But I suspect a lot of non-everyday knowledge was learned by rote (songs or poetry) to make it easier to remember and pass on accurately. That lends itself to a certain inflexibility.
Relying on external storage media (books/internet) rather than memory is independent of stupidity. The gathering of knowledge is not the same as becoming smart. Arguably relying less on memory allows you to devote more time and attention to critical thinking and problem solving which DO make you less stupid. However, if society relies on memory and oral traditions then they have limited storage and multiple fact-checkers. These ensure that all knowledge is good and easily accessible.* I don't think having books/the internet makes us stupider, just that it makes it harder to access reliable knowledge at the right time. *Iain's comment notwithstanding
We tend to get shittier at things we don't tend to do. This includes memorizing stuff. In a way, humanity has already become cyborgs, utterly linked to our tools and crippled without them. After all, do we not use books, clay tablets, paper, and silicon chips to offload as much of our thinking and mental work, such that we can devote more and more time to the more pressing matters. Like inventing even better tools.
“Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, stupid people already have all the answers.” – Socrates
“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.” "Love is the greatest force in the universe. It is the heartbeat of the moral cosmos. He who loves is a participant in the being of God." “Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.” Martin Luther King Jr.
from a story in Orsinian Tales, Ursula K Le Guin's very beautiful volume of short fiction set in an imaginary eastern European country. I think it applies to the arts in general. "What good is music? None… and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god to the suffering man it says only, ‘Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Music says nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build themselves, that they may see the sky."
I respectfully disagree. Of all the arts, music has the distinction of being able to go directly to the emotions. Hence military marches, hymns, national anthems, college fight songs, and protest songs. The people who write and perform that music know exactly what its purpose is.
Of course music is put to specific uses. I am a musician myself and I have seen that one very powerful purpose of music is to get people to buy alcohol. But I think the quotation is right too. Music isn’t good for anything other than what it does to you, its emotional effect, and why should it do anything to you in the first place? It’s one of those mysteries. And the quotation makes a little more sense in the context of the story, which occurs in 1938 in a very unstable Europe, and is about a poor composer who is a clerk at a ball bearing factory, and in an unhappy domestic situation...that is really what the quotation is addressing, the inability of music to improve ones situation in a material sense.
Well, Bob Dylan, who has sold his entire catalog of music for something over $300 million, might beg to differ. But it's true that for every musician with that sort of success, there are untold millions of musicians who find themselves lucky to score gas money.
"She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word.-- To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." - William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V Scene V
“A fundamental concern for others in our individual and community lives would go a long way in making the world the better place we so passionately dreamt of.” This is my favorite quote from Nelson Mandela, which I once used as an epigraph when I wrote a historical study with Edubirdie. Nelson Mandela is my idol and I want to share a few more important phrases for me that he said or wrote. “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” “It always seems impossible until it's done.”
“Expectations are premeditated resentments.” “Accept who you are. Unless you're a serial killer.” “If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.”
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs." ~James Napier, Commander-in-Chief in India
“Trees are massacred, houses go up - faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.” ― Emil Cioran
That reminds me of a statement whose origin I've forgotten: "A suburb is a place where they cut down all the trees and then name the streets after them."
Bela Tarr: "Today there are only states of being--all stories have become obsolete and cliched, and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that's still genuine--time itself: the years, days, hours, minutes ad seconds."
"If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. We need not wait to see what others do." Mahatma Gandhi
