “In these post-Enron days of corporate scandal, some of the millions of copies of Atlas Shrugged that have been sold over 45 years are being dusted off by executives under siege by prosecutors, regulators, Congress, employees, investors, a Republican president, even terrorists.

“Executive headhunter Jeffrey Christian says many of his clients are re-reading the 1,075-page novel to remind themselves that self-interest is not only the right thing to do from an economic standpoint but is moral, as well.

“CEOs put the book down knowing in their hearts that they are not the greedy crooks they are portrayed to be in today’s business headlines but are heroes like the characters in Rand’s novel. They strive to be real-life achievers who do far more to lift the world’s standard of living, cure disease and end starvation than Mother Teresa and altruists who believe a full life requires self-sacrifice and serving the needs of others.”

Another participant in the online conversation that elicited all these words from me said that he thought Atlas Shrugged sounded truly interesting, and he thanked the others among us for directing him to it. I responded that while the novel truly is interesting, and while I certainly do recommend it, potential readers ought to be made aware up front that the entire Ayn Rand/Objectivism nexus is riddled with scandal and controversy. Ms. Rand was a famous hothead who groomed her following into a kind of cult. According to one account I’ve read, her literary heir, Leonard Peikoff, was literally terrorized by her abusive behavior, although today he still reveres her memory without qualification. The Objectivist movement has experienced numerous divisions and splits in its relatively short history, based on hair-splitting disagreements that have led members of various camps to excommunicate and anathematize each other. And behind it all sits the ghost of Rand with her über-brand of philosophical egoism. So those who decide to enter her territory should walk with care. I’m tempted to recommend as a best first bet her short novel Anthem, which was a very early work, and which thus avoids the excesses into which she later lapsed. It ranks almost (but not quite) up there with Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World as one of the classic dystopian science fiction novels with a hard-hitting social message.

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I started typing this message on Saturday. Then I worked on it some more on Sunday and, as indicated by a comment in my first paragraph above, began the final pass this morning (Monday). It’s now Monday afternoon. So I suppose this entire bloggish endeavor qualifies as a bona fide obsession at this point. As always, I hope my pursuit of the issues that interest and obsess me has resulted in my writing a few things that may interest and even obsess you as well. Until next time, safe journey.

Peter Jackson directing a movie starring Jet Li and Jackie Chan? Steven Spielberg teaming up with Zhang Yimou? Say what? Have we crossed over into a paradisiacal, kung fu-filled version of the Twilight Zone here? I’ve just stumbled across some news at Rotten Tomatoes (my hands-down favorite among movie review websites) that flat out blows my mind: It seems that Jackson and Spielberg may be jumping on the bandwagon that has brought the classical Chinese martial arts movie to the West, and vice versa, in a major way during the past decade.

First, a brief bit cultural-historical background: The Chinese storytelling genre known as “wuxia” (pronounced “woo-sha”) was virtually unknown to Western audiences until the late 1990s or early 2000s, but it lies at the very heart of Chinese cinematic culture. Wuxia is older than movies; its roots reach back many centuries and even millennia into Chinese history, mythology, and folklore. It first arose in nascent form out of the political and societal stew of Chinese culture some time around the 9th or 10th centuries C.E., when widespread popular resentment of government corruption gave rise to stories of wandering knight-like warriors who fought on the side of the weak and oppressed, and who embodied the qualities of courage, nobility, and martial skill. Traditional folkloric beliefs about the supernatural spiritual abilities attained by advanced martial artists led to stories about warriors who could leap over high walls, levitate, walk on water, block sword blows with their bare hands and arms, and so on. This was of course tied deeply to Taoist and other Chinese religious and philosophical ideas about inner energy (”chi” or “ki”).

It wasn’t until the 19th century that wuxia entered the popular form of Chinese drama known as Peking Opera. In the 18th century the oppressive Qing government had sacked the famous Shaolin Temple and banned the teaching of Shaolin kung fu techniques. Some of the Shaolin monks ensured the survival of their art by teaching it to performers in the Peking Opera, who soon began to incorporate kung fu choreography into their performances. When the Chinese movie industry first got off the ground in the early 20th century, the actors all came from the Peking Opera, and the first Chinese movies ever made were silent adaptations of wuxia stories, complete with sword-fighting, levitating, and all that.

In America the name “Shaolin” first became widely known in the early 1970s thanks to the Kung Fu television series, whose protagonist was a Shaolin monk. Then there was the fact that Bruce Lee’s character in Enter the Dragon, which became a massive international hit right after Lee’s death in 1973, was also a Shaolin monk. But wuxia itself didn’t gain much of a hold in the West. Most Americans were familiar with kung fu through Lee’s movies, which represented the other major Chinese martial arts movie subgenre that centered around gritty, realistic crime dramas instead of fantasy stories. The few wuxia-oriented movies that made it to the West tended to fall on the lowest end of the quality spectrum. These were the “chop-socky” movies, complete with horrendous acting, absurd plots, hideous production values, and laughable English-dubbed dialogue, that populated the programming schedule of many a television station’s weekend or late night “Black Belt Theater” or “Kung Fu Theater.”

