Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

Sometimes I feel myself caught, thank you for the reminder.

This is possibly the most inane piece of drivel I've ever read. Quoting David Brooks as some kind of authority? Please.

And ending on a completely inapplicable Shakespeare quote? "wedged inartfully", indeed.

what about measures that show test scores and IQ scores have steadily increased over time? (See link below.) Has the furious pace of modern life out of neccessity made successive generations more intelligent? The quantitative increases can't all be chalked up to better test prep, can they?

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/24/science/iq-scores-are-up-and-psycholog...

I must attest that although I am no intellectual, I have forced myself to read so called difficult books from time to time (occasionally for superficial reasons) and have often found the book to be beautiful, inspiring or just plain fascinating. At other times I have found them to be dull and tedious. Instead of whining about culture being bandied about as a superficial badge of honor, let's instead appreciate that more people are challenging themselves for whatever reason, and that many people, though not all, will unwittingly make new intellectual discoveries.

This article is irritating as fuck. Of course, showing off one's cultural acquisitions is a temptation that should ideally be avoided, but the fact that that I secretly love to show off my deep knowledge of Proust (as I am now doing, ultimately because I want to get laid) in no way lessens the value of the time that I've spent on the subject. This writer really wants to think that there's a qualitative difference between the way he listens to, say, the Rite of Spring and the way his imagined peons/culture-vultures listen to it. There are as many ways to listen to it as there are listeners. Some are serious, others less so. Different people are differently disposed to perceive different things in great works, and the degree of value of those things to those people will vary. So what? It's always been that way. And in any case, as a rule of thumb, you're probably better off studying the Rite of Spring than watching American Idol. And I agree with the comment above that quoting David Brooks as if he was anything other than a lightweight and a jingoist "further lets me know" that the writer of this article is a schmuck.

1) the huge amount of time and energy devoted to the cultivation of iTunes and iPod libraries exemplifies the trend he describes whereby the storing and exhibiting of cultural goods displaces authentic engagement with them, ie learning from them.

2) at the start, he blames the situation on behavioral or attitudinal developments in society at large: "success" and "hubris." he discusses facebook, but only as a symptom, not a cause. what is left out of this analysis is an understanding of the way real, material changes in the world around us---namely technology, more specifically, media technology---have changed our relationship to art, knowledge, etc, indeed arguably diminished it.

3. none of the trends described here is without predent. it is a matter of scale, not of kind. there have always been people who were too distracted or too self-involved or too superficial to learn anything from the cultural goods they claimed to admire or know. it's just that, thanks to digitalization, reality television, the bottomless pit of corporate hunger for profits, there are a lot more of these people walking around today than there were 50 or 500 years ago.

Agree with the comment above about outsourcing everything--particularly advice to psychiatrists that normally would have been gotten from friends. part of it is the need to remove personal responsibility from life choices. our problems will get better if we put someone else in charge of them. human resources people can say, if a new hire doesn't work out, well, how should i have known, he went to harvard. the boss gets a 23 year old consultant specialist to reorganize management--if it doesn't work out, at least the boss didn't make the poor decisions.

degrees, snooty book collections, "knowledge" of opera or wine--these are like modern day vitamins. no time for enjoyment in our fast paced world of advancement. we have put our faith in things outside of ourselves to get us to where we want to be. it's a generally reorientation towards "treating" everything--even our intelligence can be treated with the right inputs of information. i can't tell you how many times someone has mentioned a friend being depressed or not doing well and the immediate response is, she should see someone or take X medicine. i'm sure that seeing a shrink or taking medicine can help in many cases, but not everything can be solved by a "take this" and keep moving approach. similarly, culture, knowledge, etc are not just things to "get in you" while you continue climbing upward. anyway, the article struck a nerve with me. maybe a bit of a grand sweep, but something certainly seems off--less human perhaps--in this frenetic world of achievement.

By attacking the author without articulating anything resembling a rebuttal or argument, you may as well stamp on your forehead that you are representative of the type of person the author is describing.

Perhaps Mr Balgobin could, in his infinite wisdom, show us the path to Enlightenment. Oh wait, he doesn't know it? I'm shocked. As a self-appointed arbiter of good taste I was expecting more from him.

While slagging off the masses who are busy checking off items on lists of Important Things To See and Do, he doesn't offer any insights into how to graduate from mere culture vulture to distinguished connoisseur. Perhaps it's because he himself doesn't have any idea how to do that, and I can't help but think this pot is calling the kettle black.

How do you expect a person to commence a life-long appreciation of art if he does not first attempt to hit up the Greatest Hits before getting into the deeper stuff? Is artistic appreciation a depth-first analysis or a breadth-first one? Your argument that because people are busy checking off items on lists of Important Things To Do and talking about them makes them intellectually shallow is not only offensive, but ignorant of the fact that that's what everybody does at some stage of their development, including the author's.

I love classical music, but I can't tolerate Schoenberg. I love painting but I think Rothko sucks. There, I said it. I think I've seen enough in my life thus far to form opinions on what I like and dislike when it comes to art, music, literature, etc. I by no means think that my opinions are set in stone for life, and I should hope they change as I mature. Maybe someday I'll consider Joyce's inaccessible texts worth reading.

