It’s good to see Jeremiah is back in the Granite Studio, and he has posted this most excellent post based on this equally excellent post. There’s really not much I can add to the discussion, except to say that I don’t think people were stupider in the past than they are now. If anything, people are stupider now than in the past, but not because our intellectual capacity has being going backwards as we evolve, but because despite all the knowledge and wisdom we have at out disposal, we still do really stupid things that we should’ve already learned to stop doing. But there are two paragraphs towards the end of Jeremiah’s post that remind me of something I was thinking as I was sitting waiting for lzh’s make-up and hair to be done for the umpteenth time at the Shadow Building today:
But perhaps even more dangerous is that many Chinese–especially the educated, urban elite zipping around Beijing in their new QQs and sipping on a frappuccino that they hate but who wouldn’t be caught dead drinking tea out of an old glass jar–is the internalization of this past/present progressive split and its regurgitation as a civilized/backwards view:
Urban=money=progressive=modern=”good quality” ç´ è´¨=what we want to show the world. Poor=rural=backwards=superstitious=the men who build our apartments and the women who clean them=bad habits/”bad quality”=who both BOCOG and the urban elite wants to shove into some Hebei lake sometime before mid-July, 2008. Solve for x.
I wasn’t actually thinking quite along those lines, but something similar. But I’m being summoned to drinks with gk and have to hurry and I’m too tired to attempt anything deep and intellectual. Tomorrow.