The 2000 release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon shattered this cultural wall. There had been a few previous attempts to bring all-out wuxia to Western and American audiences, including director John Carpenter’s notable Big Trouble in Little China (1986). But they hadn’t made much of a dent. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, however, which was an adaptation of a series of wuxia novels by an author named Wang Du Lu, won four Oscars — Best Foreign Film, Best Art Direction, Best Score, and Best Cinematography — and very nearly took home the two biggest awards of all, Best Film and Best Director. It was also massively popular at the American and general Western box office. This represented a kind of cinematic cultural sea change.

In the wake of CTHD, director Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2005) further cemented the reality of this sea change by becoming commercial and critical hits in both the East and the West. More Americans began to gain an awareness of the wuxia genre, its history and richness — not to mention its very existence — with the help of such worthy offerings as The Art of Action: Martial Arts in the Movies, a 2002 documentary hosted by Samuel L. Jackson that provided a detailed overview of both the genre’s history and its growing influence in Western popular culture, as seen in, for instance, the wuxia-fied martial arts action sequences in Hollywood’s Charlie’s Angels movies.

Now in 2006 we have tentative reports of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson wanting to team up with some of the biggest names in Chinese cinema to produce major versions of Journey to the West, a story steeped in Chinese legend and mythology. As mentioned above, I found both the Jackson/Li/Chan news item and the Spielberg/Yimou news item at Rotten Tomatoes, and I urge you to click the links and read them yourself. Whether either version of the Journey to the West project ends up becoming a reality, the very fact that such rumors are circulating is further evidence of the cultural sea change I’ve just been rambling about. It’s suddenly a brave new world — and for once, in a positive way — for at least one corner of the Western popular entertainment multiverse. I’m truly cheered by this. (For an exploration of why such cheering is a good thing for me at present, read my previous post to The Teeming Brain,, “Against School.”)

In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the entrance to hell features the inscription, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” Am I perhaps being a little too melodramatic when I invoke this phrase in connection with the fact that today, Monday, August 14th, marks the end of summer vacation and the beginning of the new school year in the district where I teach? Please brace for what I fear may seem an excessively whiny and downbeat post.

This will be my fifth year of teaching English language arts—or what the state of Missouri now calls “communication arts”—at a public school. I teach sophomores through seniors. My subjects include English II, mythology, public speaking, and a few other assorted items. This week’s school schedule involves three days of faculty and staff meetings, followed by the return of the students on Thursday.

Right from the beginning, back when I first started this gig a few years ago, the whole enterprise ran counter to the grain of my person, and quite savagely so. Teaching drains me, angers me, depresses me, and wears on me in a way that nothing else has ever done. It also provides occasional amusements, such as the fact that I guide my sophomores through a few books that I like (e.g., Frankenstein, Fahrenheit 451), and also a few movies (e.g., Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Odyssey miniseries), which allows me to spend my workdays involved with such things. Sometimes the kids even respond positively to them.

But that still does not and apparently cannot trump the fact that the scale tips decidedly in favor of overall unpleasantness. Rather than go into extended detail about this—as I did several times at my former blog, Confessions of a Conflicted Cultural Skeptic, which I maintained for a few months during the last school year when my inner turmoil was hot and high—I thought I’d offer a handful of quotations that, taken together, convey my experience with a fair degree of accuracy.

First, from Walker Percy, who once delivered a speech (later published as an essay) titled “Another Message in the Bottle” to an audience of teachers. In his opening remarks, Percy told his audience that he faced them with a “recent and hard-won respect for your profession. Hard-won, I say, because I tried it myself a couple of times in recent years — not full-time like you, but in a small way, teaching a couple of classes in such subjects as creative writing and the contemporary novel. What I learned was that it is very hard work, much harder than I’m used to. Writing novels is much easier.” Then he said something that really electrifies me with a sense of identification every time I reread it: “I did learn something from the experience. It was that I couldn’t teach and write at the same time. For me, at least, the two activities seem to draw from the same source of energy.”