Oh and by the way, in what world does a classical music enthusiast ever get to Schoenberg before getting to Tchaikovsky? Jesus, give people a chance.

Just because people like to brag about the cultural activities they've participated in doesn't mean they aren't at the same time benefiting from the experience. It's not a zero-sum game; rather, its accumulative, and some day, we hope, that person will graduate from using that knowledge as a lever for dinner party conversation to a nugget of context to inform his world view. However, you can't expect them to get to the latter unless they do the former first.

I too find most of these cultural qualification displays empty; but, not being Anglo-Saxon perhaps, am not inclined to jump immediately to a moral critique. (Why is everything important immediately *moral* with you people?) The problem with all these cultural qualifications, it seems to me, is not that their owners do not see a problem with plagiarism (I am not sure that plagiarism is a problem; certainly Bach did not think so, whom am I to disagree); or are inclined to rob a bank; or be otherwise despicably immoral in some really despicable ways; but that they have nothing interesting to say about all the books they read and all the music they hear and all the art they consume. Read the blog entries and their comments. They are all shallow and dull; occasionally a rare gem manages at best a cute arabesques. All that experience and all these qualifications seem unable to stimulate the mind to produce an original thought. It's not a moral issue, George; but it is a huge problem.

exactly. a better way to put it.

Well, yes, mahratta, if you believe that people are pursuing "tertiary" education for pure academic motives, then i can see how you might disagree. The article at least stirred me to thought about the ways in which people are always trying to showcase their knowledge and pursue intellectual offerings like they were baseball cards. The central premise seems to be that the eagerness to demonstrate sophistication or rack up credentials betrays an altogether not-so-"pure" motive.

Thus, if you believe that Tchaikovsky concertgoers are somehow different in kind from Oprah book club readers, you've just taken up a different side of the debate on whether people mostly go to classical music concerts out of a personal attraction to the music or to "get" the experience or be able to "have heard" the piece. But your language is conclusory, not an argument. The article at least presents an argument for why Tchaikovsky concertgoers and Orpah readers are two pieces of the same pattern. Unstated seems to be your belief that the two are different--but you don't quite make the case meanwhile critiquing the article for the same flaw.

I think the case the article lays out definitely has force in my immediate world and surroundings. And unfortunately, I'm not yet at the stage of life where I have the pleasure of excluding arguments based on their "tone."

At the bottom of this article, there's a link to Facebook. Just sayin' ...

I, too, find it difficult to equate "culture" with intelligence. What is culture and what is intelligence? Why are the songs and words and paintings of old, dead white men the epitome of human achievement? I know about the Mozart effect, so perhaps I'll grant you the classical music bit. But only as part of the equation.

I'm overjoyed to see others who love hip hop and opera; I prefer gangsta and opera, but I'm both old and old school. There, White Man, take that! I can explain why I love both, and why I love the other things I love, and perhaps the ability to apprehend that self-knowledge is what gives me my intelligence props. Not to mention I score well on those bloody tests. Wherein lie my qualifications, then?

Both this article and the Age of Mass Intelligence that preceded it have good and bad arguments. Both are probably right, and both are probably wrong.

I'm glad I read them. Now, off to link this to my Facebook page!

Kaminsky, it seems you have fundamentally misunderstood my counterpoint on tertiary education and the author's pessimism regarding this topic. The author wrote in an open-ended manner; merely distinguishing between those who educate themselves for social recognition rather than to devote themselves to their fields of study. Would an engineering student who uses a post-secondary education as a means of reaching their desired position in the workplace be educating themselves to be recognised, or to devote themselves to their field?

With your second statement, you have put forth a set of motivations that seem to be rather concrete. It's as if a concertgoer cannot both go to enjoy the music and to indicate that that particular concert (may be) a social scene that they identify with. It's odd that nobody is dismissing those who attend hip-hop or electronic concerts as merely attempting to showcase their cultural "baseball cards" - why make the distinction? The phenomenon of individuals attending certain events, advertising certain brands or adopting certain lifestyles in order to portray themselves in a different manner is not regulated to classical music and the fine arts. It's everywhere, so singling out and then stereotyping all Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov concertgoers only indicates that the author distinguishes certain fields as "high-culture" while neglecting to mention others. Isn't this precisely what the author was condemning?

As for your point, I did not say that the comparison was entirely untrue - merely inferred that it was unjust. What difference is there between attendees of a classical performance and attendees of an R&B performance? With the author outlining his definition of "high-culture" it's bizarre that you can agree with his condemnations yet fail to see the contradictions within his article.

When it comes to tone; look again, not everyone acts as explicitly as I do.

The point being made in the article is that measures of intelligence have become just another adornment of Spectacle. Works of art, literature, etc. are no longer appreciated for their own intrinsic value and what they can bring to a person’s view of life. They are “commodities” used to elicit a favorable response from others. When one approaches any form of music or art in an unauthentic manner, one is guilty of partaking in this "Commodified Intelligence". This is just one aspect of society where image is more important than the real. Examples are seen in fashion, music, art, etc. But is this new? Haven’t societies always had cultural dandies?