When my posts to The Teeming Brain become less frequent over the next several weeks and months, probably scaling back to once-weekly updates for extended periods of time, it will be because of the phenomenon identified by Percy. And I speak from experience. Back when I first started teaching in 2001, I was in the midst of the most vibrant period of fiction writing productivity that I had ever known. In the space of just a few months I had completed several new stories of my own plus “Nightmares, Imported and Domestic” with Mark McLaughlin. I was in the middle of writing The God of Foulness, which ended up satisfying me more than any other story I had yet written. And then after I finished that one in September or October, inner frigidity set in. I was asked by Ash-Tree Press to revise “Notes of a Mad Copyist” for Divinations of the Deep, and the experience was agonizing. I ended up expanding the story to three or four times its original length, and many readers of Divinations have cited the new version as their favorite story in the book. But I could hardly believe how difficult the writing of it turned out to be, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what had happened to bring about the change.

That was in December-January. Then Mark and I wrote another collaborative story, this one titled “A Cherished Place in the Center of His Plans,” which appeared in Mark’s omnibus collection Hell Is Where the Heart Is and ended up earning an honorable mention from Ellen Datlow in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. And that one, too, was all but impossible for me to squeeze out. Words were drying up. Full-blown writer’s block and even honest-to-God anhedonia was setting in. And along with this, teaching continued to be decidedly unpleasant. I soon began to suspect a connection between the two phenomena. Eventually the suspicion grew into a certainty.

Moving on, I offer you quote number two, from Francine du Plessix Gray: “Here’s the major point of tension in most writers’ lives: How can we rub enough with the world to nourish our writing, while keeping the world enough at bay to safeguard our creative energies?” The answer to this question for me so far, when it comes to the competition between teaching and writing is, “I can’t. It’s impossible.” Most of my students, by the way, would be surprised to hear me talking like this. I’m quite a cutup in my classroom and most of the kids end up loving me. We do have fun together and I end up liking most or all of them every year. But the non-negotiable demands of the job itself — the on-tap gregariousness that it requires, the de facto placement of the teacher in a position of disciplinary authority, the universal deployment of the goddamned grading system, the American societal pressures that make themselves known in the proliferation of faculty training seminars to promote trendy educational theories and avoid dreaded lawsuits, the way teachers bitch to each other about the students (sometimes justifiably, oftentimes simply as a way to vent pent-up frustration) — all of this and much, much more just saps the life right out of me.

Another appropriate metaphor is that the whole situation starts an engine to racing inside of me. When I’m on summer break I’m calm and collected, sometimes almost supernally so. But only a scant few months into each new school year, I find myself feeling more and more rushed and harried. I drive faster to and from work, as if my foot has a mind of its own when it’s near the accelerator pedal, whereas when I’m not teaching I glide along at a leisurely pace that is equally involuntary. The inner engine speeds up immediately when school starts and revs faster, ever faster, as the school year progresses, until eventually it reaches a point where I can hardly bear it, as if my insides are about to explode.

Quote number three, from Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness, which I read for the first time just a month or two ago, and which surprised with its astute comments about one of the more unfortunate aspects of the teaching profession in present day America. Leiber had the protagonist of his novel, a college professor, reflect that the popular view of college faculty members as intellectual and moral mavericks was quite wrong-headed, since in fact college profs “were a pretty timorous folk, exceedingly sensitive to social disapproval….All of which of course reflected on society’s slow-dying tendency to view teachers not as educators but as vestal virgins of a sort, living sacrifices on the altar of respectability, housed in suitably grim buildings and judged on the basis of a far stricter moral code than that applied to businessmen and housewives. And in their vestal-virgining, their virginity counted much more than their tending of the feeble flame of imaginative curiosity and honest intellectual inquiry. Indeed, for all most people cared, the flame might safely be let go out, so long as the teachers remained sitting around it in their temple — inviolate, sour-faced, and quite frozen testimonials to the fact that somebody was upholding moral values somewhere.”

Leiber wrote this in the 1940s, and I think his words are eerily prophetic in light of the upsurge of neo-Puritanism that has arisen in America over the past three decades in connection with the conservative religious tidal swell. If anything, life for public school teachers has become even more like Leiber’s description.

His contention that real intellectual inquiry barely factors into the thinking of the moral chorus who believe they’re defending education brings me to my final point, which involves a critique of America’s public education establishment itself. For this, I’d like to bring in some extended quotes from John Taylor Gatto, author of the monumental and controversial exposé The Underground History of American Education. They come from his article, “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why,” which originally appeared in the September 2003 issue of Harper’s: “Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever ‘graduated’ from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

“We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of ’success’ as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, ’schooling,’ but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system?”

Further on in the article, Gatto quotes a 1922 textbook titled Public School Administration, which states, “”Our schools are … factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned …. And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.” He then responds: “It’s perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we’re upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don’t bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to ‘be careful what you say,’ even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

“Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology — all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

“First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants.”

My reaction to all of this is one of mingled excitement and despair. The articulation and explication of such things both exhilarates and deflates me. Because I see exactly what Gatto, and also the multitude of other writers currently inveighing against compulsory public education, are getting at. I agree with them. I see and sense the truth of what they’re saying, right in the school where I teach. And of course their historical explications of the philosophical and ideological foundations of the modern American public school system — regarding which, see Gatto’s Underground History and various online articles that are easily available — are simply factual. The whole thing was conceived and executed as a method of social control. America did get along quite well for a very long time without an education system mandated and administered from the top down by the government, whether federal or state. Strong evidence exists to show that literacy rates were higher and the achievement of an authentic liberal education far more likely to occur in the schools of those days. The thing is, today we hear in the media, coming out of the mouths of pundits and politicians, an endless steam of canned chatter that praises the ideal of education, especially of a liberal-esque one. But in point of fact, today’s public school system actually works against the achievement of a liberal education. The classroom environment, the division of the students into grade levels, the grading system, the bell-based system of transitions, the rise of obsessive attitudes about sports, the attempt to maintain the “comprehensive high school” where multiple programs are crammed together in an environment that can’t support or do justice to them all — these things and many more work against the supposed goal of the whole enterprise, even while the pundits and politicians continue to mouth that very goal on television and perpetuate the lie that some system of reforms will fix things.

Of course, the natural question to ask somebody like me is, “Then why do you stick with it? Why do you keep going back to the job?” I’ll tell you, it certainly isn’t for idealistic reasons. It’s more an economic matter than anything else. After ranting like this, I’m certainly not winding up to a concluding statement wherein I opine that in the end, despite all the problems, teaching is still worth it because I have the chance to change young lives. I’m no Robin Williams-type who expects to inspire teens with a sense of meaning and purpose like in Dead Poets Society. I’m not even Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds. Far from being optimistic, I’m inclined to diagnose things the way Morris Berman diagnoses the American prospect as a whole in Dark Ages America, which I’m currently reading: The game is actually up. The battle is already lost. All that’s left is to watch the decline and destruction unfold over the next several years and decades.

But having said that, I do, in fact, feel bad for the kids who are growing up in such an environment, the ones I spend a lot of time with five days a week, nine months out of the year. I just don’t think I’m in a position to do much to help them, except maybe to commiserate with them.

Like most other creative artists, my thematic interests tend to remain constant across various boundaries. A current case in point is a new song that I’ve posted to Daemonyx’s MySpace page. The title is “The Streets of Vastarien,” which readers of Thomas Ligotti’s work will immediately recognize as a reference to his short story “Vastarien.” For quite some time I’ve wanted to make some music that plays upon the themes, ideas, and emotions embedded in this story, and as strange as it may sound, my essay “The Masters’ Eyes Shining with Secrets: H.P. Lovecraft and His Influence on Thomas Ligotti,” which I wrote from December 2004 to March 2005, represented the initial outburst of this selfsame creative impulse.

“Vastarien” is the final story in Tom’s debut collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer. It tells of a man, Victor Keirion, who is possessed by an increasingly desperate longing to escape into a world of perfect unreality. In the words of the story itself, Victor Keirion “belonged to that wretched sect of souls who believe that the only value of this world lies in its power—at certain times—to suggest another world.” This longing is bound up with his discovery of a book titled Vastarien, which gives him a name by which to call his perfect dreamworld, and which describes in exquisite detail the “order of the unreal” that he has always imagined. And more than that, the book actually embodies this mystical otherworld. Somehow, in some unaccountable fashion, Vastarien has been searching for its perfect reader in the form of a person who will recognize it as the incarnation of his or her most secret desire. When the book comes together with Victor Keirion amidst the high cluttered shelves of a strange bookshop, a darkly miraculous circle is completed.

The story is a true tour de force that accomplishes not just one but two amazing feats. First, it provides one of the most piercing descriptions I have ever read of what the German Romantics called sehnsucht, a kind of spiritual craving for an elusive fulfillment in an experience of absolute beauty. The word refers to a longing for a knowledge and an emotional experience that hovers tantalizingly on the horizon of one’s ability to see and articulate. In Ligotti’s astonishingly vivid description of Vastarien, and of Victor Keirion’s longing for it, he has evoked this longing with rare precision and power.

Second, the story describes the particular phenomenon of literary longing as effectively as anything I’ve ever read. Although this isn’t ultimately separate from the more fundamental longing described above, it still constitutes its own distinctive experience since book hunger is an emotion known only to a certain subset of people. Many sensitive souls know of sehnsucht, but the particulars that tend to evoke it vary from person to person. Some experience it primarily while listening to music, others while looking at paintings or sculptures, others while contemplating the natural world. And then there are those who find their most powerful experiences of this infinite longing arising in connection with books. For reasons unknown, some people seem to be cognitively and emotionally configured in such a way that those flickering hints of infinite fulfillment come to them most strongly through the medium of the printed word. A lifetime lived with this experience cropping up again and again, always hinting at an unattainable bliss that exists in connection with books, may well engender a kind of imaginative belief—perhaps conscious but more often subconscious and unarticulated—in an unattainable sphere of perfection that exists on the other side of words, in “book world.” In “Vastarien” Tom has given us what amounts to a poetic phenomenology of this ethereal suspicion, and I suspect that this very focus, which in various forms and shadings seeps into many of his other stories as well, is what leads some readers say that Songs of a Dead Dreamer seems like their own private Vastarien, their own most personal book, in which they encounter their private dreams miraculously mirrored back at them.

This particular spectrum of thoughts and emotions has commanded my attention for a very long time. Some of my earliest experiences of it were bound up with my reading of Lovecraft, who wrote frequently in his letters and stories about his longing after an experience of absolute beauty in a world of transcendent perfection. When I first read Ligotti and encountered the same type of thing, the experience started a thought process that culminated in my writing of that essay last year, which represented my exploration of this shared quality in both men’s writings and private lives. I felt and still feel that this quality is more central to Lovecraft than most previous critical writings have indicated, and that it also constitutes one of the central links between him and Ligotti.

Then I began wanting to explore the same thing in music, which leads us at last to “The Streets of Vastarien.” The song is meant to evoke the mood of one of Victor Keirion’s oneiric wanderings through the streets of his shadowy city. I’m too close to it to judge whether it achieves what I had hoped, but if you choose to listen to it, I hope you enjoy it. Especially if you’ve read “Vastarien,” and/or if the things discussed above resonate with you, I hope the song manages to evoke at least a glimmer of that tantalizing emotion of “adventurous expectancy,” as Lovecraft sometimes described it, and that mood of dark enchantment that saturates Ligotti’s Vastarien, the “spellbinding retreat where all experiences were interwoven to compose fantastic textures of feeling, a fine and dark tracery of limitless patterns.”

(And note that if you’re reading this after the song has already rotated out of the MySpace player because I’ve added new ones, it will be available late this year or early next year on Daemonyx’s debut CD, “Curse of the Daimon.”)

I already posted part of this recent PW review to my AuthorsDen page, but since I’ve mostly moved my online activities over here to The Teeming Brain, I thought I’d go ahead and repost it.

The review is for the anthology Dark Arts, or more fully, The HWA Presents: Dark Arts, since it’s the latest anthology sponsored by The Horror Writers Association. I’m thinking the book should appear any day now from Cemetery Dance Publications, judging by the flurry of activity that occurred a couple of months ago. It has experienced a five-year delay for reasons unknown — Mark McLaughlin and I had our collaborative story “Nightmares, Imported and Domestic” accepted all the way back in late 2001 — but given the striking cover art by Jill Bauman and the extremely positive early reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist (see the Amazon page for the latter), it would appear the wait has been worth it.

Editor John Pelan chose to locate Mark’s and my story at the very end of the anthology, which is always an honored spot, and it’s gratifying to see PW making prominent mention of this in their review, which was published last June:

“Artists of various stripes give the uncanny shape and dangerous substance in this pleasing horror anthology from Pelan (Lost on the Darkside). Steve Rasnic Tem leads off with ‘The Disease Artist,’ a Kafkaesque account of a performance artist in an antiseptic future who simulates disease symptoms to reacquaint people with their mortality. Matt Cardin and Mark McLaughlin close the book with ‘Nightmares, Imported and Domestic,’ a cleverly inverted story about an artist whose dreams of an alternate life in a depressingly bleak and ordinary world begin to overwhelm his waking hours. These two fine tales serve as bookends for 20 stories that tend to feature gruesome works of art that prove to have a basis in real life or artists whose dark visions expose the grim reality of existence, notably Brian Hodge’s ‘With Acknowledgments to Sun Tzu’ and Lucy Taylor’s ‘I Hear You Quietly Singing.’ Other contributors include Gerard Houarner, Tim Lebbon, Jeff VanderMeer and David Niall Wilson.”

Here’s the cover:

Clicking on the image above or the text link I gave for the book earlier will open up the Shocklines page for it, where you can preorder your copy. Oh, come on, you know you want to, especially since Mark’s and my story, which combines elements of his signature literary wittiness with my own obsessive focus on absolute spiritual darkness and despair, is in my opinion some of the best work I’ve produced.

I hope you all had a good week. As for me, I’m safely back from a brief doctor-oriented jaunt to Texas — specifically, to Austin and San Antonio — and can report that yes, it’s hot down there. And humid, at least in the two cities where my wife and I went. Imagine Dante’s Inferno set in the tropics. Here in Missouri we’re bracing for a new heat wave that’s forecast to settle over us for most of the coming week, and yet it’ll still be more pleasant than what I just encountered further south. So a word to the wise: Plan your Texas vacations for any time but the summertime.

But that’s not what I came here to write about today. Instead, I thought I’d share a bit more about anti-intellectualism, which I wrote about at length a week or two ago in my post “High tide for anti-intellectualism.” As I explained in that one, the rise of anti-intellectualism in America had become a live topic in several discussion threads at the Shocklines message boards, and had elicited such a lengthy response from me that I decided to post it here instead of there.

Well, the conversation at Shocklines progressed considerably further after I uploaded that post, with several people responding to things I wrote here. I posted my own responses to these responses, and eventually ended up writing so much that I’ve now decided it bears being published hereat The Teeming Brain. Of course, if you want to read the full, original discussion at the Shocklines boards, just click here.

Note that in the following transcript, the names of all participants besides me have been concealed to protect the innocent. I’ve quoted and in some cases summarized what other people said, and have followed these comments with my responses. Also be advised that if you haven’t read my original post about anti-intellectualism but you decide to dive right into the argument below, you might feel a bit disoriented, as if you had just walked into a room full of people where an impassioned conversation is already well underway.

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Anti-intellectualism, Part Deux

R.G. said, “I never know what to make of this issue. I cannot remember a time — or really even hearing of a time — in American history when intellectualism was so prevalent in America. I might have just had my head in a book though. I mean what’s the big problem? People can be intellectual or not, it’s never been a big concern to me. People live their lives as they live their lives.”

Regarding the first part of your comment, Neil Postman amply demonstrates in Amusing Ourselves to Death that the general intellectual character of the American populace during the 18th and 19th centuries was much more elevated than it is today or has been for the past fifty or hundred years. For example, during the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary periods, political texts like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense sold so rapidly that booksellers could hardly keep them in stock. “In 1985,” writes Postman, “a book would have to sell eight million copies (in two months) to match the proportion of the population that Paine’s book attracted.” Overall the book ended up selling maybe 400,000 copies. Writes Postman (quoting another author), “’Taking a figure of 400,000 in a population of 3,000,000, a book publisher today [that is, circa 1985] would have to sell 24,000,000 copies to do as well.’ The only communication event that could produce such collective attention in today’s America is the Superbowl.” I’ll add that if Postman were writing the book today, he might also identify other media culture detritus like the finale of American Idol.

As he recounts in his book, European and British visitors to America during the 18th and 19th centuries were astonished at the widespread literacy and book hunger that was evident among the populace. It was a cultural circumstance that elevated writers to the status of celebrities. “When Charles Dickens visited America in 1842,” writes Postman, “his reception equaled the adulation we offer today to television stars, quarterbacks, and Michael Jackson.”

Regarding the American intellectual character specifically, Postman refers to the famous political debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 — the source of today’s Lincoln-Douglas debate format used in interscholastic competitions — and points out that they were staggeringly long affairs compared to today’s political debates. The audience’s “attention span would obviously have been extraordinary by current standards. Is there any audience of Americans today who could endure seven hours of talk? or five? or three? Especially without pictures of any kind? Second, these audiences must have had an equally extraordinary capacity to comprehend lengthy and complex sentences aurally. . . . [T]hese audiences were made up of people whose intellectual lives and public business were fully integrated into their social world. . . . [T]he use of language as a means of complex argument was an important, pleasurable and common form of discourse in almost every public arena.” Postman calls the type of mind that developed in America under the influence of books and lectures the “typographic” mind, which is characterized by that long attention span and that ability for complex reasoning. He also says the advent of the electronic communications media largely undid all this. “We might even say,” he writes, “that America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.”

As for the second part of your comment, where you said it doesn’t matter whether people are intellectual or not since it’s a matter of personal choice, it sounds like you’re equating intellectuality with mere lifestyle preference, on the same level as deciding whether to live in a house or an apartment, or to join a bowling league or a book club. I think the issue at stake is much deeper than that. Sure, on one level, whether or not one reads books is akin to whether or not one plays tennis or enjoys big band music. It’s just a matter of personal taste and enjoyment. But anti-intellectualism refers to something much deeper: an attitude that is either hostile or apathetic toward serious reasoning and reflection, and that therefore produces a people who behave like barbarians when it comes to matters of serious, urgent importance. We’re not just talking about people who don’t like to read. We’re talking about people by the millions who generate a collective mindset, atmosphere, and outlook that can’t distinguish between truth and bullshit. And that has ramifications far beyond the realm of literature and the arts. Should America mount a military attack against Iran? Who should the next president be? What’s a good solution to the mounting oil and energy crisis? What is a valid response to the present conflict between Israel and Lebanon? How should we arbitrate and decide between the opposing sides of the screaming match that has overtaken America in the form of the culture war? When a people have been coarsened through the degradation and atrophy of their intellectual character, who’s to offer reasonable responses to any of these practical issues? We’re all infinitely more manipulable by our politicians, who are themselves products of this same intellectually blunted culture, when we’ve lost our ability to think, or worse, when we no longer realize that we aren’t thinking. And this demonstrates why what’s happening in America — or rather what’s already happened, since the game is over, the cultural turning is a matter of historical record, and anti-intellectualism has won — is so much more significant than mere personal taste or preference, since the question of whether one chooses to read serious books or grapple with serious ideas as a general pastime is distinct from the question of whether one is able to do these things when they’re necessary. Generally speaking, the American public has lost that ability. Our intellectual character has atrophied. So for us as a culture, authentic intellectuality is not even an option any more.

And anyway, who cares about any of that when America’s Got Talent!!!

Moving on to another comment, A.M., who created the Shocklines anti-intellectualism thread to begin with (yeah, it’s his fault!), said, “I think my original point was missed. I’m not wondering about what anti-intellectualism is, nor how pervasive it is among various elements in our society. I’m wondering why it is being categorized as a relative new and expansive phenomenon (a wave, as it were) when it’s been omnipresent during my lifespan. I mean, hell, when I was a kid ‘Carter Country’, ‘Sheriff Lobo’ and ‘The Love Boat’ all made it to prime time. Donny and Marie Osmond had a variety show, and so did The Captain and Tenille. Stupidity is nothing new.”

I’m hoping some of what I just wrote addresses some of your point. But yes, of course you’re right, such cultural detritus is always present. Nor is it always bad. The 70s had disco. The 60s had Gilligan’s Island and Green Acres. It was in the 60s that Newton Minnow, then head of the FCC, gave his famous speech in which characterized television as a “vast wasteland” based on its vapid programming. The speech is still well worth reading for its relevance. The 50s had Leave It to Beaver. The 40s had The Three Stooges. And so on.

The problem is that anti-intellectualism isn’t just a matter of dumb entertainment, but of a fundamental personal posture toward serious thought and reflection. The electronic mass communication revolution of the past century has done something to us in this area, the full effects of which we still can’t get a perspective on because they’re still accruing, and because we’re still living in the midst of it all

D.W. said, “Thank you Matt for the last bit. Its funny about Postman’s Amusing Ourselves; very relevent today but 25 years old already. (His Techopoly is also good)”

I agree that Amusing Ourselves to Death has only become more cogent over time. And thanks for recommending Technopoly. I’ve browsed it in bookstores and read excerpts online, and I know I’ll have to read it someday.

[D.W. also said some stuff in a separate post about education becoming a kind of customer-service driven enterprise in America. The following comments were in response to that.]

As for education becoming a customer service-based enterprise in a society centered around consumerism — yes, absolutely. And horrifically. I happen to think you’re dead-on. And I’m appalled to know that all the criticisms that could be made about this state of affairs, and that have been made, and that are being made, have a tendency simply to bounce off the very people who are being damaged by the whole thing, namely, America’s college and university students. The problem is that they simply can’t see how this state of affairs is bad, or even that higher education should be or could be conducted in any other way. This is a function of their involuntary narcissism, which has been bred into them from birth and which is the primary fact about their sense of self and world (cf. Jean Twenge’s recent study Generation Me, which promises to be as cogent as Postman’s many writings). Of course I myself am one of the first generation narcissists as described by Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism (1979). So I can see these same forces at work in my own self, distorting my cognitive and emotional life and generally wreaking havoc with my happiness.

B.D. referred back to Postman’s claim about the inability of modern audiences to handle the long-form discourse of 19^th century political debates when he said, “The typical C-Span junkie could probably handle 70 hours. As for our ‘grossly consumer-oriented society,’ it’s called capitalism– and it works.”

Yes, C-Spanners could surely endure that much talk. But exactly how well do they represent the mainstream in America right now? And what’s the level of talk they’d be imbibing on C-Span or any other channel?

Regarding your second point, capitalism is not consumerism. They’re distinctly different. Capitalism is an economic system. Consumerism is an ideology. Capitalism is simply one way to organize the economic life of a society. It happens to work very well, perhaps better than any other system, for moving goods and services around, and also for stimulating materially productive activity among a population. Moreover, as we have discovered in the American national experience (and as many economists and sociologists have explained both retroactively and prophetically), it is amazingly good at producing vast concentrations of wealth among a tiny economic elite of “winners.” Consumerism, by contrast, is a philosophy or attitude that elevates consuming, as in buying and owning things, to the status of Life’s Real Meaning. It holds that personal worth and a successful, happy life are measured and defined by material gain. Although capitalism provides what is probably the most perfect venue for consumerism, enabling it to expand explosively and take over the ideological environment like a spreading virus, it’s still a distinctly different thing. To ride roughshod over this distinction is to muddy the waters in a big way.

B.D. responded to the above words by saying, “I think that consumerism, as you’re describing it, is more a lack of ideas than anything else. But does that really mean people are getting dumber? Most people in the US used to be farmers– that changed dramatically with the rise of industry. Was this population better educated and informed than Americans today? I find that hard to believe.”

Consumerism is a lot more than a simple lack of ideas. It’s a positive driving ideology that has shaped and is continuing to shape American society into something it did not used to be. Moreover, it produces cannibalistic zombies who hang out in shopping malls.

The question of whether today’s American populace is or isn’t better educated and informed would seem to hinge on value-laden assumptions about the meaning of education and informedness. In the popular mind today, education is almost universally equated with being schooled in the mainstream educational institutions. Being informed is equated with having access to the mass media net through television, computers, and so on. The problem is, just a little investigation reveals that the schools aren’t really about educating in the authentic sense of the word, and being informed in the modern sense isn’t the same as having real knowledge.

For the first part, one can turn to such resources as John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education or even to far less radical books and articles for much proof and documentation that we’re all being hoodwinked by institutional pressures when we think the schools today are truly devoted to educating the population, or that American society is better educated than it was before the massive school reforms of the early and mid-twentieth century were instituted.

For the second part, I hope I’m not harping overmuch on a theme when I refer yet again to Neil Postman. In his 1990 speech “Informing Ourselves to Death,” Postman argued that ever since the advent of the “information age,” as defined by the rise to dominance of the electronic communications media and the computer, we’ve been drowning in a sea of information that we just don’t know what to do with. The universal cultural assumption is that more information will improve and even save us. Whatever the subject or problem, the assumption is that if you throw more information at it, do a controlled study, cross-reference multiple databases, survey the relevant literature, watch or make a documentary, find out what the experts have said — in short, if you’ll just get more information, i.e., make yourself more informed — you’ll magically arrive at the solution.

Postman does a great job of deflating this belief by asking rhetorical questions: “Did Iraq invade Kuwait because of a lack of information? If a hideous war should ensue between Iraq and the U.S., will it happen because of a lack of information? If children die of starvation in Ethiopia, does it occur because of a lack of information? Does racism in South Africa exist because of a lack of information? If criminals roam the streets of New York City, do they do so because of a lack of information?

“Or, let us come down to a more personal level: If you and your spouse are unhappy together, and end your marriage in divorce, will it happen because of a lack of information? If your children misbehave and bring shame to your family, does it happen because of a lack of information? If someone in your family has a mental breakdown, will it happen because of a lack of information?”

Of course, Postman isn’t the only one who’s talked about this kind of thing. Theodore Roszak and his The Cult of Information come to mind.

Another way to look at it is this: We can all see that being ever more informed isn’t necessary valuable in and of itself, because American culture in the midst of this utopia of information and informedness is — to put it bluntly but accurately — profoundly fucked up in a way it’s never been before. Certainly, we’ve been screwed up in various serious ways in the past, but we’re currently foraging through unexplored territory.

So to answer that last part of your question — No, I don’t think people used to be better informed than they are now. But I don’t think we’re any better off than they were just because of our informedness. In fact, we’re worse off in a great many ways precisely because of this difference, and will continue to be so as long as we keep equating informedness, and also education as it’s currently practiced, with wisdom.

Incidentally, I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m shouting at you, B.D.. I don’t even know for sure that the kind of assumptions I’m going on about were behind your question. This entire issue just touches upon things that interest me greatly, as I suppose is obvious.

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Okay, this is me talking again, in the present tense, right as I’m about to post this to my blog. If the anti-intellectualism conversation progresses any further at Shocklines, I’ll probably share more of it here. Need I add that what I wrote above signaled the end of that particular discussion thread? This doesn’t surprise me and I really can’t blame other people for abandoning it, since Shocklines is primarily about horror entertainment, which made the whole conversation off-topic anyway, and also since I have a long history, almost amounting to a kind of legacy, of seizing upon topics that interest me and then pounding them into the ground so very thoroughly that everybody else grows sick of them. I’ve ended many an online discussion with my long-form comments. I certainly hope I haven’t further perpetuated the beating-the-dead-horse phenomenon via the present post. But then again it may not matter, because hey, after all, it’s my teeming brain we’re talking about here.